I recently decided to take a shot at making an FCEU run of a published Famicom video to see if I could obsolete it. It's difficult to tell if I'm making any progress though because I can't compare frames. Famtasia doesn't have any sort of feature that I can find that displays frame numbers or tells me how long the movie has been running for.
I believe I have saved a few frames here and there but I have no way of knowing for sure.
Is there something I can do? I suppose I could hex edit to see where input is made, but it would be so much of a pain it wouldn't even be worth it.
You could also dump an AVI from Famtasia and use VirtualDub for the frame counter.
I hadn't thought of that. Thanks.
P.JBoy wrote:
You could convert the famtasia movie to fceu with nesmock.
Then you can use the frame count.
That may have occurred to me, but I figured the conversion would cause desyncs so after a while I wouldn't be able to tell.
Edit: Okay, well it most definitely does desync very early on, so this doesn't work.
Also, Famtasia doesn't seem to be able to output AVIs. Do I have the wrong version?
You can get it here, just enable the 'AVI recording patch', download boing.dll, and download the do_record file (they're all on that page, near the bottom). Make sure it has no extension on the end of the file name of the do_record file (.txt, .exe, etc.). Also make sure that all the files are in the same directory as Famtasia. That should do it but hopefully you have disk space to fill because the avi file will be uncompressed and you can not choose what codec you want either.
Sorry if I'm a little patronizing.
Thanks. This is a little annoying though because it starts recording as soon as you open the rom, and appends to the same avi when you open the movie file. I can't pause the system prior to opening the rom, so there are a bunch of extra frames I can't get rid of.
Okay... this is really weird. The Famtasia run is way ahead of me in frames, even though I know of a few ways I saved time. It seems to consistently stay ahead of me for no apparent reasons. Lots of parts where it's just a straight run it seems to beat my time.
Is this a problem with how Famtasia emulates or something? Does FCEU emulate some sort of lag or anything that Famtasia doesn't? Otherwise I have no idea why I would be so behind a run that doesn't have frame advance in a game that's extremely straightforward.
remember that famtasia cannot detect if a movie must be played in 50 or 60hz, while fceu can, maybe the famtasia movie is faster because it plays on the wrong setting...
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
Thanks. This is a little annoying though because it starts recording as soon as you open the rom, and appends to the same avi when you open the movie file. I can't pause the system prior to opening the rom, so there are a bunch of extra frames I can't get rid of.
What I used to do, when I would record avi of Famtasia runs, is go to File and Open and highlight the ROM (without loading it yet) and then hover over where Edit is before I pressed enter on the keyboard (to load the ROM), then I'd click Edit before it recorded that many frames.
Also, it's difficult to tell how many frames you have saved because it's relatively inconsistent. You might also like to check the frame rate of the Famtasia movie, in VirtualDub and make sure, for some reason, that it's not 30 frames a second (This isn't likely if it's dumped straight from Famtasia but Famtasia has been known to be rather quirky, here or there). Instead of frame hunting, you could always just check the duration and see if you are ahead, after all, Famtasia and FCEU have different frame rates in which I don't understand what's Famtasia's (is it 60 frames a second or 59 - 58, WHAT IS IT THAT VIRTUALDUB SUGGESTS 'CAUSE IT STILL DESYNCS?!). Hope this helps :).
If making AVIs turns out to be too tricky, another way is to make savestates at the points you want to measure, because the savestates contain what frame they were saved on. It takes some hexediting to work though.
