Posted: 12/30/2009 7:00 AM
Post subject: A newbie with a Macintosh decides to join the fray
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Beacon
Joined: 12/30/2009
Posts: 5
. . . but he doesn't really know what he's doing. SNES9X v. 1.51 is a bit different on my Mac than what I've seen in some tutorial videos. My memory searcher is pretty much the same, but I don't know how to enter frame advance mode (whatever it exactly is), I don't know how to get movie rerecording to cooperate with my freeze states, and I don't even really want to do any TASes with SNES games -- I just want to get started with SNES9X to get my feet wet in this business. That being said, I'd like to do two TASes: DBZ Taiketsu on the GBA, and Bee 52 on the NES. My current NES emulator, Nestopia, doesn't allow movie recording, and neither does my Mac version of Visual Boy Advance. Um . . . help? When I say I'm new to this, I mean really new -- I don't really understand how hex works; I can kinda slow the frame rate of the games down, but I don't really know where to start; and the tutorials I've seen (like MarioBob's videos on YouTube) haven't really helped me much. That, and I'm not even sure I have the right operating system to even be considering this! If anyone can help point me in the right direction, I'll be very glad for it. . . . speaking of DBZ Taiketsu, I tried downloading a rom a few minutes ago, but the game itself gave me a message saying the it wouldn't run on "this hardware". I won't ask where to find roms, but does anyone know if this is typical for Taiketsu roms (that is, if you're into downloading roms of sucky games)?
Posted: 12/30/2009 7:07 AM
Quote
Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I hope you're familiar with coding and the command line; to my knowledge, the only way to make TASes on OSX right now is to compile your own copy of the emulator (FCEU/FCEUX for NES games; the TAS-modified versions of SNES9x for SNES, etc.). There aren't any binaries available that I know of. Last time I tried, compiling FCEU was pretty straightforward, but I didn't get any UI to go with it. When I asked Bisqwit how he did memory watch in FCEU, he said he just dumped the contents of memory to a file each frame and had written customized programs to scan the file for what he wanted. That's a far cry from the advances that exist for the Windows version.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/30/2009 7:09 AM
Quote
Beacon
Joined: 12/30/2009
Posts: 5
. . . do what, now? UI? Huh? I don't even know what a command line is. Should I just stick to watching videos?
Posted: 12/30/2009 7:35 AM
Quote
Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
Derakon wrote:
When I asked Bisqwit how he did memory watch in FCEU, he said he just dumped the contents of memory to a file each frame and had written customized programs to scan the file for what he wanted.
Off-topic, but I think you're mixing an explanation of mine for something with an explanation of mine for something else. File handling was not involved in my memory watches. I just coded the relevant code in FCEU and that's it. IIRC, someone used to memorymap the FCEU memory space into a file or something, but that wasn't me.
Posted: 12/30/2009 9:39 AM
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Beacon wrote:
I don't even know what a command line is.
Youth these days... sheesh. In my days we had nothing else than a command-line prompt, and it sufficed.
Posted: 12/30/2009 9:41 AM
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Flygon
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Warp wrote:
Beacon wrote:
I don't even know what a command line is.
Youth these days... sheesh. In my days we had nothing else than a command-line prompt, and it sufficed.
It's not always a bad thing. Think of all the people we can trick into accidentally formatting their hard drives.
Posted: 12/30/2009 1:40 PM
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nesrocks
He/Him
Player (246)
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Think also of all the people who wouldn't dare touching our pcs but now do...
aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios
Posted: 12/30/2009 2:28 PM
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mmbossman
Experienced player (829)
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
GBx TAS of 2008
Beacon: unfortunately, most of the emulators we use are usable only on windows or Linux if you compile it yourself. I've heard that you can compile a couple emulators on OS X, but the only usable binary I've found is for SNES9x 1.51. As far as I know, it works exactly like the windows port, and movies made on it are playable on windows as well. However if you only want to work with two random games, you have a couple options: 1) Learn how to compile the emulator you want to use for OS X 2) If you have an intel based Mac, install virtualization software (ie parallels) or install a windows version using boot camp. Let us know if you have any other questions.
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Posted: 12/30/2009 4:41 PM
Quote
Beacon
Joined: 12/30/2009
Posts: 5
Okay. If you had said command prompt, I would've understood a bit more. I do know about Parallels and I have an Intel-based Mac, so I think I'm just going to have to do that mess. If I can use the exact emulators that people use in the tutorials, I think I could stumble my way through it from there. Thanks for the help, people. TASvideos rocks. And, in an effort to save face, I know enough not to reformat my own hard drive, thank you very much!
Posted: 12/30/2009 5:08 PM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Bisqwit wrote:
Off-topic, but I think you're mixing an explanation of mine for something with an explanation of mine for something else. File handling was not involved in my memory watches. I just coded the relevant code in FCEU and that's it. IIRC, someone used to memorymap the FCEU memory space into a file or something, but that wasn't me.
Apologies for misquoting you. My main goal was pointing out that, to my knowledge, Linux FCEU doesn't have any kind of integrated memory watch or Lua scripting, which are two features that seem to generally be important for TASing.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/3/2010 5:53 PM
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RadioKJ
Joined: 1/2/2010
Posts: 29
Location: China
I can tell you that using VirtualBox (which is free) with Windows 7 has troubles with Visual Boy Advance. I use Parallels on my Mac. It costs a bit, but it gets the job done.
Posted: 1/8/2010 10:47 PM
Quote
Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Has anyone tried using VirtualBox with FCEUX? Presumably FCEUX isn't doing anything particularly fancy that would give VirtualBox difficulty, right?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.