OK, this is pretty awesome. Got 6300 frames of Metroid Prime playback to sync perfectly.
However, I'm still having a problem with savestates and Dolphin not taking input after loading one. This is kind of important to making rerecording work, so I'd like to know what can be done about this.
Also, hotkeys stop working for me if I don't switch over to the main Dolphin window. Any ideas why?
Are you getting this with Gamecube controllers? I only get that problem with Wiimotes because at the moment, save states do not save the Wiimote states properly, and loading a savestate causes them to disconnect.
Looks like it's syncing well over here (Windows x64, r7064) On OpenGL, Direct3D 9, and Direct3D 11, although the last one has graphical glitches.
One thing I would suggest is that you turn off idle skipping, because unlike dual core mode, it gets speedup by ignoring some calculation the game does, which can change a lot of things in the game that can never happen on the actual hardware. (Stuff like RNG, which can easily break sync.)
It turns out that the Gamecube (and probably Wii) can poll the controller for button/joystick states multiple times per frame
Hm that is interesting. I wonder how Wind Wakers zombie hover would behave with multiple B presses per frame.
Could be that it works as good as with the action replay cheat or maybe it's still limited to turbo controller standarts.
Could somebody test this? Sadly dolphin doesn't run on my crappy old computer, so I can't do it myself...
Probably not, Just because the hardware can poll for input multiple times per frame (Dolphin does it 8 times per frame) doesn't mean the game actually uses these other inputs.
Toad King ftw
It worked and did not desync :D
too bad there's no built-in avi recorder, since it plays so slowly. before i used to get 100+ fps
The video plugins (at least the OpenGL and DirectX9 ones) have an option called "Frame Dumping" which makes a video-only recording of the gameplay in User/Dump/Frames. If you're not doing it from Windows, you have to set up a named pipe at User/Dump/Frames/framedump.raw to pipe it into something like mencoder or ffmpeg beforehand, but on Windows it opens up a codec selection dialog and saves it from there.
EDIT: Also, did you make that recording with a memory card inserted? It's not syncing for me, and I think that's the reason. If you could upload that too, I can probably get it to play.
EDIT2: My version also has different hashes, so it's possible we have different revisions of Melee, which might also be why it's desyncing.
Latest builds can be found here
Also, if you must make some TASes right now, try to make them for SSBM (USA) because I actually have that game so I can view them. :)
http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/source/detail?r=6154
Dolphin now has usable rerecording support. There's still a lot of work required before any serious TAS can be attempted, but it has the very very basic features there, including rerecording and continuing a movie from a savestate.
Thank you for the feedback. I've submitted a patch to the developers, and hopefully it'll get accepted. There are still some desync issues in the emulator core to work out before TASes will be possible, but I believe this is a good step forward.
Hi, I recently got Dolphin to properly play back input movies, which for the longest time almost always desynced. It turns out that the Gamecube (and probably Wii) can poll the controller for button/joystick states multiple times per frame, which caused problems with the current method of recording input.
However, before I submit a patch to fix this, I want the opinion from TASers: Should all input polls be recorded as separate sequences, or should just copy one input sequence for all the input polls during a frame be recorded? I'm not sure if the between-frame input polls are actually used and can be utilized in TASes, and if there can even be a way to manipulate them using TAS tools.
My frame dumper/video creator patch was recently accepted, and it available in the latest SVN version. (check one of the two people hosting recent builds on the Dolphin forums.) I wrote a quick how-to guide here: http://forums.dolphin-emu.com/thread-205.html
Do you guys had any suggestions for features to add to this?
baby.lueshi; I'm the guy in the TAS issue posting all those patches.
I've just gotten it to dump directly into an .avi file on Windows, so other than sound and the weird games that have both 60fps and 30fps sections, the video creation aspect of the emulator is working great.
Just because I love you guys, I've started my own work on a frame dumper for Dolphin. It's still in very early stages and not yet suitable for creating stuff over a couple minutes long, but I've been able to create 60fps videos from it. My hope is to get it piping both audio and video directly into MEncoder and making videos from it before the desyncing bugs in input rerecording get fixed.
Just check the TAS issue for the patches. Or wait a day or two, since at least one developer was going to look at it.