Post by pirate_sephiroth

Posted: 3/6/2006 7:04 PM

Post subject: Emulator Movie Front End -- A simpler way to view fcm/vbm

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Hoe

Joined: 7/31/2004
Posts: 183
Location: USA

Emulator Movie Front End allows you to simply double click on a fcm or vbm movie in Explorer to begin viewing it. It works by obtaining a hash of your roms and storing them in a database. When the fcm or vbm movie is run, it reads the stored hash from the movie file, and finds the associated rom file. Currently only fcm and vbm are supported because they are the only two emulators which support running it with a movie through the commandline. As other emulators support this, they will be implimented/enabled in the source code. Download [this is an older version, please find the post with a link to the newer version] For FCEU, you will need the newist release. Download. It is to my understanding that this will now be apart of the normal builds. A sample config.ini is included with the archive. This file will need to be modified to represent your system.

[config]
fcm=C:\path and file name\to your\fceu.exe
vbm=C:\path and file name\to your\vba.exe
dirs=C:\a list;C:\of your;C:\rom directories\

Spaces in the paths and file names are acceptable. Do not wrap them in quotes. The list of directories is semi-colon deliminated (just like your global PATH variable in Windows). The hash used for .nes roms is a generated md5 checksum which skips over the iNES header. This should be accurate. The hash used for the vbm files is the internal game name that's part of the native GB/GBC/GBA header. This is not a hash, and potentialy inaccurate, but should work with extreamly little trouble aside from the rampent amount of GBA files with scene intros potentially causing trouble. I have moved this from the FCEU forum due to the support for multiple emulators in this release. This release also contains a large amount of stability fixes. The genesis video format will not be supportable unless the movie file is revised to support a hash inside. The smv movie files can optionaly contain a hash, but from my experience, they typicaly do not. m64 is very possible to support if the emulator was updated to support commandline running of movies. A very large thanks to nitsuja for making the new version of FCEU, as well as doing large amounts of debugging and in general help. Edit--- It's probly worth mentioning that you will need the Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework to use this.

Posted: 3/13/2006 4:35 PM

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Hoe

Joined: 7/31/2004
Posts: 183
Location: USA

Download This will be the final update I make unless there is either a bug or additional emulators add support for viewing movies through their commandlines. Additions to this version include: * Upon hash collition, a menu is presented with a list of all the ROMs. You select which to use by entering in the corosponding number. [1] * If no rom is found at all, you are presented with a file selection dialog. Default directories can also be configured on a per movie type basis. * Upon running with no arguments, you are given a menu of options. You can add directories to the list, set them as default for a movie type, and view detailed help. * If no emulator is associated with a movie type, a file selection dialog will be presented to configure this. * Probly more. 1) Hash collitions are not uncommon because I'm not actually using a hash of the GBA/GB/GBC games. I'm just using the internal title.

Posted: 3/13/2006 5:24 PM

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Highness

Player (70)

Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden

This is nice. I would like to see that feature baked into every single emulator there is. :)

Posted: 3/13/2006 6:07 PM

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evilpenguin

Joined: 11/1/2005
Posts: 3

I agree 100%, CLI launching of these game movies is a great feature. I love showing people these movie on my Media Center PC when they come over and this makes it sooo much easier.

Posted: 1/8/2008 1:18 PM

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pirate_sephiroth

Active player (308)

Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil

Hey, Hoe. I finally tested it, and it's really neat. But I have a doubt: Why does it ask for a "rom folder" at the first run? Do you think we should keep all the roms of all systems in the same folder? It should already ask for the "default" folders for the movie formats... And... because of that, do we have to keep GBA and GBx roms in the same folder...?

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Posted: 1/8/2008 1:41 PM

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Hoe

Joined: 7/31/2004
Posts: 183
Location: USA

It takes a list of directories containing roms and determins what type they are via the file extention. The list can be 1 directory, or 5000000 :) The default directory is if the rom is not found in the db, the default directory where the file select dialog will show.