It's ok, I haven't worked on this since my failed attempt at configurable hotkeys.
Dromiceius, you can still send me a PM with your Gmail address if you want me to add you to the current project page on Google Code, so you can have a reliable server where to host files.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
FBA-RR v0.0.2
I tested the rerecording features through a good chunk of the weekend, and successfully created a testrun of the first level of Sengoku 3. The desyncs and crashes I've experienced all seem to have been resolved at this point, but I should stress that I have no way of knowing if this be the case on systems other than my own.
Fast-forwarding and toggling read only mode cause desyncs, still, but at least they aren't as arbitrary now.
The UI is also now behaving almost exactly the way I wanted it to, with some exceptions that will be smoothed out later. You can find out more in the changelog.
Do report bugs and annoyances when you find them, either in this thread or on googlecode. I've uploaded my running list of issues to that page, if you want to know what I'll generally be up to next.
Potentially stupid question. I have FBA set up on my system, but I can't get it to recognize my roms, even with the paths set up properly. Any idea why this might be? (Windows XP SP3)
Potentially stupid question. I have FBA set up on my system, but I can't get it to recognize my roms, even with the paths set up properly. Any idea why this might be? (Windows XP SP3)
FBA requires specific rom names (like "pacman.zip") for each game. Also, it needs specific dumps of these roms (this means, not every version on the net will work).
FBA-RR uses the roms set of MAME v0.127, so... You know what to look for.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
Try changing the setting in "Video->Select blitter" before starting a game. You may want to use "Enhanced (Direct3D 7)".
If that doesn't help, I have no idea what else could it be... I've never had that issue, sorry.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
I did...
maybe it's all just a big mess in my system
my OS is windows server 2008 and it was a fight to get latest catalyst (8.12) to work, got conflicts on lybraries (visual C++) and .NET
anyway, my other finalburns (FBEvo, FBA official) and such are doing pretty well
Hm. I must have broken something if FBA official doesn't crash. I did mess with some of the graphics code, and the ROM loading, so it's reasonable that there could be unexpected side-effects.
I won't be able to work on this again for awhile yet, unfortunately, but I'll definitely look into this when I get back to it.
Thanks for the feedback.
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 231
Location: Lonely City
I am trying to tas some speedruns on Emulator FBA.Thank you for your Emulator FBA-RRv002-bin.7z.
I have used FCEU for many years.So I feel a little unconfortuble with FBA.
I can't config hotkey.For example,I plan to use "S" to save slot1 instead "shift+F1",and other config.
I can't watch memory.Although I can find the correct memory address by "Cheat Search",I can't watch them when I am tasing :(
I wish there will be some new function in next FBA :)
leandroff5:
Thought I'd fixed that, but I'm not surprised to hear that it's still an issue. In the near future, I plan to overhaul the part of the code that is likely responsible for your crashing, so hopefully that'll fix it.
Xipo:
Customizable hotkeys are the other top priority at the moment. I guess I could also bump up "memory watch" and try to get it into the next release. :)
Let's go through the approval process... What is the current status with this emulator with regards to these pages:
http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/Features.htmlhttp://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/Requirements.html
Let's start with:
-- Does it work on most systems by simply extracting a package, running the executable within, selecting a ROM, and clicking a "load" button, and then just playing, without need to run configuration & plugin selection?
-- Are the most used options accessible on the commandline? I.e. can I launch e.g. "fba x.iso test.pxm" to have it bind "x.iso" to the emulated CD drive and playback the "test.pxm" movie, with no pointing&clicking or other types of menu navigation needed?
-- Continuation to the commandline topic: Can AVI recording also be activated from the commandline?
-- Does it compile with free/libris development tools (MINGW/GCC toolchain)?
-- Does it work on Linux? (WINE not accepted; most plugins are high-likely not WINE-compatible)
-- Is the rendering quality (audio & video) close to original?
-- Do most popular games work on it?
-- Is it stable, i.e. does not crash if you navigate menu accidentally in the wrong order or leave some checkbox unchecked?
-- Is the movie file format stable? I.e. does it include all the necessary things?
-- Continuation: Does the movie file format include a way to tell whether the movie begins from a cold reboot (power cycle), from a soft reboot (reset button) or a savestate?
-- Continuation: Does the movie file format include a way to tell the FPS on which the movie runs? Is the said FPS constant throughout the movie? I.e. can the movie length in milliseconds be derived from the movie file alone, tamper-securely?
-- Continuation: Does the movie file format include way to include soft reboot (reset button) events in the movie?
-- Can the movie be paused and/or speed changed during playback, without these actions affecting the sync of the movie?
-- Related question: Can the movie be paused and/or speed changed during playback, without these actions affecting the A/V sync or the playback speed within the AVI that is produced during the playback, if AVI recording is activated?
Answers from the horse's mouth, please. :)
Also, I don't have any idea how FBA works. Or how arcade machine ROMs work. Or compatibility. Or whatever. Or what kind of things the movie recording should consider. The above list is a generic one based on the list I asked about PCSX.
Short version: there are a few major problems which are going to take a lot of time (and probably more engineering skill than I have) to solve to my own satisfaction, much less TASvideos standards. Namely, it crashes if you poke the UI enough, and it may/may not desync if you use the wrong video configuration, or switch movie modes while recording, and possibly other things. Fastforward and speed +/- seem stable.
A determined TASer could (and has, if I'm not mistaken) produce a TAS. You'd just have to work around a lot of fragility and outright stupid behavior on the part of the emulator.
I still intend to fix these things, though I admit I haven't made significant progress since the last version was released.
Bisqwit wrote:
-- Does it work on most systems by simply extracting a package, running the executable within, selecting a ROM, and clicking a "load" button, and then just playing, without need to run configuration & plugin selection?
Getting the rom list to behave might take some work. Otherwise, yes.
Command line?
No.
-- Does it compile with free/libris development tools (MINGW/GCC toolchain)?
Yes.
-- Does it work on Linux? (WINE not accepted; most plugins are high-likely not WINE-compatible)
There's no Linux build.
-- Is the rendering quality (audio & video) close to original?
I'm not aware of any problems.
-- Do most popular games work on it?
Not exactly, no. After the rest of the emulator is stable, adding more games would become a priority.
-- Is it stable, i.e. does not crash if you navigate menu accidentally in the wrong order or leave some checkbox unchecked?
UI issues remain.
-- Continuation: Does the movie file format include a way to tell the FPS on which the movie runs? Is the said FPS constant throughout the movie? I.e. can the movie length in milliseconds be derived from the movie file alone, tamper-securely?
I don't think anyone (including me) has thought to check that.
-- Is the movie file format stable? I.e. does it include all the necessary things?
Yes.
-- Continuation: Does the movie file format include a way to tell whether the movie begins from a cold reboot (power cycle), from a soft reboot (reset button) or a savestate?
Yes.
-- Continuation: Does the movie file format include way to include soft reboot (reset button) events in the movie?
Unknown. There are input problems preventing me from testing. :facepalm:
-- Can the movie be paused and/or speed changed during playback, without these actions affecting the sync of the movie?
Nope.
-- Related question: Can the movie be paused and/or speed changed during playback, without these actions affecting the A/V sync or the playback speed within the AVI that is produced during the playback, if AVI recording is activated?
AVI recording is somewhat broken, according to earlier posts in this thread.
UI brainfarts such as "lack of commandline support", "crash if select options in wrong order" are not critical to accepting the emulator.
However, not being able to calculate the movie length (in seconds) automatically from movie file alone is a critical issue, because it undermines our movie verification process.
Unrobust AVI recording & movie playback is also likely a critical issue. It can however be solved with a crude hack by someone with AVI encoding experience & programming skills, as I have done on many occassions. I don't know anything about FBA though, and I don't have time to study, so count me out.
Otherwise this emulator seems to be close to accepting, yes.
Last time I tested it had command line support. It can even create Windows associations automatically for you, so you only need to double-click a movie file and it will load the correct rom and start the movie automatically.
About popular games, it has all of the Neo Geo, CPS-1/2/3 and Cave games. And there are some games from Konami, Taito and a few others too... Obviously we'll probably never be able to have every popular game on the arcades, because there are too many. But adding new games is somewhat easy, as they're all separate drivers, and the official FBA is updated often.
For Linux there is a FBA-SDL port, but I don't know how good or bad it is.
Bisqwit wrote:
Does the movie file format include way to include soft reboot (reset button) events in the movie?
Yes.
Bisqwit wrote:
Does the movie file format include a way to tell the FPS on which the movie runs? Is the said FPS constant throughout the movie? I.e. can the movie length in milliseconds be derived from the movie file alone, tamper-securely?
Every movie is recorded at 60 FPS.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
A determined TASer could (and has, if I'm not mistaken) produce a TAS.
Are you talking about my Overtop TAS?
Some people in the thread could watch it just fine, yes, given that the Neo Geo memory card was erased beforehand. Or created, I forgot, lol.
Also, I could record an AVI from it just fine, and I even youtube'd it. It has the same "save AVI" interface as Gens and FCEU as far as I can tell.
I'm all for approving FBA, but since its own author says it's not ready there's not much I can do :(
I'm totally against approving FBA. I have been running Neo Turf Masters with it and encountered nothing but problems. I started recording on an old 32bit machine running XP with the basic DirectDraw 7 video blitter and 22khz sound. After finishing the movie, I had to find out that it didn't play back in synch! After trying out several options, I realized that I had to switch the blitter to Direct3D, or else the movie would always run out of synch. But that wasn't enough. After the movie at least finished playing, I realized that the sound of the resulting avi was always out of synch. At the beginning of the file, the audiotrack was in synch, but got gradually faster, until it reached a skew of a full second after 10 minutes. Later I realized that I had to record the movie in 48khz to get a stable audiotrack, despite the fact that the run was recorded with a 22khz setting.
I tried to record the same run on my new 64bit machine running Vista 64 and encountered the same problems, just with the difference that the movie *always* ran out of synch, regardless of which settings I used. I was able to get over some de-synchs, but had to face countless others after those, which in the end prevented a full playback of the movie on that computer.
You can check out the my run here, by the way.
Later I tried to run a new part of the game on my vista machine, because apart from the aforementioned problems I experienced tons of crashes under XP when I slowed the game down instead of using frame advance, when I navigated the menu, or just randomly after a few minutes of recording. Under Vista the emu performed stable and I didn't encounter any crashes.
After finishing half of the run, I wanted to check it out, only to run into synching problems again. This time, no combination of settings on neither computer seemed to help! The movie always went out of synch at the same spot. The work of half a week is gone thanks to this mess. So I don't think that the emu in its current state is even close to being a stable platform for running arcade games. I'm thankful for what has been achieved with it so far, but I'm also a little disappointed that no new version has been released for the last few months.
If someone wants to check out this reproducible synch problem, here is the fbm-file. The movie stays in synch until it encounters hole 4. At that point, the game changes slightly, so this might be an emulation issue. May be this is only limited to this game. In any case, this might help the devs to trace the source of this problem. This synch problem also occurred at the same location of my completed run, but at least changing the settings helped getting past this point.
Dromiceius wrote:
A determined TASer could (and has, if I'm not mistaken) produce a TAS.
Determination has nothing to do with making a run, if the emulator isn't capable of producing stable results and therefore ends up destroying the product of said determination.
A few other remarks: I don't like the fact that the modded version of FBA has the original documentation stripped. Apart from this being highly disrespectful to its original author, it also is quite a set back for user friendliness, especially since the included new "documentation" explains none of the emu's functions. I had to get the original emu first to find information about included key shortcuts and the emu's options.
And let's not forget that this behaviour violates the license under which the source code for the emulator was released.
While you are making a movie, make it a habit to periodically play through your whole movie to verify that it works, and always make a backup of the working copy.
"Periodically" doesn't mean half a week (especially for a WIP emulator).
AVI problems could be solved using .kkapture, but that seems to be too difficult for most people, so it may not be a solution.
Xiaopang wrote:
And let's not forget that this behaviour violates the license under which the source code for the emulator was released.
I don't know where you got this stupid crap from, but this is what the license says (and yes, you can read the full license within FBA-RR, using "Help"->"About"):
FBA Real License, which doesn't have a single word about documentation wrote:
You may freely use, modify, and distribute both the FB Alpha source code and binary, however the following restrictions apply to the FB Alpha original material (see below for a list of libraries with differing licenses, please consult their respective documentation for more information):
* You may not sell, lease, rent or otherwise seek to gain monetary profit from FB Alpha;
* You must make public any changes you make to the source code;
* You must include, verbatim, the full text of this license;
* You may not distribute binaries which support games with copyright dates less then three years old;
* You may not distribute FB Alpha with ROM images unless you have the legal right to distribute them.
Also, my release of FBA-RR had a readme.txt file with all hotkeys explained; you shouldn't need more than that to make a TAS. That text file even has credits to the original authors and not a single word about me or my name, since I couldn't care less about that. But I know there are a lot of people like you who start to cry if they don't see their big names on there or something, so I put the credits there anyway.
Anyway, I agree with you on something: I'm totally against approving FBA-RR (and PCSX-RR too, by the way). Just for completely different reasons.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
While you are making a movie, make it a habit to periodically play through your whole movie to verify that it works, and always make a backup of the working copy.
"Periodically" doesn't mean half a week (especially for a WIP emulator).
i have backups and they all run out of synch, so what are they good for if they don't work??
mz wrote:
AVI problems could be solved using .kkapture, but that seems to be too difficult for most people, so it may not be a solution.
and where in that great documentation of yours does it say that kkapture works as a 3rd party solution for avi capturing? also, kkapture performs terribly with fba, capturing like a frame every 30 seconds, while it works great for the demos it was intended for... so no, it's not a solution. fraps would work much more reliably, but that only works with the direct3d blitter...
mz wrote:
Xiaopang wrote:
And let's not forget that this behaviour violates the license under which the source code for the emulator was released.
I don't know where you got this stupid crap from, but this is what the license says (and yes, you can read the full license within FBA-RR, using "Help"->"About"):
i was more thinking about:
"This copyright notice must remain with the code. If your program uses this code, you must either distribute or link to the source code. If you modify or improve this code, you must distribute the source code improvements."
yeah this notice is there, even though it is hidden pretty well.
still doesn't change the fact that it's impudent towards the original author if you just delete his documentation with your distribution, regardless of what the license says. his information was pretty helpful, while yours was not, or else i wouldn't have looked for the original information...
mz wrote:
Also, my release of FBA-RR had a readme.txt file with all hotkeys explained; you shouldn't need more than that to make a TAS. That text file even has credits to the original authors and not a single word about me or my name, since I couldn't care less about that.
yeah, may be it HAD this kind of textfile... may be you should also download the 0.0.0.2 release yourself, because it doesn't come with anything else, but the exe and a crappy outdated changelog.txt that only contains the changes of 0.0.0.1... but hey, go bash people for no good reason...if this txt-file was included with the 0.0.0.1 release, then surprise: the download is not available any more!
mz wrote:
But I know there are a lot of people like you who start to cry if they don't see their big names on there or something, so I put the credits there anyway.
what the hell are you talking about? what does my name have to do with giving credit where credit is due? may be you should start to use that head of yours to think before you write bs like that. anger management might help too....some people...
if you answer honest feedback with personal attacks, then you have some serious personality problems. anyway, i'm done with this crappy mod, seeing what kind of smug idiot is responsible for it...
i have backups and they all run out of synch, so what are they good for if they don't work??
DesyncHelp wrote:
and always make a backup of the working copy
Hint: "working copy" might not be the same as "copy that runs out of synch".
Xiaopang wrote:
and where in that great documentation of yours does it say that kkapture works as a 3rd party solution for avi capturing?
Nowhere. I'm just trying to provide a possible solution to a problem I never had before.
Xiaopang wrote:
i was more thinking about:
"This copyright notice must remain with the code. If your program uses this code, you must either distribute or link to the source code. If you modify or improve this code, you must distribute the source code improvements."
yeah this notice is there, even though it is hidden pretty well.
I still fail to see a single word about the documentation. Source code has always been there.
Xiaopang wrote:
still doesn't change the fact that it's impudent towards the original author if [...]
Says the guy who made a whole TAS using our program, encoded using our program and then uploaded the video to YouTube, without saying a word about us or the original FBA developers. And then came to our forums only to talk shit about it, and not a single word of thanks. Also, I can't see any word of thanks to the people who made the game you illegally obtained and then TASed.
Xiaopang wrote:
may be you should also download the 0.0.0.2 release yourself, because it doesn't come with anything else, but the exe and a crappy outdated changelog.txt that only contains the changes of 0.0.0.1... but hey, go bash people for no good reason...if this txt-file was included with the 0.0.0.1 release, then surprise: the download is not available any more!
I didn't release v0.0.2. You can download v0.0.1 from the official website.
Xiaopang wrote:
what does my name have to do with giving credit where credit is due?
Heh, what a joker.
Xiaopang wrote:
may be you should start to use that head of yours to think before you write bs like that. anger management might help too.... [...] if you answer honest feedback with personal attacks, then you have some serious personality problems.
If I had serious personality problems I would have called you a fucking asshole, but you see I never did.
Xiaopang wrote:
i'm done with this crappy mod, seeing what kind of smug idiot is responsible for it...
That should teach you to care more about who made which software before using it. That way people won't have to stick their name everywhere on it.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
Wow drama... okay, clearly there's been enough of the useless pissing contest.
I, on the other hand, would like to give constructive feedback to whoever is still working on this, that will hopefully be helpful.
While I've already seen a lot of discussion about desync in recordings so far, I've not seen mentioned anywhere a specific aspect of it that I find worth noting.
In a WIP TAS of mine, when it desyncs it always does so at the same three places. The TAS is of Metal Slug (first one) and it either desyncs during the first stage boss (insanely rare), middle of the fourth stage (insanely common), and right before the final before enters the screen (happened the whole one time it got past stage four).
Didn't know if this was worth mentioning or not, but here it is anyway, enjoy...
The rerecord option is a bit unstable but with a bit patience it works. I longplayed GhoulsNGhosts and have to overwrite the file much times. It seems it have some problems with random events.
Thanks for you work :) It was really a big help for me.
Is it planned to support older capcom games ? I wanted to play the MAME versioon from Ghosts N Goblins too. Most of the conversions wasn`t really good or near on the original.
The only good version was for the PS2 in the Capcom collection. But there is no working emulator at the moment for this system.
