Playstation recording? Yay, it's finally here. Castlevania and Megaman runs? So exciting! ...but I can't see how they're doing it.
Ok let's start at the beginning of my issues. When I start recording from power on, everything goes fine at first. I can make save states, play the game, etc. When I finally hit esc -> stop recording, I start to have problems: When I go click play recording, the emulator crashes (Windows has Encountered a Problem blah blah). Doesn't even let me choose what file to load, clicking the menu item playback just instantly crashes the game.
More mysteriously, when I load up the game, any savestates that were created during my recording "failed to load". Any savestates made during normal (non-recording) playing work just fine.
Also, frame advance works... to a point. Only seems to accept my button input every 3-or-so frames, but I'm willing to accept maybe that's the game I'm playing rather than the emulator. But once I've gone into frame-advance mode, I can't get out of it unless I hit ESC and then run the game again. Numpad zero doesn't work, the - or = speedup thing doesn't work, pause doesn't change the speed back to normal, and tab (fast forward) does nothing. Heck, even . (period) doesn't pull up my frame counter like the hotkey binding says it will.
On top of all that, I can't get my USB gamepad to work with the game. I change the keybindings to Joystick, and I can map the buttons just fine (I can reassign to any buttons, and it recognizes the buttons I press, so I know the emulator can 'see' the gamepad, so to speak). But when I play the game, nothing works. No buttons, not even the directionals. I guess I'm stuck with just the keyboard? Yikes...
I'm not trying to complain about the emulator, I think it's a wonderful advancement, and obviously it's working for some people out there, as evidenced by the new TAS's being released. Did anybody encounter problems like this at first? I've read the helpfiles and done the basic steps (plugins etc), but I just don't know whats up. If you need to know more specific settings let me know, I didn't want to write up a huge list if it doesn't matter. Thanks for any help!
Update: The above questions being answered, here's some more:
Everything's working now, except recording (sorta). I built a movie file that goes through the game's first screens (intro/loading/newgame/etc). Here's the two issues...
For whatever reason, sometimes the frame-by-frame-advance would skip on certain screens. When opening a movie intro, it would sometimes "auto-advance" 50-500 frames (depending on what was loading up) and then go back to paused in frame-advance mode. Sometimes when drawing something on screen (a pop-up box for example) every press of the frame-advance would jump exactly 2 frames each time until said object was completed. Is this normal?
Also, after creating the movie and getting past the intial newgame screens, I stopped the recording, and went to playback my movie. Desync!! It works fine until the first 'movie gap (see above)' and that's where the desync happens. Did the movie not load fast enough in the playback (thus desyncing)? I hit Start on the first possible tested frame to skip the movie and enter the menu screen, but maybe I should have given it more of a lead in time for the movie to avoid the desync?
It should be noted that for both above conditions, I was re-recording a movie (a tiny one made during the company logos before the opening movie). Also I was using the TAS Video and TAS Sound plugins.
I guess what I'm really asking is, do I need to give "lead-in" frames for movies/loading screens, and is it normal for the frame advance to sometimes jump a lot faster than a single frame, especially around movie/loading screens? Thanks for any help, and I appreciate all help already given!
Samus taught us that a girl doesn't need brains to be successful. Brains are giant, evil, and vulnerable to missiles.
