Hey guys, when you start TASing on libTAS + PCem, I’ve got to tell you something from my personal experience…
1. After running the winxp installation movie, when you get to your game setup movie, ALWAYS, go to bottom left, click that start button -> control panel -> mouse -> pointer precision -> turn it off. For any games that require mouse inputs to play it, turn it off if you want coordinates to work how they’re supposed to.
2. Even frames: mouse clicks only work on even frames, key presses can work on uneven frames, and coordinates only register on even frames (I’m not too sure about this, but from my testing coordinates didnt register on uneven frames).
3. Coordinate movement limit: sometimes, moving the number way too fast will cause the mouse to not end up in the same position, you should not use for example on first frame 0, and then on second frame 230, you need to charge it up by 100, or by 50. I think the limit is ~200 frames, so you may be able to move by 200 x/y coordinates safely sometimes…
4. CURSED coordinates: NEVER, and I mean NEVER, input x coordinates: -170, -86, 86, 170! They will cause your mouse to not end up the same afterwards! (Well, at least if starting from 0, but feel free to test if you’re for example at coordinate 80 or 160).
5. Re-centering the mouse: in case anything goes wrong (after you’ve turned pointer precision off), you can recenter the mouse… just find what edges it’s closest to, for example if bottom and right edge is the closest, just charge up the x coordinate to 400 then back to 0, and y coordinate to 300 then back to 0 (since default resolution is set to 800x600, you just do half of it).
6. You start from center, (0, 0) is center of the screen.
7. How coordinates work: they don’t work like coordinate system used in math, basically y coord is inverted, inputing positive will move the cursor down, and negative will move the cursor up. The x coordinate stays the same as math coordinate, positive being right and negative being left.
8. How to start using coordinates: when you start your TAS movie, on the welcome screen (on windows xp), I recommend you to put “mouse button 1” (left click) for 3 frames, or on one even frame, basically without it mouse coordinates won’t respond.
9. In your game setup movie, you don’t have to make it fast, you can just use recording mode and set up your game manually without bothering about optimization, also it is IMPORTANT that you SHUT DOWN windows in your installation movie, in order for you not to have that annoying “checking disk” screen on the boot of your TAS movie.
Running the movie from the very start seems to give consistent timings without errors, but combined with XP's strange lag inconsistencies, it seems game installation in particular is likely to be a pain to optimise.
I was also able to play Hotline Miami in Windows XP, with a different version of Pixomatic, but the game seems to be too slow for the emulated cpu with software rendering. It's also a Directx 8 game.
You just take dlls and files from the shader directory and put them in the same directory as your game executable.
For Hamsterball I used Pixomatic version 2 from here https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/wrappers/files/Unsorted/rast.7z
For Hotline Miami I used Pixomatic version 2 from here https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/wrappers/files/Direct3D/Software/Pixomatic/pixomatic_softogl.7z
There's also an opengl wrapper in the zip.
For other games, SwiftShader version 2 may work better but I didn't find good examples. There's a version of SwiftShader version 2 in the first link.
Here's another version of SwiftShader 2 https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/wrappers/files/Direct3D/Software/SwiftShader/SwiftShader%202.x/
There are other versions of SwiftShader so if you're interested you can search for them. People compiled versions to run in Reactos so you can try them as well.
