Post subject: Gens question
Joined: 6/28/2004
Posts: 219
Location: Raccoon City
whenever i run my Gens, my monitor flashes, all my desktop icons disappear and reappear, THEN Gens runs. but while its running, my winzip icons change from the regular light blue to a redish color. then when i close Gens, it does the same flashing thing. does this happen to any of you? is this normal? is it messing with or hurting my video card/ computer/ anything? sorry, but im just a computer paranoid person. its the source of 75% of my entertainment, as nerdy as that sounds.
Joined: 6/27/2004
Posts: 550
Location: New York
It happens for me so I'm sure others as well, but even if it only happened for you you wouldn't have to be worried about any of your hardware being damaged.
Joined: 6/28/2004
Posts: 219
Location: Raccoon City
i was just moderately leary becuase i dont want it to mess up anything. like, change a resolution, or make me play computer hide-and-seek to find out what was happened or anything weird like that. edit: this is what im talking about. before Gens is run. after Gens is run.
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Joined: 3/16/2004
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Location: America, Québec
It is caused by changing the resolution or the refresh rate. It happens often with recent 3D games.
Joined: 3/13/2004
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Location: Kansai, JAPAN
That is one crazy desktop image you've got there. Is that dog alive?
Do Not Talk About Feitclub http://www.feitclub.com
Joined: 6/28/2004
Posts: 219
Location: Raccoon City
yes the dog is alive. i just thought it was cool lookin becuase hes in a commando position with his face in a can of dog food. i love dogs. [URL=http://img17.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img17&image=dogcanface.jpg][/URL]
Joined: 7/6/2012
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Location: Réunion (FR)
sorry for ask the question here, but i think, it's the best place: So, what can I do (all what is possible) with a GMV file please?
~ [I]feeuzz
arflech
He/Him
Joined: 5/3/2008
Posts: 1120
Look through the main site: http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources.html The general rule is that you need to load the ROM that the GMV was based on (we will not distribute or point to ROMs), and then you need to "Play Movie" or some similar command, and if the checksums match, the emulator will start playing the game just as the TASer did. If the checksums don't match, you probably used a slightly different version of the ROM: Occasionally game manufacturers would need to fix some serious bug in their games or (less commonly) change something found offensive (like the vaguely-Islamic chanting in the OoT Fire Temple and the crescent on the Mirror Shield), so they would recall whatever the stores still had in stock and silently release new versions of the cartridges; the scene sometimes tags these versions as "v1.0" or "v1.1" (I think sometimes the actual manufacturers did this too). Another possibility is that your download was corrupted or that you did not get a verified good dump (marked by "[!]") of a game that had one. Now if the ROM is the best known dump of the correct version of the game, you may still have a problem if the GMV was made for an old version of Gens and subtly relied on the timing of that specific version; Gens is notorious for this, as is DeSmuME. Basically, rendering a game written for one platform on another with frame-perfect accuracy would take insane amounts of RAM or CPU speed, so emulator programmers, seeing that normal gameplay isn't interrupted by taking certain shortcuts in interpreting the code, decide to do just that, sacrificing accuracy for speed; I think I remember reading a post by the author of bsnes, the notoriously slow and memory-hungry SNES emulator (which is now the basis for our lsnes because of its extreme accuracy), that doing an absolutely perfect job of emulating the SNES would take 3GB of RAM and a fast CPU. Anyway, as emulators are developed, sometimes the core engines are modified, usually in some way that improves the accuracy-efficiency tradeoff, and this usually causes those frame-perfect TAS input files made for older versions of the emulators to desync with the new ones (after a point, the game's state isn't where it was expected, so the main character appears to wander around aimlessly or meander through the menu or something); for this reason, and because it generally takes so long just to make an input file, when WIPs are posted or finished runs are submitted, often a note is made of the version of the emulator used and which versions synched. Keep in mind, making a TAS that relies on an emulator glitch, especially one fixed in the latest version of the emulator, is frowned upon; on the other hand, you don't need to discard all your work and start all over again just because yet another new build was released (but you can try hex-editing, if you're meticulous about its effects). The smaller text above was a bit less important for your immediate situation; one final note is that you can always try to add to the GMV file by continuing your recording, at least if it's a WIP, and the link atop this post will point you there too.
i imgur com/QiCaaH8 png
Joined: 7/6/2012
Posts: 207
Location: Réunion (FR)
err, yes, I know what is a GMV file and what's the goal, but for example, how to continue a record which is already stoped, how to delete some input, or to improve the record? (these things are not explained here )
~ [I]feeuzz
WST
She/Her
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Joined: 10/6/2011
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Location: RU · ID · AM
You can use this to arrange parts of your run. If you want simply to continue record, find “resume record from now” in the menu or press f5 and then f8 at the place where you want to continue record from.
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2 my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
Joined: 7/6/2012
Posts: 207
Location: Réunion (FR)
thank you EDIT: is it possible to continue a movie which was stoped? when i try gens says "the movie is read only". EDIT 2 : "control + T"
~ [I]feeuzz
Joined: 7/6/2012
Posts: 207
Location: Réunion (FR)
(sorry for second post, but it's because there aren't many people who look at this topic...) Please, how to edit player 2 input with tasmovie-editor?
~ [I]feeuzz
WST
She/Her
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I got a dumb question. I’d like to use gd library to render some nice images from my scripts. The Gens Lua documentation says that it’s possible, but the steps described there do not help. What should I do to make gd functions available in my Gens Lua scripts?
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2 my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
AnS
Emulator Coder, Experienced player (723)
Joined: 2/23/2006
Posts: 682
WST wrote:
I got a dumb question. I’d like to use gd library to render some nice images from my scripts. The Gens Lua documentation says that it’s possible, but the steps described there do not help. What should I do to make gd functions available in my Gens Lua scripts?
Those steps do help. 1. Download lua-gd-2.0.33r2-win32 (exactly the 32-bit version, even if you use x64 Windows) and extract it into the Gens folder. 2. Do the same with the lua5_1_4_Win32_bin - extract all dll files right into Gens folder instead of littering C:\WINDOWS\system32. 3. Now Lua scripts will successfully find GD library, and the library itself will be able to find necessary Lua stuff (even though Lua5.1 is already statically linked into Gens.exe, but GD library needs lua51.dll for its own purposes). For example, try this code:
Language: lua

require "gd"; -- load resources gdstr = gd.createFromPng("1.png"):gdStr(); function draw() gui.image(10, 20, gdstr); end emu.registerafter(draw);
Joined: 7/6/2012
Posts: 207
Location: Réunion (FR)
I heard it was possible to set "3" gamepads on Gens-rr, please if anyone knows, how to use the third? (how to configure it?)
~ [I]feeuzz
WST
She/Her
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I know feeuzz’s question is already answerred… As about mine — thank you again, AnS, this crap is working fine now. I am surprised that true color png image with alpha channel is rendered perfectly over 256-color game’s image. Link to video Apologies about video quality — for some reason my primary encoder stopped working and I had to call ffmpeg with default encoding settings (because I completely forgot it’s command-line syntax). (upd) for whatever reason, my experiments with gd often result in random crashes. I have no idea what’s going on…
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2 my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
WST
She/Her
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The crash happens with probability around 1/5 whenever I try to call gd.createFromGdStr(). I even do not know if it's a Gens issue, or it comes from lua-gd. The argument is certainly valid, because this script causes such behavior.
require "gd";

function process()
	local str = gui.gdscreenshot();
	local screenshot = gd.createFromGdStr(str);
end;

emu.registerafter(process);
AnS, could you please run this script within your Gens instance? Just to ensure that the bug is actually present and not caused by my mistake. (upd) found a workaround, thinking of reporting the issue to lua-gd github page…
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2 my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
AnS
Emulator Coder, Experienced player (723)
Joined: 2/23/2006
Posts: 682
WST wrote:
AnS, could you please run this script within your Gens instance? Just to ensure that the bug is actually present and not caused by my mistake.
I've launched the script ten times in a row, it didn't crash.
WST
She/Her
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AnS wrote:
I've launched the script ten times in a row, it didn't crash.
Which means I have to dig around a bit more… Thank you, AnS
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2 my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
WST
She/Her
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AnS sent me an archive containing his Gens instance. I've checked all *.dll files with md5sum and found no difference. Finally I've started his Gens and run the test Lua script. It worked just fine. So, the source of the problem is certainly Gens itself. I used SVN nightly builds (rev 304 and rev 327), but AnS sent me gens_11b.exe. Yesterday I workarounded the issue by writing the results of emu.gdscreenshot calls into files and further processing by standalone Lua script, but now I got a chance to finally write a complete Lua script for Gens, which would solve my task. So, thank you once again, AnS.
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2 my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
Joined: 2/26/2013
Posts: 9
Back to the original question, what Gens does (at least older versions, the latest ones don't do it on my system) is change the color depth to 16-bit depth. I have no idea why, but that's what it does, and so Windows changes some of the icons to their 16-bit versions, which are Windows 95/98-looking. ;)
Editor
Joined: 3/31/2010
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It's an issue with Gens. It sets my Windows 7 to Basic color mode.
When TAS does Quake 1, SDA will declare war. The Prince doth arrive he doth please.
Joined: 2/26/2013
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It probably does it as a 'forced compatibility' feature.