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Not bad. Another solid entry for the growing list of Ninja Games.
All I'd have to say for future versions is that they include the two skipped levels. They in and of themselves were pretty sweet and it would show off more of the game.
Last time I played this, I seem to recall a level in a mountain forest. However it wasn't in any of the videos. I wonder what's up with that.
Either way, I approve.
Edit: It seems Halamantariel and I are taking different platforms. ;P
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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Small update. Seems to be an emulation issue and nothing to do with plugins or other setup. I just booted it up in ePSXe with the same plugins and it worked fine.
Darn. :(
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Dromiceius wrote:
Sticky wrote:
Hmm, I vote for Yes/no/meh again. I, too, have stopped voting for anything. Too much brain power to give a decent rating, as opposed to a high or low number if i want a yes/no vote
I don't understand this sentiment that keeps coming up. You don't like the new system, because it allows you to be more specific than 0.0, 5.0, or 10.0.
The solution to your problem seems clear. :p
That's assuming that you can assign "Yes", "No", and "Meh" clean numerical equivalents to a 100 point scale. A "Yes" isn't necessarily a 10, or any other value, really. It's a "Yes".
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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moozooh wrote:
What's the current consensus on CD reader plugins? I've been somewhat out of the loop so I'm not entirely sure it's currently warranted, but SaPu just released version 1.3 of his plugin together with the source. I think it's supposed to be good, and the fact that it's open-source is also good. Opinions/tests/anything?
I've been using mz's TAS CD plugin with no hassles. I've even been able to record off a CD and play the movie back on an ISO using linuzapps' plugin with nary a problem.
From here, I'm good.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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Another bug report.
"Stop screen saver" option does not work. I just tried reviewing my Punky Skunk work after an intense hex editing session and it desynched because my computer switched into screen saver mode (no damage done to the file; the emulator just skipped a beat).
Also I've noticed this emulator is a *huge* CPU hog when the game window is open, but it seems I can't do anything about it. Oh well.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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...will not run. Both the PAL and NTSC versions get as far as the company logo, then just stick there. Otherwise I'd be getting to this already.
Either way, I'll set this topic up now.
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I want to put this down before I forget about it. It was one of those rare dreams that lasted a long time and actually had a *mostly* coherent plot. Keep in mind that everything I say applies only to the dream world.
So there's some big trial going on. Somehow my drummer roommate was selected to be the defense attorney and I was picked to be on the jury (they were really lax on the jury, as shall be seen). The defendant was Bart Simpson and he was being accused of aiding in the escape of a character from a recently released video game. And I don't mean escaped from the video game, but rather from the prison in the video game where she was being held (remember, *mostly* coherent).
As the dream progressed, it occasionally flashed to scenes from the video game as though I were watching G4 around the time of some big video game convention. Apparently said character looked a lot like a mean and muscular version of Krystal from Star Fox, and the prison where she was being held had a series of torture rooms or "torture obstacle courses" that I believe served as the games levels. These rooms were in control of a guard who looked like some kind of cartoon leopard, but if he resembles any particular character from somewhere else, then I can't put my finger on it. Much of the story would be about these two characters interacting.
Before the trial began, my roommate, some friends and I sat around in some room discussing the trial. I don't remember the discussion, but I do remember that at the end of it, we were late and had to sneak in. As the trial progressed, we were allowed to live normal life during the recesses. One of these times some friends and I went to pick up (or drop off?) my sister at the local college dorms, and when we showed up we saw that two of the building had been burned in a really bad fire; one of these was where my brother had stayed. Other times my brother and I would go swimming in a near frozen river.
Once I met up with Bart Simpson and managed to talk with him a little bit. He was looking really depressed and wearing a tattered Bartman costume. When I saw his condition, I looked at him and said, "Let me guess, you were playing around in the woods and fell down, ripping your clothes. When the cops found you, they also found her footprints nearby, and assumed you were an accomplice and she had turned her back on you when she decided she know longer needed you." He said, "Exactly."
It was during the conversation that I learned that she was a big deal because she had stolen some magic crown and had hidden it somewhere. At that point I realized the crown had been placed on top of a Radioactive Man statue at a local themepark. I don't know how I knew; I just did.
I don't remember too many details about the trial itself. My roommate was having a hard establishing his case, but eventually he managed to procure some crucial piece of evidence and win the trial. It then came out that, though the case was real, the trial was part of some gameshow, and my roommate won a huge reward because of it.
The dream then ended with my brother and I returning to the near frozen river to do some swimming. When we were done, we rushed home and I crawled into bed to warm up. That's when I woke up.
Funny part about the dream is that my roommate had been hypnotized. Whenever someone said something, he would stand up and walk up and down the aisles, acting as though he were playing the drums. It was always a pleasure to see his embarrassed face when he snapped out of it and thought, "What am I doing?!"
So, yeah. That's the dream I just had.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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blahmoomoo wrote:
Well, the emulator simply tells the CD player itself to play this type of music, so the music you hear is coming directly from the hardware. If you go into the advanced volume control of your computer, you can adjust the volume level of the CD Player since it is considered a completely separate audio input.
Yes. It's painfully apparent how not-integrated the CD audio is in the emulator as I'm picking up a few more bugs (mainly that when the current track that is playing ends, instead of going back to the beginning like it's most often supposed to in games, it just continues onto the next track; this can lead to some unfitting music if you're taking too long).
But! None of this affects the stability and synching of the emulator, so it should probably be low priority. In fact, fixing some of these problems may lead to a host of other issues.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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mz wrote:
You need to use v0.0.7's TAS Video Plugin to fix this issue (you're probably using one of the test version plugins, which don't have this fix enabled).
I hate to say this, but that's the plugin kkapture can't load. It picks up the test one just fine, and others just lock up the emulator when using kkapture.
(thank you for saying this; it's just that I've come on here with so many issues, such as this one, that I can just imagine you seeing my screen name, rolling your eyes, and thinking, "Goodness, what is it now?" :P)Edit: So I purchased that cable talked about earlier, and I'm getting music now. Sweet! However, this seems to open up another can'o'worms that, from the looks of it, isn't in anyone's control. Loading a save state in another level results in the previous level's music playing, and closing the emulator or going into the menus doesn't stop the music. The former I can understand, but the latter just baffles me. It'll be fine for normal play, but while TASing I'll probably be turning it off.
This also raises the issue of how to record CD audio for a publication. <_<
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Okay, now that recording is done, I have a few questions.
1. Is kkapture *supposed* to record in a 640x512 window and then shuffle the image off to the corner? I set PCSX's resolution to 320x240, and while it captured it at that resolution, it placed in the in corner of a larger resolution.
2. Can I change this?
3. How do I get it to stretch the image to fill the space I want regardless of ingame rendering? Instead of recording the parts that get rendered at 256x240 at the specified 320x240 (yes, it's set to stretch the image), it just captured it at what it was rendered at.
If the answer to any of this is, "Do some post-recording processing," I'll be sad because I know nothing about such things.
I'll admit I'm feeling exceedingly n00bish right now.
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FractalFusion wrote:
In addition, selecting play movie or record movie while using old plugin settings (carried over from v0.0.5) will result in a crash. You must use the new plugins.
I'm not sure if you're trying to answer my concern, but if so, let me clarify: I'm not having issues playing and recording input files, and all my plugins are up to date. The emulator crashes whenever I use kkapture to try and record an AVI. Either that or it locks up.
Hm... Got it working somehow just now. I eliminated the space in the PXM file and checked New Startup Interception in kkapture. It's running really slow, but we'll see if it works.
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mz wrote:
I'm afraid I don't understand this. Savestates are saved as movieFilename.pxm.000/1/2/etc, so it shouldn't be possible to load a savestate that is not bound to a movie (but it might still be remotely possible to load a savestate from another movie, which in that case this is the expected behavior if you're loading a savestate from a longer movie in read-only mode).
What Atma said. You have to let the movie run for a bit before it will load bound states.
mz wrote:
I thought I had fixed this bug in v0.0.7. Are you sure you're using that version and not v0.0.6? :/
It's v0.0.7 alright.
mz wrote:
You may want to try recording an AVI with other video plugins if that bug always happens for you.
Hm, now the emulator seems to crash or lock up whenever it's about to start the game. :/
I also decided to download the recent test build. We'll see how this works.
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I pretty impressed with this. I made a ten minute movie only to catch a huge bungle made within the first minute. After managing some hex edit magic, it only desynched once due to something unrelated, and that was easily fixed with some more hex edit magic! This is a complete subversion of all my expectations regarding TASing a disc based system; I'm even recording from a CD I burned using the image I downloaded. I just find this cool.
Now for some more bugs, mainly with movie playback.
Pause the emulator and load up a movie. If you load a savestate to get to some part of the movie before unpausing, the emulator will load the state that is not bound to the movie and stop playback (feature request: the ability to bind/unbind savestates). I suspect this may be the cause of some desynchs if Open Read Only is unchecked.
I've had a movies somehow get corrupted between sessions. It will miss button presses or go down some other track that I don't remember putting in. I'm not sure if it's related to the previous issue or something else, but it's often fixed by loading a state that's towards the end of the movie. Such was the desynch I had mentioned in the first paragraph, except I didn't have a savestate to fix it.
And another question: I try to use kkapture to record an AVI, but it brings up a message that says, "Could Not Load GPU Plugin C:\pcsx\plugin\gpuPeopsSoft.dll". I've checked and the file is there. After clicking OK, it pulls up the plugin list, and there's nothing under the Graphics plugin when there would be if I loaded the emulator itself up. What's up with this? (keep in mind that the only plugins I have came with the recent build, so the only thing that appears when loading the emulator is the TAS Graphics plugin; may be related)
This wouldn't be a problem, except the built in recorder doesn't seem to capture sound.
Thanks in advance.
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mz wrote:
Hah, you're right. I didn't notice that.
After a quick Google search I found this:
In order to be able to have CD audio play on your sound card, they need to be connected directly to it. Most CD-ROM drives come with a thin, three-wire cable to enable this. If the cable is not connected, or is connected improperly, the CD-ROM drive and sound card will be isolated.
It looks like we don't have the CD-ROM drive properly connected to the sound card. :P
All I've got is the power cord and the bus cable to hook it into the motherboard. :/ I wonder how much such a cable costs...
Again, thank you.
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mz wrote:
Most PlayStation emulators I know can't play CDDA music, so probably PCSX doesn't.
I'm curious. If that's the case, then what's up with the "Disable CD Audio" box under "Options"?
(side note: Jumping Flash's music may work, but it doesn't use CD tracks; Punky Skunk does, and I still can't get music from it in the emulator when I can by using a CD player)
Thanks for any answers; I've appreciated what's been done so far.
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Hm. It would seem Rayman doesn't want to get past the company logo. The game just sort of locks up.
(sorry for being a bit of a bother)Edit[/b]: Aaaand, another thing. I have burned a game onto a CD. I have since learned that PCSX likes to crash anytime it tries to access my disc drives using TAS CD-ROM Plugin 0.1. So I'm *still* without music and FMV.
Tweaking things, and I'm making progress. It's not up and running, but at least it's not crashing.
Edit: Okay, lesson learned: It will be important where you get the ISOs. I redownloaded Jumping Flash, and now I have both FMV and music. I'm happy now. :D
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Derakon wrote:
I think there's a difference between "being harsh on quality" and "encouraging people to make higher-quality videos". The former is basically saying "Your video sucks, for these reasons. Fix it and maybe we'll consider it." The latter is "Hey, nice effort! I think if you did this and this, though, it'd be even better. Why don't you give that a shot?"
In other words, it's all a matter of wording, and being encouraging to newcomers.
Last time I tried that, he left and never came back. >_>
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Yup, those exact settings give me a black screen. I'm guessing "Stretch to full window size" and "Use system memory" are, for whatever reason, incompatible at this point, since "Scale to window size" doesn't give me any issues with system memory.
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LagDotCom wrote:
You can boot to the PS1 logo if you like by selecting 'Run from BIOS' or something I think? Not that it's very necessary, most PS1 games have nice long black screens at the start to overlay anyway.
Yes, but it's conspicuously absent when you "Record from Power on."
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Retroplay wrote:
I found a small bug, not movie related.
If I select Use system memory - slower with most cards, disables auto-screen-filtering in latest v007 I just get a black screen.
Everything is fine (except I get that ugly screen filtering) if I untick it.
I'm using WinXP SP3 with a Geforce 6800GT with latest ForceWare drivers.
It works fine for me. However, I remember getting a black screen because I selected one of the filters (can't remember which one that was) in addition to this. What are your other settings?
Also, another graphical bug report: Whenever using a 2x filter unstretched, the bottom part of the info display (input, FPS, etc.) appears in the middle of the screen instead of the bottom.
(minor note: there's a 1:1 setting, but no 2:2 without filters? very low priority note)
No suggestions about what to do for sticky input? ;_;
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Okay, first impression go here.
So far, not too bad. Things had a somewhat rough start with getting things going (plus I was initially baffled at the multipart .rar files that seem common), but once things got going, it was smooth sailing. I've come away with a better impression than I had with Mupen - perhaps I should give that one a second shot. I did a brief, one-minute test TAS of Punky Skunk, and it synched fine. Good job!
Only two issues:
1. The lack of music and FMVs when using ISOs makes me sad. :( I'm also not sure how this will affect my potential submissions.
2. The controls stick. A lot. When they get stuck, it lasts anywhere from 2-20 times longer than I pushed the button. I don't know how to trigger this, and quite frankly, it's starting to get annoying.
And one question: How do I start recording a movie from BIOS startup? Is it even possible?
Thank you, mz, for making this a reality.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
(just thought you all would enjoy this)
