Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
pierrot wrote:
The whole point of being satisfied with beating these things was that they were so hard and that you HAD to do it in one run.
It takes a completely different skill to make these movies: cleverness. The skilled player uses all of the tricks available to him, glitches, bugs, wacky game physics, and the advantages given to him by the emulator to shave seconds off his performance. The thrill comes when a new timeattack is posted that beats the previous time. Whenever this happens, I ask "HOW did they do it?" The answer is usually very entertaining.
Note: I wrote this reply for the benefit of the other users of this forum. You seem content with your viewpoint.
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
After a bit of effort, I managed to compile a "Greatest Hits" collection:
http://www.altvox.com/~squid/greatest-hits.zip
Once again, you'll need the latest patched famtasia from the vending machine (with the "from now" fix turned on), and all of the relevant roms. Here's a file list of what's in the .zip. Hopefully it gives a good enough idea of what's inside:
I'll probably take this .zip offline in a couple of days, so grab it while you can.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get Battletoads working at all. The movies kept desyncing. :(
Note to whomever is going to make the movie: I have a version of Famtasia that writes a raw .avi file. This might be of some use. It can also be modified to suppress the "MOVIE REPLAY" etc messages. Contact me directly if you want a copy.
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
And now, I present my latest hack:
Sleepz-Vs-Thor.FMV
I found a way to extract a portion of an .fmv into another, smaller .fmv. The clip above is the battle with Thor from Sleepz' River City Ransom time attack. To watch it, you'll need my previous hack, and the River City Ransom (USA) rom.
And now, for your enjoyment, is the Sleepz Greatest Hits collection:
http://www.altvox.com/~squid/sleepz-greatest-hits.zip
I'm afraid the process of creating a smaller clip from an .fmv is a little complicated, otherwise I would post the tools so others could do it. Now, I guess I should go through and collect clips of peoples' favorite parts from the time attacks...
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Bisqwit wrote:
Background music would preferably be something specifically composed for this movie (don't rip copyrighted stuff!), with the game soundeffects still hearable.
I think it would be best to use a video game remix from a site such as VGMix or OC Remix. It would probably be easy to get permission from the author and also it's kind of fitting with the theme.
This patch fixes a bug in the movie load routine. The movie creation routine appears to be fine. I would like people to consider this an "experimental" patch, since it *does* mess with the movie load routine.
Edit: Updated the patch to be compatible with the sound logging patch. Note to Bisqwit: in the sound logging patch, the byte at $1b0 should also be $f0.
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Bisqwit wrote:
Why's that? To get a savestate to the beginning?
The goal is to get a savestate at the *absolute* beginning, immediately after the system was reset. It seems easiest to do this using a movie recording that automatically resets and saves the state for you. I don't know of any other way to guarantee that a savestate is made immediately after system reset.
Edit: You might be right about only needing a single generic savestate. I haven't tested this, though.
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Converting an .fmv to a .vmv is slighly more complicated than converting in the other direction. Before you convert, you need to make a movie that was recorded from reset. It's easy though, just go to Options->Movie in VirtuaNES, and check the box "Start a record from reset". Open the ROM, record a movie, stop the movie, then exit.
Once you have that, then here's in the C code that will do the conversion:
Give the .fmv file as the first argument, the short movie you created above as the second argument, and the output .vmv filename as the last argument.
I've only tested this method on two movies so far: Genisto's SMB2 run and Sleepz' Zelda run. Genisto's movie plays back fine, but Sleepz' movie desyncs before Link even gets the wooden sword. :(
If you manage to make a .vmv that doesn't desync, you should consider yourself lucky.
Good luck!
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Phil wrote:
It seems all games have the wrong time ex. Double Dragon 3 was 14:05 with the other version and now it's 14:04.
The original Famtasia was doing some weird rounding. I'm pretty confident that my method is correct, though. It's very simple to take the number of frames in a movie and turn that into minutes/seconds.
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
qFox wrote:
but anyways, can i make it compatible with fam?
Bisqwit is totally right about the timing needing to be precise. Check my post here. I found that for some games (like Batman), the difference in emulation causes a desync between movies made in Famtasia and VirtuaNES.
Your emulator could have a "Famtasia compatability" mode, where it would copy the emulation used by Famtasia exactly. It would be tough, but you might be able to rip the emulator core directly out of the Famtasia binary and use it as-is.
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Bisqwit wrote:
This one seems to do nothing but crash if I check the "max speed" checkbox and run the game.
Then I like Phil's idea of having separate Windows and Linux binaries. The Windows version should have the C3 byte at $30010... I'd like to fix it the "right" way, but I don't have a Linux box available to test against.
Edit: The most I can understand from the Morimoto BBS is that people are complaining about the CPU lock-up on Windows. The C3 byte should fix that.
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Well, I am amazed. For the heck of it I converted genisto's smb2 run into a VirtuaNES .vmv file, and it played back perfectly.
This means that a .vmv to .fmv converter is also likely possible.
Boco wrote:
If the VirtuaNES movie started from system reset, though?
Let me try converting one of Lezard's videos to .fmv and we'll see how that goes. I'm really worried that if the movie doesn't start on the *exact* right frame, then the random number generators will start with different values. But we'll see.
Edit: Lezard's Batman movie desyncs after about a minute of playing in Famtasia. I can't be sure, but it appears that at the desync point VirtuaNES emulates some slowdown in the game and Famtasia does not. So this desync appears to be due to a difference in the emulation.
I'll happily post my converter code if people want to play around with it. My guess is that some .vmv files can be successfully converted.
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
VirtuaNES movies contain a savestate where the movie was started from. This would be impossible to duplicate in Famtasia unless Famtasia was hacked into loading a savestate before playing. A Nesticle->VirtuaNES transcoder would probably be more feasible, since Nesticle movies also contain a savestate. I had a look at it, and IIRC the Nesticle header was like 3000 bytes larger than the VirtuaNES header. I dont know enough about the NES hardware to know what those 3000 bytes were for.
That said, I would be very very surprised if the movies could be converted without problems. There would be differences in the emulation which would cause desync (even minor updates to an emulator, like Nesticle 0.42->0.43, cause desync).
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
It seems to me the problem is something like this:
On Windows machines, if the c3 byte is not at $30010, then Famtasia is prone to locking up sometimes (for example, trying to run at 999% ExecSpeed with Occupation=1).
On Linux machines, if the c3 byte *is* at $30010, then Famtasia sometimes becomes mute and doesn't recover (for example, if the CPU is too busy).
After thinking about it for a bit, I think this is a solution:
// disable the routine that polls for a free sound buffer
{ 0x30010, 1, "\xc3" },
// check that the sound buffer is free before attempting to play sound
{ 0x2ff6e, 0x16, "\
\x8b\x0d\x3c\x23\x47\x00\x8b\x04\x8d\x40\x24\x47\x00\xb2\x01\x84\x50\x10\x74\x7f\xeb\x1f" },
Bisqwit, would you mind testing this as seeing if it works for you? Like I said, I couldn't reproduce the problem on my machine.
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Bisqwit wrote:
I mean, I just ran Shatterhand in the emulator, and started a "make clean" in other console, and the emulator went mute. No sound data was generated anymore.
Sound has been behind a *lot* of the observed problems. Famtasia has this nasty habit of locking up until a sound buffer has been freed. Therefore it must be very careful to output the exact number of samples per second required, or else it will either glitch (not enough samples written), or lock up (too many samples written). The C3 byte at $30010 disables the routine that Famtasia uses to wait for a free sound buffer, which will avoid lockups but allow sound glitches. To make matters worse, I think different machines behave different ways when sound glitches happen. For example, I can't reproduce your problem on my machine.
This particular problem might be related to this:
sub eax, edx
jg .positive_interval
mov eax, 1
.positive_interval:
Basically, if the timer misses its target, set sets the next timer 1 millisecond away in an attempt to "catch up". Unfortunately, this can cause problems with the sound (too many samples per second).
Bisqwit wrote:
it also includes my patch which should remove the heaviness-problem of 240 scanlines.
I don't think you've mentioned this before... I'm curious; what is it?
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Bisqwit wrote:
What is the difference between setting DrawFrame=2,Occupation=1 and setting DrawFrame=1,Occupation=2 ?
With DrawFrame=2, Occupation=1, the emulation will run 60 times per second, but it'll only display half of the frames. With DrawFrame=1, Occupation=2, it'll run the emulation 30 times per second, but draw all (30) of the frames.
Edit: I've noticed that to get this version running at high speeds (>400%), I had to increase the Occupation number; increasing DrawFrame didn't help. It seems obvious, but I just thought I'd point it out.
Edit 2: Re-introducing the following hack will allow Famtasia to run at 999% execution speed at Occupation 1:
$30010:c3
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Bisqwit wrote:
blip wrote:
"Occupation" is just the term Famtasia uses when it writes the frameskip value to its .ini file. They're interchangeable.
[Speed]
DrawFrame=2
ExecSpeed=100
Occupation=1
Benchmark=0
AutoFrame=0
FullSpeed=0
So what is this DrawFrame then?
Oops. You're right. "DrawFrame" is the value that's put in the "Refresh" box when you open up the "Speed Configuration" dialog box.
"Occupation" governs how often the timers fire, so it needs to be set to 1 to get 60fps. Which reminds me, did you try finalfighter's fix to the Occupation slider? Did it work for you?
You can get 30 fps by either setting DrawFrame to 2, or Occupation to 2.
