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As far as I know, you have to press X to select new/continue.
Also, I tried your config file and you have space set to OEM8 (this is not the default, and it effectively disables the space key unless you know which key is OEM8 and want to use that instead), and you have the Frame Advance 2 hotkey set to space (which is the default, but you said you unbound space from the hotkeys, and it's not unbound in this config).
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On windows 7 the fastest combination of options I've found for this game is:
switch the game to windowed mode (by starting the game outside of Hourglass and hitting alt-enter if it's in fullscreen mode, then alt-F4 to close it)
enable "Graphics > Surface Memory > System Memory" in Hourglass (note that this option is not saved, if you restart Hourglass)
With this, I can get pretty normal speeds and about 3000 FPS in fast-forward mode (at the expense of missing transparency effects). I don't know why it's so slow otherwise.
As for the space key, I was not able to reproduce that problem on windows 7. It works for skipping the 2nd and 3rd screens of the intro (and nothing else, as far as I can tell). Maybe you could post your hourglass.cfg file somewhere so I could try it with your settings. I am noticing a bug where ctrl, alt, and shift all act like the pause/unpause hotkey, however.
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A pretty high percentage of the videos here (maybe 25% of the ones on the first few pages) are TASes of danmaku shooters. (Not many are as long as the one you just posted, though.)
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rog wrote:
nitsuja wrote:
Try going to Options > Hotkey Settings and setting a hotkey for "Read-only mode". Then you can press it when the game window is active to toggle read-only. That should always work even when emulation is paused.
It doesn't.
But the hotkey works when emulation isn't paused? Does the window title change when you press it or not?
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rog wrote:
Can't turn on read only while a game is paused, in 291 =x
Try going to Options > Hotkey Settings and setting a hotkey for "Read-only mode". Then you can press it when the game window is active to toggle read-only. That should always work even when emulation is paused.
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Snes9x 1.52 has some Lua support but many things are disabled at the moment, including gdscreenshot. I think if you try either 1.51 or 1.43 you'll find that gdscreenshot actually works there.
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I don't think 267 had my changes. Try 3.0-291. Note that builds I create might run slower than builds someone else makes of the same revision, and I don't have a 64-bit version.
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Maybe it's fixed (as of 3.0-276)? I saw it before too, but I can't get the byte 0x1000 bug to happen anymore, nor do I see the error message appear (I think it was appearing because it was correctly detecting the junk at 0x1000 as a potential source of desync). It might have been caused by memory corruption in unrelated savestate code (which I hopefully fixed). But let me know if you find any steps that still make it happen.
By the way, I really don't recommend anyone to turn off panic handlers. If you do turn them off, you should be extra careful and periodically check your movie from the beginning for desyncs (a little more than usual, I mean), because there won't be any warning if something goes wrong.
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Someone made a full TAS of this game (in Hourglass), and it uses some of these tricks. You can watch part 2 here (that's probably the most entertaining part of it, but follow the links to the others parts if you want to see the whole thing).
drakorg23 wrote:
by the way, i re-recorded this game in windows 7 and makes the crash game with visual garbage, how can i fix that, because i cant make a good TAS
I still have some fixes to do for windows 7 savestate reliability, you might be able to work around it by forcing system memory surfaces in the graphics menu (note that it resets every time Hourglass starts) and disabling multithreading but I'm not sure yet.
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Forgot to comment when I voted Yes before... This is really impressive. I know the old movie was quite old, but it's not like I didn't try to do the skips that you succeeded at here. The new tricks were performed so efficiently that it's actually a bit hard to notice them (almost as if parts of the game simply decided to disappear when you reached them, not through any extra action that could be pointed out as a difference).
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rog wrote:
edit: actually it's not fixed, just got it in 235.
What's the actual error message (and are you seeing it even when loading saves that were created in 235)? If it's the same one I mentioned, it might be your fault for loading savestates incorrectly. Here is an example of what I mean (these steps should cause the error message if you follow them):
start or continue recording a movie
save state 1
run the game for a little while, pressing some buttons in the game
save state 2
load state 1 (not in read-only mode. still recording.)
run the game for a little while again but this time don't press the same buttons
also, run the game a bit longer than you did last time
switch to read-only mode
load state 2 <— brings up error message because you're not supposed to do it
This is a sequence of events you should avoid doing while actually TASing. This goes for other re-recording emulators as well. The warning that pops up is to make sure you don't accidentally do it without realizing it.
EDIT: I just noticed your posts in the other thread which give more details. I think there's an actual bug happening, though it could be several different things (for example, my error check code might be detecting the result of a bug in the DTM saving or loading code). In any case, I think the steps I posted above of "what not to do" could be informative for someone, even if that's not what you're doing in this case.
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rog wrote:
it gives an error every time you load a state (turn off panic handlers)
What error are you getting, by the way, and in which game? I'm not seeing this in WW, at least when loading savestates made in the same version.
If you're seeing an error that says "Warning: You loaded a save whose movie mismatches", don't ignore that, it means you loaded a savestate incorrectly and it's trying to warn you about the desync that's going to cause if you don't fix it.
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Note that I haven't actually seen read-only mode work yet in Dolphin. Maybe it was working before or would be working if I were to try using it in a certain way, but as far as I can tell it's totally broken. (I'll probably try fixing it soon if nobody else does.) Also, if I try to playback a movie that has Wii input, it just crashes (in the PlayWiimote function), do I need to use some specific settings to avoid that and/or is anyone else getting that problem?
CoolKirby wrote:
What does he mean by "advances 1 frame each time instead of waiting for further unpause commands"?
It means the frame advance hotkey now makes the emulator advance each time you press it (as opposed to before where it didn't actually advance any frames until you also press the pause/unpause hotkey, which was weird and unlike other emulators).
I've never seen frame advance skip frames before, does this only happen in certain games? I did see one time where I paused the game and the frame count in the title bar didn't update, so when I hit frame advance the number increased by more than 1, but only because the number that was displayed was wrong, not because it really skipped any frames.
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What if the restriction is applied that each battle entered must be finished as quickly as possible? In other words, you are not allowed to spend extra time in a battle even if doing so speeds up a later battle. (Outside of battles, you can do whatever makes the overall completion time shorter.)
I think that would result in a run that either doesn't use the Calculator, or only uses him late in the game. I realize that this would rule out all sorts of additional strategies (including the one that was just posted above this), but the resulting lack of grinding would probably be a plus (entertainment-wise), and I'm pretty sure a TAS would be able to do extraordinary things even within those limitations (especially if good luck manipulation is possible).
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ALAKTORN wrote:
where can I find an older version of Hourglass…? I’ve deleted mine when I downloaded r81
They're all still on the downloads list.
ALAKTORN wrote:
I’ve tried downloading a clean RG 1.05 but that didn’t help either
I'm noticing some weird problems with it now. It runs fine from the directory I normally work from, but if I move Hourglass to a different directory, RotateGear freezes on startup. I'll try debugging it... hopefully it's related to the problem you're having.
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ALAKTORN wrote:
just downloaded latest version (r81) and tried running Rotate Gear, but it won’t understand input… one of the early versions of Hourglass worked with it
RotateGear (rg_105) still works fine for me. I even tried on a Windows 7 x64 system with r81 and it worked. Make sure you're hitting Record and not Play, and make sure the "Paused" box isn't checked in Hourglass after you press some buttons. Try waiting until it says "Action Love!", then press Z or X.
Billy Johnson wrote:
I've been trying to use Hourglass to record a movie of the game Temporal and while Hourglass basically works, I can't get it to record the game's audio.
This game indeed doesn't work yet in Hourglass, and I think it has bigger problems than just the audio (such as desync issues). Allegro games are a little difficult to support properly, but I think it's definitely possible to do it, especially because the Allegro engine is completely open-source and there are open-source games written with it, so it shouldn't be as much of a guessing game as usual.
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xnamkcor wrote:
Wouldn't 1HP prevent boost jumping? That turns it from a TAS into just a no-hit challenge.
It would simply be one more thing you wouldn't be able to do. I don't see how that would prevent it from being a TAS any more than not being able to kill bosses as quickly would. And the more differences the better, I think. (Should anyone actually want to make it.)
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zaphod77 wrote:
I believe the bubbler challenge would go as follows.
If you (or whoever) is going to do something so unlikely to get accepted here, you might as well break one more rule to make the challenge more extreme and simplify the rules: Start the game with a level 3 Nemesis and 1 max HP, and never switch weapons (and, uh, level it up immediately in the Last Cave and Hell, if you get that far). (example) (save file)
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Ilari wrote:
Due to nature of .m64 format, what wasn't validated here is correctness of lag on Mupen64.
However, we can time how long the console took to play the movie, and compare with the time Mupen64 thinks it took to play it, to (sort of) set an upper bound on how different the lag might be. Across the entire 1:39:02 TAS, it looks like the console took about 63 seconds longer than the emulator did, which makes the emulator's average timing 98.95% accurate in this case, if I did that right, although maybe most of the inaccuracy is concentrated in the few areas of the game that are prone to lagging. It's probably possible to compare (in more detail) the video produced by the emulator with the video produced by the console to determine which parts in particular took longer on console (for example, by playing them simultaneously, and noting at which points it's necessary to briefly pause the video from the emulator in order for them to visually sync up).
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xnamkcor wrote:
This was a good run, but the subtitles seem to be very shy. They disappear quickly. It's not like the person is pressed for time. There is usually a whole minute, or more, between lines, but the lines seem in a hurry to go away, as if the subtitler has some perverse desire to teach us to learn to speed-read.
The subtitles originally gave you longer to read them. They were usually 4 full seconds per sentence (which I have no trouble reading despite being a fairly slow reader), or 3 to 3.5 seconds if the sentence was very short, or 5 to 6 seconds if the sentence was long or there was a lot of "free time" after it. You can look at the subtitles on the YouTube encode if you want to see what they were like before. (Certain subtitles in high-action areas might be slightly too fast due to so many being crammed in there, but I think most of them are readable.)
But, it looks like they got chopped up (for the published MKVs) into shorter lines which are often onscreen for a very short amount of time. I have a little trouble reading them now, too. The problem is that reading time doesn't divide evenly. For example, it might take 4 seconds to read a sentence, but 3 seconds to read 1/2 of that sentence, so splitting it into 2 parts makes each part too hard to read in time unless extra total time is allocated.
I wasn't going to complain about the subtitle editing, because it probably took a lot of effort to go through all of them and make so many individual edits and timing adjustments, and it was well-done for the most part, and finding a significant amount of extra time to move subtitles into would have been impossible in many cases. But now that I am basically complaining anyway, I'll add that a few of the subtitles also had the wording changed enough to remove the humor they originally had and/or make the resulting comment say something weird. Very few, though. Also, certain subtitles were originally timed to match up with and replace the contents of an in-game dialog box or were timed to avoid overlapping with dialog boxes, but now that they were (understandably) moved away to the top of the screen, those subtitles lost their reason for having the timing they do, and simply appear to go away too fast. Again, though, not very many of them were like that.
zaphod77 wrote:
The password for the hideout is supposed to be the games title, written backwards. The translators missed that fact, and thus we have "Litagano Motscoud" instead of "yrotS evaC"
Something else I remember being mostly untranslated was the "Nikumaru Counter" (which became the "290 Counter" in official versions, although admittedly they seem equally meaningless to me). Another thing that could be considered a flaw with the translation patch is that it locks the font to Courier New (unless you hex edit the config file), which probably isn't the best font to fit in with the graphical style of the game. I didn't bring these up earlier because having flaws doesn't necessarily make a translation unofficial. An official translation could easily have had the same (or worse) flaws.
EDIT:
I know this is no King's Bounty, but shouldn't there be some sort of "manipulates luck" tag assigned?
Also, maybe this has already been mentioned on some other movies and isn't something we should try to work around, but I was unable to play the regular published MKV in SMPlayer due to this bug, until I found a late enough SVN build to replace MPlayer with. (I would normally have switched to VLC though, and incidentally I prefer both MPC and VLC over SMPlayer.)
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I think I like this one more than my initial suggestion:
The art is nicer and represents the game better, and it's a lot easier to see the main character and what's going on in the scene. (It doesn't really get across how much destruction is in the TAS, but there's no way to convey everything in a single screenshot.)
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Great. It's too bad this game lags so much (at least in this emulator), which cuts down on the amount of playaround you can do in boss fights, but it looks like you did as much as you could there. And this is a LOT faster overall.
(By the way, you don't say which version of Snes9x you used, but it synced in Snes9x 1.43 v16 for me.)
The art is nicer and represents the game better, and it's a lot easier to see the main character and what's going on in the scene. (It doesn't really get across how much destruction is in the TAS, but there's no way to convey everything in a single screenshot.)
I put some other screenshots 