Posted: 7/18/2011 4:55 PM
Post subject: Running emulators in Hourglass
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moozooh
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So I've been beta-testing for a new Demul release, but this proves to be a really annoying task because savestates don't work, and won't work for a while longer. I've had the idea of running Demul in Hourglass so that I could save the state of the entire emulator disregarding problems with actual emulation inaccuracy. However, it doesn't work. Quite simply I can't even make Demul run a ROM if it's wrapped in Hourglass: the File menu does not open the file choice dialog. Seeing as Hourglass has a whole lot of settings that may or may not affect this behavior, could any of you at least point me to those that may affect it? I'm on Win 7, my Hourglass is from 17th of June, and the Demul 0.5.7 beta I'm trying is a private WIP for testing purposes, so I can mail it to Nitsuja, or you could use another recent release like this one (it's from February, not much has changed since).
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Posted: 7/18/2011 5:28 PM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I seem to recall reading that Hourglass doesn't handle any OS widgets properly right now, which would presumably include the "open ROM" dialog. Perhaps you could specify the ROM to use on the commandline?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 7/18/2011 6:02 PM
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moozooh
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That might work in theory, but how do I pass commandline to the application with Hourglass?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Posted: 7/18/2011 6:22 PM
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Warepire
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You can't do that yet, but the feature is on the way and should be available in the future (most likely soon if I understood it right)
Posted: 7/18/2011 6:24 PM
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moozooh
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Ah, so my only option for now is waiting, is that correct?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Posted: 7/18/2011 8:12 PM
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Warepire
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Depends on if you're a good programmer and can add the feature yourself. I believe Lex or nitsuja is already working on adding it to Hourglass officially.
Posted: 7/18/2011 8:38 PM
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moozooh
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If I were a good programmer I would have done it already, but unfortunately I'm not a programmer at all. :)
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Posted: 7/18/2011 9:41 PM
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Patashu
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Command line arguments are being worked on ATM
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 7/18/2011 9:45 PM
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Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I was the one who was going to work on it, but since I'm running VS2010 (instead of VS2008) and my Hourglass builds don't work like Nitsuja's, I don't think I'll be able to do it, even if I could do the code modifications necessary to implement command line arguments. For an emulator to work in Hourglass nicely (once command line arguments are implemented), it should support command line arguments like SSNES does. Mupen might work too which could allow us to once-and-for-all record Yoshi's Story!
Posted: 7/24/2011 3:41 AM
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nitsuja
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Computer TASer of 2011 TAS of 2011 First edition TAS of 2011 Computer TAS of 2011 Sega TAS of 2010 Sega TAS of 2008 Sega TAS of 2007 Glitchy TAS of 2007
By the way, the latest version supports commandline options now, so I tested this out on an emulator I had handy that I knew supported starting a game via commandline: Gens (svn296). It lagged occasionally, but I was able to record a movie and use savestates and frame advance, even though from Gens' point of view I didn't use any movie or savestate features. The movie played without desync issues and AVI recording also worked. I don't know how many other emulators this will work in already, but there might be a few.
Posted: 7/24/2011 6:33 AM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
So clearly the next step is to throw in a few virtualization layers. How meta can programs get?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 7/24/2011 11:39 AM
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Patashu
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Derakon wrote:
So clearly the next step is to throw in a few virtualization layers. How meta can programs get?
Hourglass isn't really a virtualization layer, it's more of a hypervisor (is that right?)
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 7/24/2011 2:22 PM
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moozooh
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Hmm, either r63 doesn't pass the arguments as it should, or Demul doesn't receive them as it should. So, for instance, if I run it from commandline (without Hourglass) as "demul.exe -run=cave3rd -rom=mushisam", it immediately starts running Mushihimesama. When I try passing "-run=cave3rd -rom=mushisam" via the designated field, it still just starts Demul's UI, with its menu bar available (i. e., the emulator is just idle, not busy loading anything) but not working. The frame counter doesn't increment, and frame advance doesn't work. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Posted: 7/24/2011 6:01 PM
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nitsuja
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1301)
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Computer TASer of 2011 TAS of 2011 First edition TAS of 2011 Computer TAS of 2011 Sega TAS of 2010 Sega TAS of 2008 Sega TAS of 2007 Glitchy TAS of 2007
Try r64. I don't know if Demul in particular works yet, but there was a bug with commandline arguments in r63. (It was passing the commandline arguments directly, but many Windows programs that parse arguments assume that the path to the current executable has been inserted as the first argument.)
Posted: 7/24/2011 7:20 PM
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moozooh
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Still doesn't work, but there is some progress. I'll send you a pm.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.