Posted: 3/10/2015 12:53 PM
Post subject: TASing on MESS?
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Organics
He/Him
Joined: 3/10/2015
Posts: 2
Hey hey. I'm interested in starting a TAS run of a few games for the Philips CD-I. It's a notoriously bad system, and emulators are few and far between, but MESS seems to work and supports at least one of the games I want to try. I'm aware that MESS has a built-in system to record and playback inputs (to/from a *.inp file), but I can't find any way to edit the file to optimise the run. Does anyone know if its' possible to do so? Or, I might be coming about this all from the wrong angle, I have no idea. Any pointers would be great. :)
Posted: 3/10/2015 2:34 PM
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Dimon12321
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Active player (479)
Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 1125
Location: Ukraine
This topic was raised several times already! By the way, wanting 3DO, Atari Jaguar, Mobile Java games emulator and so on :-) As I understood, it seems that no-one has free time on making rerecording tools because the game consoles we want are not enough popular or have not enough interesting games for TASing. I expect I'm wrong though there can be some problems with emulating games for N console, for example, for Sega Saturn, which is a good reason for not making the rerecording tools (who wants to make em if it doesn't work well).
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Posted: 3/10/2015 3:06 PM
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AntyMew
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Joined: 10/22/2014
Posts: 425
You could hex edit the file if you're dedicated enough, but otherwise you'd have to pray for rerecording to be implimented GLHF and welcome to TASVideos :D
Just a Mew! 〜 It/She ΘΔ 〜 ███████
Posted: 3/10/2015 4:03 PM
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feos
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Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11264
Location: RU
NES TAS of 2011
Rerecording was only tried to be added to mame, but not mess. And with both of these the main problem is that whoever was coding the modules per system was not consistent about savestates, or didn't even add support for them, so on systems where savestates work, they may not be deterministic, but no one knows for sure.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Posted: 3/10/2015 4:19 PM
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Joined: 3/10/2015
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Thanks all. Sorry, I did look around before asking and found some things about MAME but not MESS, and most of that was outdated anyway. Figured it was worth asking. I haven't heard of re-recording before. That certainly sounds like a useful feature, but I don't think it'd be 100% required. It'd just take a really freaking long time to build the later parts of the run without it. Hex editing has crossed my mind but the files aren't in a friendly format at all. I guess I'll poke around the source code some more to see if I can learn more about their format and do it that way then.