The most recent BizHawk release,
1.13.2, is compatible with 32-bit Windows XP and features the most up-to-date build of GLideN64 video plugin. It has been explicitly fixed to work on this OS. The only thing that may prevent using it is insufficient video card that only supports OpenGL 3.0 and older.
Due to various problems, like version of GLideN64 in BizHawk being too old, or BizHawk 2.0+ being incompatible with older systems, it was hard to use this plugin for N64 TASes and expect perfectly looking video. We are doing all we can to improve this situation.
Using GLideN64 is important, because it makes it the easiest to create perfectly bug-free, fully anti-aliased, UltraHD encodes of N64 TASes. We have publishers with enough dedication to make such encodes and invest as much time and effort as this requires. The result is better than any emulator and video plugin can afford. It is better than what you see if you just replay an N64 movie in an emulator.
And there is one thing that makes this task enormously hard: use of Jabo video plugin in a TAS.
Once it was one of the best N64 plugin for a lot of games. These times passed long ago. Once it allowed to create encodes that look the best, compared to other plugins. This is not true anymore. GLideN64 tops Jabo in a huge list of games and nuances. And where it yet doesn't, it will.
If one wants to make a perfectly bug-free, fully anti-aliased, UltraHD encode of a TAS that uses Jabo, they must go through the nine circles of hell and waste several months on it. These posts tell in full details why this is so:
Post #453166 (this post talks about another plugin, but the resync process is identical)
Post #461947
Post #463184
Post #470461
So as a staff decision, we announce:
None of the future TAS submissions after 2018-06-09 using Jabo will have any fixes or enhancements for a publication encode. Internal resolution will remain 1x. No anti-aliasing or filtering will be applied. No emulation bugs will be fixed. Such TASes will be published leaving all the fundamental Jabo problems intact. Youtube encodes will be upscaled to our usual resolution right from 240p that the footage was dumped at.
On the other hand, TASes using GLideN64 will get as many bug fixes and enhancements as a publisher handling them is able to pull off.
If for whatever reason you are technically unable to use GLideN64, a run made with Glide64mk2 is still way easier to resync on GLideN64 than the one made with Jabo. And this will be attempted. Technically practicable enhancements and fixes will be applied whenever they can be. This just won't be top priority.
Different versions of GLideN64 are easy to sync between each other, so if something is made on an older version, it's trivial to swap it with the newest version, occasionally fix minimal desyncs if they happen, and get significantly better emulated video.
If the latest version of GLideN64 still has some bug not fixed, we can report this bug to the developers, who are currently very active (
huge respect for that, gonetz!), and its very probable that this bug is fixed in due time.
People who care and want the games they TAS to be properly emulated, are greatly encouraged to help GLideN64 developers by testing and reporting bugs!
If you want to experiment with different versions of GLideN64 patched for BizHawk, here's the repository for our fork:
https://github.com/TASVideos/GLideN64/releases
It contains builds compatible with 32-bit Windows XP, as well as builds that require 64-bit Windows 7 or newer. There's no difference between them in features.
