Post subject: Rerecording for MSX?
Joined: 11/7/2006
Posts: 7
After playing this old beast for few days I came to think if there's any MSX/MSX2 emulator with rerecording function available? Platform itself consists interesting games, many of them have been licensed to other consoles etc too, but there's still some other games, with other differences than somewhat "smoother" graphics.
Post subject: Re: Rerecording for MSX?
Active player, Editor (296)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7468
Location: Arzareth
Because MSX is actually a computer, doesn't TASing on MSX actually involve similar rules to that on DOSBOX. That said, there would probably be some interest towards C64 TASing ― as another topic.
sgrunt
He/Him
Emulator Coder
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
Upon seeing this thread, I went to investigate the SVN version of OpenMSX (which will become the as-yet-unreleased version 0.8.0). A basic form of rerecording appears to be present in the form of the "replay" command and its subcommands (recording from reset would be done by setting auto_enable_reverse and restarting the emulator), and you can easily implement frame advance in the emulator by binding a key to "set pause off; after frame \"set pause on\"". About the only thing I can't see that it does right now is store the author or a rerecord count in the replay file format. I'd be interested in seeing if other people can get the emulator to behave in a fashion suitable for rerecording; if so we may yet be able to get MSX rerecording. One other note: a wide variety of MSX system BIOSes appear to exist. We already have a rule in place regarding BIOSes, so finding something that works for a given game should not be too troublesome (also there is C-BIOS, which may or may not work reliably for most games).
Emulator Coder, Player (31)
Joined: 4/24/2010
Posts: 73
Location: California
Although C-BIOS is a good alternative it's not yet perfect. Also C-bios is standard 50Hz which will slow down speedruns too. I recommend using a 'Panasonic FS-A1GT' configuration, this allows you to run most games with all the features included (if available) like FM-PAC (FM synthesis) and Midi out. Also new versions of C-BIOS will be released in the (near?) future and these will impact replay. So therefore I would recommend picking the configuration above.
MSX Game specialist / openMSX team member
Post subject: Recommended MSX models
mth
Joined: 10/31/2010
Posts: 5
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
C-BIOS is still in development, so future C-BIOS versions are likely to have a slightly different timing from the current version. So for recording TAS's, I would recommend against using the C-BIOS machines. Also the Panasonic FS-A1GT is not an ideal choice, since openMSX does not perfectly emulate the refresh timing of this machine yet. We hope this will be improved in the future, but these small changes could break your recordings. The same applies to the other turbo R model, the FS-A1ST. A good choice for playing Japanese games is the Panasonic FS-A1WSX, which NitroGenesis used for the Rambo TAS. For European games, the Philips NMS 8250 would be a good choice.
openMSX developer