Post subject: Good news for TG-16 fans
Joined: 2/23/2008
Posts: 21
Howdy... I recently was inspired by the first PSX video here to write to the developer of Magic Engine and ask him how he's doing with the record function on his emulator. I told him a bit about the TAS community and what TASing is about, and basically asked him if he'd make the recording function happen and if he could make it "TAS-friendly". He actually wrote back and said he would :o He seemed to like the little bit I linked him to on this site and I'm hoping that the next version will have a nice set of recording features that will TASing easy for TG-16. PS: I know at least one other emu has working recording, and I hope that works out, but I really like MagicEngine (enough that I paid for it). Not sure which is better in terms of timing and compatibility, but I hope people will support it if the author actually implements a feature request like this :D PPS: I don't want the guy to get mad at me, he didn't make any guarantees or promise a time or anything like that. So I hope nothing gets back to him like... "SOME DOOD SAID U WERE MAKING RECORDING WHAIR IS IT????". You can check for updates here: http://www.magicengine.com/uk_index.php?sessid=Kf4J_oVWBpOYRURxB9Z3EwPzgNhw
Joined: 8/27/2006
Posts: 883
I doubt that It will get accepted, the fact that you need to pay for it is pretty bad. That means only the taser that want to pay will be able to TAS, and even worse, we won't be able to watch the movies because we didn't pay for it.
Experienced player (961)
Joined: 12/3/2008
Posts: 940
Location: Castle Keep
Theres a limited free edition, what it would need i guess is to fully unlock movie replay in that version
Magic Engine wrote:
The demo is limited in time, everything is fully fonctionnal, but after 5 minutes the game you are playing will be frozen. You can reset it to start again or you can load another game, but you can not play to a game more than 5 minutes. However there's a little trick. If you save a game, reloading it will reset the time limit, so if every 4-minute or so you save the game and reload it immediately, you will be able to play to the same game for more than 5 minutes.
Joined: 2/23/2008
Posts: 21
yeah, I guess that's a good point :/ Still, it's a lot of work, I don't mind someone wanting to get paid for it. I guess we're lucky that the vast majority do it for free. One thing though, the watchers can see the movie without paying for it, by downloading the the AVI/MKV instead. So it's not entirely hopeless.
Experienced player (961)
Joined: 12/3/2008
Posts: 940
Location: Castle Keep
CreeDo wrote:
One thing though, the watchers can see the movie without paying for it, by downloading the the AVI/MKV instead. So it's not entirely hopeless.
In practical case that would mean it doesnt work rather, i dont think an emu where only avi/mkv can be published (viewed by any) will be allowed... Now, putting full (not 5min) movie replay (can be independant from recording and play...) as a free feature in free version might be enought for validate, and for the taser it mean if he dont pay, he must make a savestate within a 5 min game time frame and reload often, witch would always happen anyway for tasing... :/ All is depending of the author, but the lack of open source is probably a bad thing, and the fact its not free also is a trouble by itself[/url]
Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685
It's worth mentioning that one of the criteria for an emulator to be acceptable for use here is that it be open source, which Magic Engine is not. You could still make movies with it if you so desired, but they would not be accepted for publication. Not sure how much that matters to you.
Kirby said so, so it must be true. ( >'.')>
mz
Emulator Coder, Player (79)
Joined: 10/26/2007
Posts: 693
Bisqwit has said many times he's interested in accepting pSX, which is not open source. This is what the rules say:
The emulator must be freely available via Internet without subscriptions or fees. It should be available for Windows. It should be available for Linux. It should be available for Mac OSX. It should be customizable (source code included). Sometimes we let some of those requirements slip, but doing so will increase the work our encoders and judges have to do, so it is preferred that those rules are met.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685
That'll teach me to pay attention.
Kirby said so, so it must be true. ( >'.')>
Joined: 10/3/2005
Posts: 1332
No one has mentioned Hu-Go. It's free, open, ported to Linux, and according to Zophar is second only to Magic Engine. Development has been stagnant for years, apparently, so someone from inside our community would have to pick it up, assuming any devs here care about TG-16 enough to do that.
Joined: 2/23/2008
Posts: 21
It's looking grim for PCE fans T_T I never even noticed that rule about the emu needing to be free, AND have ports on mac, linux, etc. I kind of felt like now that we saw one PSX speedrun, I would be seeing a bunch more. Then again it hasn't been that long since we saw it. On the other hand, as far as I know the ability has been there for a while. So maybe it's unrealistic for me to expect much in the way of future PSX runs eh? And if people aren't bothering to speedrun PSX games, which has more emu support and 10 million popular games we'd like to see... what are the odds anyone will fool with TG16? :(
Player (217)
Joined: 2/12/2006
Posts: 373
Location: Oregon
Actually, people have been working on PSX TASes recently. Runs for Mega Man X4,X5, and X6 are being worked on. Arukado recently finished a TAS of Resident Evil 3. Metal Gear Solid is currently being worked on. A TAS of SOTN using Richter has been done. There may be some other TASes I'm forgetting. So although only Castlevania: SOTN has been submitted so far, there probably will be several PSX TASes showing up in the queue at some point once people are finished and confident in the quality of their runs (several of the attempts so far have been test runs).
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 8/12/2007
Posts: 102
I was working on Mednafen, but I'm a novice programmer and I think it's beyond my ability. This is my movie.cpp: http://pastebin.com/f7e02bb40 Mednafen starts movies from a savestate, embeds loaded savestates into the movie file and loads them during playback, and also saves a state to the end of a movie file. That movie.cpp records and plays back from power-on, and doesn't embed any savestates into the movie file. I also made it so that Mednafen doesn't compress movie files. I wanted to avoid a lot of filestream opening/closing stuff by keeping the movie in a buffer, but I can't get MDFNMOV_AddJoy to play from or record to a buffer properly.
Experienced player (961)
Joined: 12/3/2008
Posts: 940
Location: Castle Keep
*trying to make some lame humor*
zidanax wrote:
A TAS of SOTN using Richter has been done.
"PLAY HARD!PLAY HARD!"
Joined: 2/23/2008
Posts: 21
That's encouraging about the PSX stuff at least. I know I can search by system among published movies, but Is there a way to search for just unpublished PSX movies?
adelikat
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3576)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
paul_t wrote:
I was working on Mednafen, but I'm a novice programmer and I think it's beyond my ability. This is my movie.cpp: http://pastebin.com/f7e02bb40 Mednafen starts movies from a savestate, embeds loaded savestates into the movie file and loads them during playback, and also saves a state to the end of a movie file. That movie.cpp records and plays back from power-on, and doesn't embed any savestates into the movie file. I also made it so that Mednafen doesn't compress movie files. I wanted to avoid a lot of filestream opening/closing stuff by keeping the movie in a buffer, but I can't get MDFNMOV_AddJoy to play from or record to a buffer properly.
I am very glad to see someone attempting to add rerecording to mednafen. This emulator emulates 4 platforms that are currently untasable. I was planning to attempt this myself but have had so little time (and so many emulators).
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Editor, Expert player (2080)
Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 3284
CreeDo wrote:
That's encouraging about the PSX stuff at least. I know I can search by system among published movies, but Is there a way to search for just unpublished PSX movies?
Just look around the PSX game forum. :P If you mean submissions, well just search it manually for now.
fruitbane
He/Him
Joined: 3/28/2005
Posts: 216
Here's a section of a post I made to another forum topic here. I'm pasting it here because it's related to this discussion. "Magic Engine is the prettiest TG-16 emulator, but in addition to being for-pay, it's also not that great in the compatibility department. Many CD games have volume problems and sound quality issues. Mednafen is one of the hardest to use for newbies (no GUI) but also the most accurate at emulation. Ootake is in-between Magic Engine and Mednafen in that it has more accurate emulation than ME and is easier to use than Mednafen, but isn't as slick in appearance as ME. " Both Mednafen and Ootake have source available. Comments from others have indicated Ootake might be difficult to work with, but I know the author is actively developing it and might be convinced to implement TASing features for us if we can convince him they are valuable. The same, then, could possibly also be said for Mednafen, and Mednafen supports other systems as well, so there could be an element of killing many birds with a single stone.
adelikat
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3576)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Moved topic to the TG-16 forum.
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects