Topic by adelikat

Posted: 5/11/2009 12:51 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3596)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee

Or completely bypass the need for understanding commandline by using a frontend ;) http://code.google.com/p/mednafen-rr/wiki/MakingTAS

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 5/11/2009 2:41 PM

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ThMrksman

Joined: 8/3/2008
Posts: 157
Location: The Land Down Under

moozooh wrote:

Find a file named "cmd.exe" located in WINDOWS/System32 folder, and copy it to Mednafen folder. Double-click the cmd file, type "mednafen" in the command prompt and press enter. You should see something useful. Alternatively, press Start -> Run -> type "cmd" and press enter, then navigate to the mednafen folder using "cd" command (the disadvantage is that you must do that every time).

I found the cmd.exe file and copied into the folder with mednafen. the cmd.exe opened up fine, i typed mednafen into the command prompt . . and nothing happened. It looked like this after i had pressed enter:

Microsoft Window [Version 6.0.6001]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\Peter\Documents\mednafenrr>mednafen

C:\Users\Peter\Documents\mednafenrr>

Just started another line as if nothing happened . . and adelikat, i tried using the frontend and even failed at that, I went File>Loading Files . . then chose the .lnx file i wanted to run, and (you guessed it) nothing happened. Thanks for your help so far, and any further help is greatly appreciated. Oh, also I'm using windows vista . .

Posted: 5/11/2009 2:43 PM

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moozooh

Senior Moderator

Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5770
Location: Away

ThMrksman wrote:

the cmd.exe opened up fine, i typed mednafen into the command prompt . . and nothing happened.

I probably got the filename wrong. What you should type there is the filename of the file you want to execute. Or, better yet, use frontend like adelikat suggested.

Warp wrote:

Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.

Posted: 5/11/2009 2:46 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3596)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee

You need to read the first post dude. The windows version of mednafen rerecording only runs PCE and NES games. The other platforms have not been successfully ported over (yet).

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 5/11/2009 3:07 PM

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ThMrksman

Joined: 8/3/2008
Posts: 157
Location: The Land Down Under

adelikat wrote:

You need to read the first post dude. The windows version of mednafen rerecording only runs PCE and NES games. The other platforms have not been successfully ported over (yet).

*reads first post again* Oh. My apologies.

Posted: 5/18/2009 4:31 PM

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paul_t

Emulator Coder, Former player

Joined: 8/12/2007
Posts: 102

This version should prevent undesired resets as reported by FuzZerd. http://mednafen-rr.googlecode.com/files/mednafen-rerecording-138.zip

Posted: 8/3/2009 12:17 AM

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paul_t

Emulator Coder, Former player

Joined: 8/12/2007
Posts: 102

There is now a sync and movie-format compatible alternative to Mednafen for Windows users who want to TAS PC Engine and variants. See this post and http://code.google.com/p/pcejin/

Posted: 12/5/2009 10:46 AM

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klmz

Editor, Emulator Coder, Expert player (2105)

Joined: 5/22/2007
Posts: 1134
Location: Glitchvania

I wonder if Mednafen-rr will have a full-featured GUI front-end.

<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do

Posted: 12/5/2009 12:40 PM

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moozooh

Senior Moderator

Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5770
Location: Away

Isn't PCEjin basically Mednafen with a GUI?

Warp wrote:

Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.

Posted: 12/5/2009 12:45 PM

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arukAdo

Experienced player (954)

Joined: 12/3/2008
Posts: 936
Location: Castle Keep

Yeah essentially, with a native win32 interface Alltought pcejin will not allow you to tas the numerous other systems from mednafen (gg,nes,lynx,ngp ect...) Note that anyway the library of thoses systems is totaly bs and not worth tasing except some few handy titles

Tasvideos.org personal page

Posted: 12/5/2009 10:51 PM

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FuzZerd

Player (51)

Joined: 4/10/2009
Posts: 226

also pcejin crashes repeatedly when tasing (at least for me)

Posted: 12/14/2009 2:21 AM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3596)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee

FuzZerd wrote:

also pcejin crashes repeatedly when tasing (at least for me)

Could you be more specific? I'm currently fixing up some stuff for PCEjin and I'd like to be able to fix crash bugs. However, it has never crashed for me. If you can find a specific set of actions that can reliably make it crash, let me know.

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 12/14/2009 4:51 AM

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FuzZerd

Player (51)

Joined: 4/10/2009
Posts: 226

it crashes every time I save and then load a save state I swear it used to only crash about ever 15-50 times I loaded a savestate when I first noticed it. and don't recall it happening when I first used pcejin. but I just tested it and it happen'd every time. ok thats wierd I just tested it again and it was working fine for awhile, then it crashed when I saved. edit: it just crashed when I hit frame advance. seems its a "access violation exception"

Posted: 3/4/2012 5:05 AM

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Dacicus

Editor, Player (67)

Joined: 6/22/2005
Posts: 1041

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderswan wrote:

The WonderSwan are playable both vertically and horizontally

Are there any plans for a hotkey or some other way to rotate the screen and mimic this behavior for games that require it? EDIT: I checked the official Mednafen docs, and this function actually is supported. The default key combo in the rr branch appears to be shift + j.

Current Projects: TAS: Wizards & Warriors III.

Posted: 5/5/2012 4:21 AM

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WhisperIIII

Joined: 5/5/2012
Posts: 2

From what I understand, the current version of Mednafen supports WonderSwan TASing on a Windows system? At least according to adelikat's last post regarding the issue. I'm using the front loader and everything works like a dream, except for actual recording. I can run any WonderSwan game just fine, configuring hotkeys and my inputs was no problem, nor is loading from an existing savestate (not that I'd use this option to begin a recording, but I tested it just for clarity's sake). However, trying to initiate a recording while a ROM is running doesn't register at all, and playback just resets the console and tells me playback has stopped. Checking off the 'record movie' box before Mednafen starts up results in a 'recording' and "recording has started" text showing up as the ROM boots, but the ROM is frozen at the first frame. I can even save and load a state from this frame. This is basically the only thing about the emulator that causes any trouble at all, and for the life of me I can't figure out what's causing it to freeze this way. It's purely the ROM itself that freezes, too. The emulator runs just fine as this is happening. It's not causing anything to crash. EDIT: Nevermind, I figured it out. Good lord I'm dense.

Posted: 3/16/2013 7:51 AM

Post subject: Lynx corrupted saves?

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dwangoAC

Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (898)

Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1007

Greetings, I have put some considerable time into trying to get Lynx to behave but my results so far have been a complete failure. Can someone, anyone, please look at these movie files and tell me what the heck is going on? Here's what I know after attempting three completely separate TASing attempts: - Joust is emulated perfectly, as far as I know. - All of the rerecording controls themselves appear to work correctly - frame advance, savestates, everything. - Attempting to play back any of the files results in what appears to be a desync or just flat out randomness, I can't quite figure out exactly what's going wrong but I know it's not right. :) - The header information seems to be missing entirely from most of the movie attempts in the archive I created. - I've tried doing things in different orders, but I'm generally specifying a filename in the frontend with Record movie checked, Read Only unchecked, and I'm saving states and working from there; when I'm done, I've been hitting Shift+T to toggle read-only, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. If someone could please take a look, I'd appreciate it. I'm running Mednafen Rerecording 1.1 Frontend 1.0 on Windows 7. Thanks for any thoughts you have, A.C. ******

I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.

Posted: 3/16/2013 11:02 AM

Post subject: Re: Lynx corrupted saves?

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Ilari

Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1141)

Joined: 5/1/2010
Posts: 1217

dwangoAC wrote:

I have put some considerable time into trying to get Lynx to behave but my results so far have been a complete failure. Can someone, anyone, please look at these movie files and tell me what the heck is going on? If someone could please take a look, I'd appreciate it. I'm running Mednafen Rerecording 1.1 Frontend 1.0 on Windows 7. Thanks for any thoughts you have

IIRC, newer mednafen-rr versions have totally broken movie recording for anything except PCE(CD), since MC2 won't support anything else. IIRC, the newest version that works is SVN r144 or something like that (no idea about how version numbers correspond to releases). Those versions use MCM, which can record Lynx.

Posted: 3/16/2013 4:36 PM

Post subject: Re: Lynx corrupted saves?

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dwangoAC

Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (898)

Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1007

Ilari wrote:

IIRC, the newest version that works is SVN r144 or something like that (no idea about how version numbers correspond to releases). Those versions use MCM, which can record Lynx.

I'm using mednafen-rr-1.1-win32.zip from the http://code.google.com/p/mednafen-rr/ website which indicates it is the version to use for Lynx on the homepage and on the download page. In other words, I believe I have the right build but I'm not convinced I'm doing things in the magic secret order that you need to use to get things to work. I'd much prefer to use r144 in Linux but I keep getting an SDL_Net not found error even though I have all of the appropriate prerequisites; I suspect it has something to do with being on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit though. I may try on Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit and see if my luck is better. Thanks for the suggestions, A.C. ******

I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.

Posted: 3/17/2013 9:38 AM

Post subject: Mednafen requires precise ordering of rerecording steps

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dwangoAC

Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (898)

Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1007

dwangoAC wrote:

I may try on Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit and see if my luck is better.

I was able to successfully compile in Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit and I discovered a few things. First of all, both the Windows 1.11 and the Linux r144 versions are very particular about the order that you do things in. Specifically, if you want to see your movie alive you must do the following: 1. Toggle read/write on with Shift+T 2. Toggle Recording on with Ctrl+Shift+T 3. Create a savestate 4. Load the savestate 5. TAS ad nauseum 6. Load your final savestate 7. Toggle recording off with Ctrl+Shift+T 8. Toggle read/write off with Shift+T 9. Close Mednafen gently (Windows: Frontend Close Mednafen button, Linux: Close window) If you deviate on step 7 and toggle read-write before you stop recording, you will corrupt your movie file. If you close Mednafen in Windows using the red X window close button (or hit Ctrl+C in Linux), none of the data appears to be written to the .bak or .mcm files and you will corrupt your movie. I think there are other ways I discovered of corrupting or crashing things as well, including loading two different savestates too quickly causing a crash. I can't tell you how many times I truncated input or corrupted my movie files before I figured out what not to do. At any rate, I've posted my WIP of Atari Lynx Joust and I'd love feedback. Thanks! A.C. ******

I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.

Posted: 3/18/2013 1:19 AM

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CoolKirby

Editor, Experienced player (608)

Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4012

Is there a place I could download a binary of r144? I searched and searched for it. All the mirror links on EmuCR are dead too. I mean, if it was the last revision to support the Lynx core, and there was a published TAS on it, it shouldn't be this hard to find, right? If someone has it, could he or she please upload their binary (and the frontend, if it's a different version) to the Google Code page for anyone who wants to TAS a Lynx game on Windows? I would appreciate it.

Posted: 3/18/2013 6:28 PM

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dwangoAC

Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (898)

Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1007

CoolKirby wrote:

If someone has it, could he or she please upload their binary (and the frontend, if it's a different version) to the Google Code page for anyone who wants to TAS a Lynx game on Windows? I would appreciate it.

Mednafen Rerecording 1.1 Frontend 1.0 is the correct version for Windows and a binary is available. For Linux, you have to compile r144 but that's compatible with the Windows version as far as I can tell as I can take the movie files I made in Windows and play them back in Linux. As far as posting a binary of the Linux build I created, I'm not sure about that one - it'd be better if someone made an official 32-bit and 64-bit .deb package. For the record, I've created a Lynx: Joust post to discuss my WIP. A.C. ******

I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.

Posted: 3/23/2013 6:57 AM

Post subject: Continued Lynx corruption. Please help me make this stable.

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dwangoAC

Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (898)

Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1007

Greetings, I'm at a breaking point in frustration - despite my best efforts to be incredibly paranoid and careful, my movie files are still ending up corrupted at random. I started over at the beginning of the first wave and I can tell that *some* of my input is there and sane because the ostrich goes all the way to the top and hits its head and jets to the bottom then goes to the top again, but as it falls for the second time it does not move to the left onto the head of the lowest buzzard under the center platform like it should and instead plummets straight down. Beyond that point it desyncs, although you can still see places where input is obviously being fed in as there is rapid flapping. I've again zipped up all of the movie files, including two "predecessor" files named pressK.mcm and pressJ.mcm that show where the input was copied from originally. The session history is as follows: After I determined that the Ostrich looked better but that hexing in the change caused a desync I recreated input and created the initial file named dwangoACJoustTASWIPasOstrich.mcm. I closed the project and came back to it a few days later, at which point I played to the frame I wanted to start from, switched to read-write, changed to rerecording mode, created and loaded a savestate, and proceeded to work for a couple of hours. Things looked sane, but when I stopped the session and closed Mednafen (copying the file to a - copy.mcm file just in case) I could not play back any of the .bak or .mcm files. I'm noticing that the "header" information in the .mcm files seems to also be wrong, with a completely inaccurate number of rerecords and in many cases the author information omitted. This was again tested in Windows 7 64-bit with Mednaen-rr 1.1. I'd really like to make this work because I've made some good progress on making something that I think will be very entertaining, if I could just get things stable. For the record, I was able to determine that you can "belly flop" through the platform on the right but it takes a fair bit of precision to do it. If only I could show you... :) Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to make this more stable, in particular in regard to what order to do things in. Thanks in advance, A.C. ******

I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.

Posted: 4/1/2013 7:12 AM

Post subject: Re: Continued Lynx corruption. Please help me make this stable.

Quote

dwangoAC

Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (898)

Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1007

dwangoAC wrote:

This was again tested in Windows 7 64-bit with Mednaen-rr 1.1.

I was concerned that being on a 64-bit version of Windows was causing problems, so I regressed this on a 32-bit version of Linux. I was able to recreate the desync there as well and I've posted the mcm files in Linux-friendly tar.gz format. I was able to recreate the problem under the following controlled conditions: 1. Create new movie using the raw command mednafen -mov "/path/to/dwangoACJoustWIP.mcm" -play 1 -readonly 0 -pause 1 /path/to/JoustROM.lnx 2. Create an initial savestate then advance ~500 frames and a few button presses at the menu before quitting 3. Load dwangoACJoustWIP.mcm and play forward until around frame 500, Shift-T toggle read-only, Ctrl+Shift+R toggle rerecord, create a savestate, load a savestate, ram bird into ceiling, quit 4. Copy that snapshot of dwangoACJoustWIP.mcm to file nearlyTheSameAs008.bak (called nearly because a diff said that the movie differed from that most recently touched .bak file) 5. Same as step 4 confirming playback of previous input, then after toggling to read+write, ram bird into ceiling a second time then drift to the left and smash the buzzard appearing at the lowest spawn location, quit 6. Play back file, see desync (mount does not go left, enemy buzzard doesn't die) So in summary, I was able to successfully complete two cycles of quitting and reloading but the third cycle failed with a desync; it could be very enlightening to see the difference between the current dwangoACJoustWIP.mcm and the previous, good nearlyTheSameAs008.bak file. One item of particular interest is that the timestamp of all of the most recent .bak files is identical to the .mcm file itself. It should be possible to recreate this desync yourself by starting with the nearlyTheSameAs008.bak file (renaming it to .mcm) and playing around with savestates. I'm yet again rambling but I'm now completely convinced that there is something about this game (or Lynx in general) that is not suitable for TASing. I will likely give up unless someone responds that they're regressing this or otherwise interested in helping me work around this problem as I'm just not sure what else to try. If I can figure out what's causing the desync and avoid it that would definitely be nice but if there's no answer as to why this keeps happening I'll simply consider the emulator unfit for general use and move on to something else. Thanks for any thoughts and please don't take my comments personally - I test broken code for a living and I'm used to things not working right, although I'm admittedly a bit frustrated that I can't make any progress on the run. :) A.C. ******

I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.

Posted: 8/16/2014 9:57 PM

Post subject: Will there ever be any hope?

Quote

dwangoAC

Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (898)

Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1007

Are there any developers left on this project who could take a look at the problems I described with Lynx Joust in my posts from last year? Is there any hope of Lynx being supported in another emulator? I'd like to eventually finish this one. :) Figured I'd try one last time, A.C. ******

I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.

Posted: 8/21/2014 5:05 PM

Post subject: I tried again on a fresh system, still no go

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dwangoAC

Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (898)

Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1007

I set up a clean Windows XP 32-bit instance and tried loading my working TAS and starting from there. No go. It is not possible to ever quit and restart once you start TASing the game - no matter how much you want it to work, the movie file will become corrupt and effort will be lost. I will make one final, desperate attempt to TAS Lynx Joust in a single sitting before giving up. I hope that one day development will resume or the Lynx core will end up in BizHawk. A.C. ******

I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.