OK, I'm finally making this public, and I decided to call it Hourglass after all. There's still a lot more work to do, but think of this as a demo for anyone that wants to get a head start on Windows TASing.
http://code.google.com/p/hourglass-win32/
A build is available for download there, as is the current source code. If anyone wants to contribute, let me know and I'll give you commit privileges. I think I said I would wait longer before posting this, but actually I see no reason to do that, since it's not like progress can't continue on it.
For anyone who wants to try actually TASing something with this now/soon:
Let me know if you run into problems. PM me about it, preferably. Same for feature requests, although I'd suggest posting those directly to the googlecode
issues page instead. Keep in mind this is in the early stages and that it's an especially unusual environment for making TASes because it's not an emulator. Also keep in mind that things are likely to change, including the movie format.
All of the games on that
list should be possible to create TASes of in the program's current state, but not all of them are supported equally well. There are several gotchas to work around. For example, games that use multiple threads have stability problems (the game crashes sometimes after loading a savestate), and as a workaround for this, there are several options for forcing the program to be more single-threaded, such as disabling DirectSound or disabling thread creation. So making a serious TAS would involve disabling that stuff and TASing the game with the sound off, then re-enabling it to check sync and record an AVI with audio.
Also, there's a Frames per Second field you'll have to fill in before starting recording, which depends on the game. In general, if you get this number wrong, the game will either run too slowly, or it will run at the correct speed but with unnecessary "lag frames". I haven't made any sort of database yet of what these should be, but for now: Cave Story and IWBTG are 50 FPS, Hero Core is 40 FPS, Iji is 30 FPS, and almost everything else (including La-Mulana) should be set to 60 FPS.
The game most likely to work with all existing features is Cave Story. It's simply the game that got tested the most and it's probably the most fault-tolerant game of all the ones I've tried running through this.
The target OS for Hourglass is Windows XP. It has been tested somewhat on Windows Vista and Windows 7 64-bit, but it's most likely to work as intended on XP. Theoretically it should also be able to work in Windows 2000 and Wine, but it almost certainly doesn't work in those yet.
By the way, here are some tool-assisted non-speedrun videos (they're not that special and I'm probably playing them all wrong, but I did use some savestates and some frame advance) that I made just now to convince myself a TAS could be made of these games all the way through to an AVI:
Perfect Cherry Blossom,
Tumiki Fighters,
Legend of Princess. And if you missed it earlier, there was also
this for Hero Core.
