Mupen64

Target settings

Guide

Windows

1. Make a backup of your plugin directory so that your old settings are preserved, as necessary. Also backup glide3x.dll in your Mupen64 root directory.Instead of "make a backup", perhaps starting with a fresh extraction is a better idea here
2. Place the above plugins into your Mupen plugins directory, and glide3x.dll from the "wrapper" directory in the Glide64 package into the Mupen64 base directory. Wrapper hack is not needed for GLideN64
3. Edit Plugins/Glide64.ini; change instances of "filtering = 1" to "filtering = 0", and "hotkeys = 1" to "hotkeys = 0". More Glide64 specific stuff that is no longer required
4. Start Mupen. Good advice.
5. Options -> Settings -> General -> uncheck "Limit FPS (auto)".
6. Options -> Settings -> Config Plugins -> select Glide64 Napalm WX Swap this out for GLideN64. Also, this is not the version of Glide64 that was linked previously. as the video plugin and Azimer's audio plugin for audio.
7. Go into the Glide64 configuration dialogue, check "show advanced emulation options", and close and reopen the dialogue.
8. Set video options as seen here and here. (Note: "use frame buffer objects" may be necessary for some video cards).Some of this information is incorrect, but it will be replaced with GLideN64 so that doesn't matter. Consider compiling a list of GLideN64 settings for accuracy, and optional enhancements (along with when they should be used)
9. Select a video resolution that is a multiple of 320x240 (or 342x256) Does N64 ever use 342x256? Investigate. Also, GLideN64's OSD tells you the native resolution, so rather than using a predefined, stick to a multiple of that, but smaller than your screen size This is only true for windowed mode. Fullscreen mode can capture up to 2x your screen resolution, for instance I have a 2560x1440 monitor which can enable capturing at 5120x2880 (5K).(antialiasing).
10. Load your game ROM, and observe the Glide64 text at the bottom of the screen. You should see "Filtering: Automatic" specified. If it's not, you will need to exit Mupen64 and edit Glide64.ini as described in step 3. More Glide64 steps that can be removed
11. Before doing this, wait until after the game has reached a situation where something visual has been displayed and ensure the game is NOT paused Utilities -> Movies -> Start Movie Playback Suggest familiarization with CTRL-SHIFT-P as the hotkey for this, as fullscreen doesn't have menus. Select the movie to play back, check "Open Read-Only", and enter 1 for "Pause at frame:". Click OK. The movie should now be paused on the first frame.
12. Make a save state. CTRL-F5. Also, after making the savestate the game must be unpaused, otherwise the state can fail to create. This ensures no crashes later.
13. Close Mupen.
14. Check that there are no .eep files for your game in the Save directory in the Mupen root directory (playback from .kkapture as follows doesn't clear these files out, and their presence can cause desyncs). Maybe expand this to cover other save data types?
15. Start .kkapture; configure it as seen here. Note in particular the frame rate (120fps); this is to ensure that all frames in 60fps segments are captured. Update this to the new configuration. For the audio, this will require a 1 max get_pos build at 480fps. For the video, this will require a higher (1024?) max get_pos build at 60fps to ensure the motion is smooth and as consistent as intended. Even with additional dumps, it's actually a faster process now. Chameleon Twist 2 took about 2.5 hours to dump two separate 5K and 320x240 dumps, along with a third audio dump, during the testing stage. Prior, this could take over a day. There will likely be a lot of duplicate frames in the output; as such, use of a codec such as Lagarith that can store null frames is STRONGLY suggested.
16. Set "Demo" to your Mupen executable and set "Target" to a target filename, then click "kkapture!". Mupen will start.
17. Load the game ROM; wait for the Glide64 text to disappear (and ideally for a recognizable action to appear on the screen, so that you know when playback of the movie starts) This is no longer an ideal situation, this is a requirement as loading the movie before the game has initialized will lead to an instant freeze. See my new note below..
18. Pause Mupen.Pause/Break key if in fullscreen
19. Utilities -> Movies -> Start Movie Playback CTRL-SHIFT-P if in fullscreen; select the movie as earlier, check "Open Read-Only", and click OK (don't specify a pause frame). Depending on your system, you may need to alt-tab to the Mupen window (even if it's already in focus) to bring this dialog box to the front in fullscreen
20. Load your save state from earlier. CTRL-F7 if in fullscreen
21. Unpause Mupen - you are now capturing. Before leaving this for a long period of time, it's recommended you wait for something to happen on the screen visually to ensure the process has begun successfully Do not attempt to move any part of the emulator window off-screen - it will ruin rendering on the off-screen area.
22. At the end of desired playback, highlight a non-Mupen window the new version of .kkapture doesn't seem to mind if Mupen is highlighted and press the right CTRL key. (WARNING: this means you can't use right CTRL during video capture!) Mupen will exit upon doing so. The new version uses RIGHT-CTRL, RIGHT-SHIFT and ? as a three-key combination, to prevent unintended termination of the capture. This was a problem I frequently experienced after several hours of capturing in the past.

1. The capture may have an extra 20 pixel border at the bottom, which should be cropped out. This only true for Windowed mode and is because Mupen renders black underneath the status bar. This means regardless if the resolution, it will always be exactly 24 pixels. For fullscreen mode, black bars will be added to pad the game video to your monitor's aspect ratio. In cases of 16:9, this means you'll have to crop off 1/8th of the width from either side. I'll likely make something automatic for this, explained below
2. The audio plugin may add a audio delay of around 192 ms (could be a function of the sound card). This a hard value to pinpoint. After some testing, I'm inclined to say this new method has a delay of 120. This ensures all the visual elements occur either prior to, or at the same time as the relevant sound. This was compared to actual N64 footage (captured in several ways) during testing.
3. To align the audio and video together, an additional program is required. Aktan has worked on this and I have tested it and can confirm it works as intended. It compares the samples of two different audio clips and provides the correct "DeleteFrame" calls for AVISynth, along with a DelayAudio line, to make sure the "video" dump and "audio" dumps line up correctly. It also reports if unique frames are lost during this process. In my tests, only one game has dropped unique frames and the amount was under 10. In certain games it could be unavoidable, but due to the emulation process a sacrifice would have to be made. It's either severe audio problems, severe motion stutter or this. This was chosen as it's the most pleasant to view, and there is precedent: to get proper N64 dumps out of Bizhawk, alternate sync must be used and it behaves in a similar way.
4. The sound output may not be 44.1kHz. In fact, due to either the current state of RSP emulation or how the RSP functions - it's almost certainly not going to be. Outputs currently are not resampled and therefore unless the most likely candidates seem to be 22047hz and 32006hz. This can be programmed on a per-game basis however. If it is not, it will generally be a very odd sampling rate, and you may resample the sound track to be 44.1kHz. I had a chat with Aktan about this. Some games use rates such as 19196 or 26807. It's probably best to just resample all games to 48000hz and be done with it. It will introduce unavoidable loss (as would 44.1kHz) and the only way to prevent this would be to avoid resampling altogether. The downside here is that many soundcards don't handle non-typical sample rates well and produce audio which is much worse than any loss we'd introduce in this process.
5. On certain games, the capture FPS can be set to 60 FPS for a smoother capture. It is very doubtful that any game would capture the old way without significant audio problems at 60fps. The new way takes advantage of this idea though, and so all video dumps are 60fps.

Linux