Under Construction. This page will document the concept of rerecording from an implementation point of view.
Introduction
The laws of TAS outline practices and demands of TASVideos, and the coders that have contributed to Tool-assisted capable emulators. We use emulators far harder than your regular users, and we've learned what makes them reliable and rugged in quality. The laws primarily are to document specifically the aspects of movie rerecording, and tools necessary for quality TASVideos movies. However, they delve into all aspects of emulator development. Rerecording has been implemented in dozens of emulators. We know what works and what doesn't.
The laws of TAS aren't telling you how to make a fast emulator. All other considerations get discarded when you want speed. They are documenting how to make a stable emulator with well thought out features in which other people can assist you on. While these laws primarily document the making of "rerecording" emulators but cover far more scope than that including core implementations, GUI conventions, and even subversion control practices. Many strategies have been tried in the past. Emulators are all too commonly written from scratch with knowledge of other practices & ideas. As such there are many different variants of the same basic features. Many of these fail, others succeed. The laws of TAS outline the best battle tested practices that make for the highest quality emulators in not only rerecording implementation, but also core implementation, accuracy, ease of use, ease of development, and general quality tools that allow communities to thrive and grow off the emulator.
Do you have to follow all laws? No. Are all laws equally vital and important? No. However, the more successful emulators follow these laws and the less successful ones don't. Success can be defined by many things, emulation accuracy, quality TAS making, ease of development, a large community of developers, a large community of users, reputation. In all these cases the Laws of TAS define success.
Table of Contents
- Glossary of Terms
- The laws:
- On the rerecording concept
- On input & frames
- On Movie file formats
- On Movie length measurement
- On Determinacy, Sync, and "Bullet proof rerecording"
- On Movie movies & emulator read status
- On Savestate/Movie interaction
- On Displayed Information (framecount, etc)
- On Commandline options
- On Accessory TAS Tools
- On Scripting
- On GUI design
- On Video dumping
- On Version control
- Feature Checklist