Replay Of The Week

Vansibel · Post by **Vansibel** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 8:23 pm

Just a suggestion to possibly make MARP replay archive a more accessible and enjoying experience. I have been watching several replays lately and I have to admit it can sometime be a pain to search for old mame version because of a broken link and then have to hunt for exotic .dll or old romset to finally be able to enjoy the replay. I'm pretty sure some mame32 users even give up when they must input a few command line to actually launch the game. It could be interesting to convert some of them to video file and make it accessible for other to download.
Each week or month, a replay of a specific game could be made available (preferably the best). Bittorent could be used if the site is short on bandwith, so people who's getting them will actually handle it's distribution as well, pretty much like Bisqwit's NES timeattack movies have been doing. Of course, the idea is not to change the whole formula of the .inp submission to plain video (mame input shall always be kept for verification purpose and avoid edited/cheated performance), but to make the most outstanding ones available to a network beyond MARP regulars and for those who actually never worked an emulator before. The name of the player and a MARP logo should be added for identification, as well as the setting used along with any specials rules. I'm pretty sure this would bring more peoples here, and along with them, even more ferocious competition.

-Vansibel

zlk · Post by **zlk** » Fri Apr 16, 2004 10:46 pm

What is the best way to convert the inp playback to avi format?

LordGaz · Post by **LordGaz** » Fri Apr 16, 2004 10:57 pm

To convert an inp to video, play it back in a window and use Windows Media Encoder to capture the window and make a wmv file. You might want to fiddle about with the compression properties a bit to get a decent quality and small filesize.

Unless anyone knows of a better program and/or method?

Gaz

sikraiken · Post by **sikraiken** » Fri Apr 16, 2004 11:12 pm

I used SnagIt (I believe) one time with MAME in a window, then messed with compression in Virtualdub. Older versions of MAME32 actually let you save a game to straight uncompressed .avi, but no input file; you can just change the encoding method and compression in Virtualdub after, but there is of course the problem of cheating with that. :/ Unless maybe it's possible to re-add the capability of saving a game to uncompressed .avi by getting the old code from a MAME32 version and adding it into a more recent MAME32 version (such as WolfMAME), as well as letting it save an inp file at the same time.

Vansibel · Post by **Vansibel** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 9:01 am

I have done those kind of recording before, the trick is pretty much like LordGaz said. All you have to do is get a hold on a program that will capture directly from your screen and convert the frames to .avi (preferably uncompressed .avi to minimise frame loss, but mjpeg or huffyuv codec are also pretty fast while reducing the size of the captured raw file). I use HyperCam wich is easy to use while offering many option, and can also zone automatically any active window. For a decent playback quality, it's reccomended to capture at least at the game resolution or at 320x240 for higher resolution. Also, a framerate below 24fps will make the playback of the vid very choppy, the best would be to capture around 30 fps. A rather good machine would be required for game like snk or cps2. I know I can capture around 29 fps at the native resolution of the game with winkawaks, but mame take up too much ressource while combined with the capture software running (pIII 800mhz). But anyone with a p4 should't have any problem with almost any game. Make sure you don't run any video filther during capture, and also disable any other fancy options that may take up unnecessary ressources.
Once you are done with capture, the next step is to compress the raw file you get to reduce it's size for web publishing. If you just want to convert your file without prior editing, you might want to use virtual dub, which is a free and very easy software to handle. But if you plan to add logo or the setting used, then you have some work to do in adobe premiere (or any other video editing software). Personnaly, I use XviD for compressing the video file, which is also a mpeg4 compression based codec like divx. While offering one of the best quality/compression ratio, the video will still look very crisp, unlike wmv (window media video) wich end up being very blurry at lower resolution. That's pretty much all about it, hope that gave peoples the idea.

-Vansibel

Chad · Post by **Chad** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 12:34 pm

that is a cool idea to transfer an inp to an avi, even though it might make it a lot larger, it will in deed prove playbackability but not necesarily legitimacy. I'll bet mamedev might be able to help with this to make a mame that commincates directly to a avi/mpeg maker to make mame send it frame by frame images in a streaming manner. so you don't have to find something that captures fast as mame can play it (and perhaps wastes big time quality to do so). Or at the very least you could easily make mame save a screen shot at each frame and then find a program that can make animations from sequential screen shots but that would waste a lot of temporary png space.

jet sanchEz · Post by **jet sanchEz** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 9:21 pm

I think it would be great to have the replays as .avis so that even newbs like me would be able to view them. They will be larger, but the accessability will be much greater---everyone on the net has seen that Super Mario 3 in 11 minutes avi, right? If you do decide to do this, pick some of the replays from the "Must see recordings" thread.

sikraiken · Post by **sikraiken** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 9:29 pm

jet sanchEz wrote:I think it would be great to have the replays as .avis so that even newbs like me would be able to view them. They will be larger, but the accessability will be much greater---everyone on the net has seen that Super Mario 3 in 11 minutes avi, right? If you do decide to do this, pick some of the replays from the "Must see recordings" thread.

Even though everyone has seen it, it isn't even real.

SJK · Post by **SJK** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 9:55 pm

JoeyL21988 wrote:
jet sanchEz wrote:I think it would be great to have the replays as .avis so that even newbs like me would be able to view them. They will be larger, but the accessability will be much greater---everyone on the net has seen that Super Mario 3 in 11 minutes avi, right? If you do decide to do this, pick some of the replays from the "Must see recordings" thread.
Even though everyone has seen it, it isn't even real.

same as most from the site in the top post in this topic..

sikraiken · Post by **sikraiken** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 10:05 pm

SJK wrote:
JoeyL21988 wrote:
jet sanchEz wrote:I think it would be great to have the replays as .avis so that even newbs like me would be able to view them. They will be larger, but the accessability will be much greater---everyone on the net has seen that Super Mario 3 in 11 minutes avi, right? If you do decide to do this, pick some of the replays from the "Must see recordings" thread.
Even though everyone has seen it, it isn't even real.
same as most from the site in the top post in this topic..

Atleast if this does happen, MARP has -real- replays.

(Yes I know those movies are for "entertainment" purposes, but come on now.)

Weehawk · Post by **Weehawk** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 2:12 am

I present in Windows Media Video glory, Gaz's 678k on Joust:

http://weehawk.marpirc.net/joust.wmv

I don't know why the little two-way arrow appears in the middle of the picture. It wasn't there when MAME was playing back.

Also, there's no sound. Don't know if there's a way to capture it with the video. I always hated the sound on Joust anyway.

Even if one can play back in MAME, a recording like this is useful for studying the game, in case you need to back up and repeat something. No way to do that in a MAME playback.

DRN · Post by **DRN** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 4:56 am

Nice work John. Do you know what codec I need to play this back? I'm missing whatever it is and can't download it (no surprise there). I'm on my work pc though, I'll try it later at home.

Weekhawk wrote:I always hated the sound on Joust anyway.

I'm surprised. I loved the sound on Joust, and all 'Williams' games. Some of the best sounds to ever come out of an arcade in my opinion. Excellent with the volume cranked up so loud the cabinet shaked. Joust, Defender, Blaster, Black Knight, all roared through my local arcade so loud you could hardly talk over the top of them. Brilliant.

Couldnt play them very well though, me and 'Williams' games don't mix, but I sounded great whilst trying

Weehawk · Post by **Weehawk** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 5:12 am

DRN wrote:Do you know what codec I need to play this back?

Windows Media Video 9

DRN wrote:I loved the sound on Joust

Ugh. The constant flapping of the wings is only slightly annoying, but the screech of the pterodactyl is like fingernails on a blackboard. I definitely prefer playing that one with the sound turned way down, or completely off.

Chad · Post by **Chad** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 1:24 pm

i didn't need the media 9 codec, very cool john, VERY cool, the compression is amazing 30 minutes in three megs, it's pretty frameskippy but that's still very awesome.

The TJT · Post by **The TJT** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 2:45 pm

Yes, very frameskippy. If you double the size, would you get double amount of frames included....If that's where choppiness comes from?