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Is there any way to record a clip from a SNES or NES game using an emulator? I ask because my SNES emulator has the function to record movies, but I have no clue how to play it other than inside the emulator. (Or perhaps I recorded it wrong.) I'm using ZSNES for this, but I have Snes9x too. Meh.

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OSonic Rave
/ \Last Arcanum
[ ]Strike Raid
XRagnarok

You can only play it in the emulator.

If you want to create an actual AVI or MPG recording, you'll need something else.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Hm, I see. Thanks!

Edit: Wait, what is this 'something else'? Or is it not legal?

This post has been edited by Zeromus_X on 22nd May 2006 02:51

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OSonic Rave
/ \Last Arcanum
[ ]Strike Raid
XRagnarok

Macromedia has a program called Captivate, which will probably do what you are wanting - you specify a segment of your screen for it to record and it records it, which you can playback later.

you can get a free 30-day trial of the program at http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cf...ivate&loc=en_us

for the 30 days, it works just like the purchased version...

Moderator Edit

Don't go around telling people how to get software illegally. If they really want to do it, they'll figure it out themselves, but don't use my forum to advocate illegal activity. -R51

ok sorry

Quote (zeromus_X)

Hmm, this seems more of a slide show thing then a straight recording. And it makes the emulator slow down a bit. It seems it won't work after all. Sorry. :/

sorry, I haven't used captivate that much, didn't realize that all it made was slideshows

This post has been edited by King of Chocobos on 29th May 2006 15:53

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kweh!

Thanks! Now everyone will know what I mean about this funky Asper sword glitch...

Well, assuming I can figure out how to use this thing. Although I'd probably just download another after the 30 days is up. Still, thanks again!

Edit: Hmm, this seems more of a slide show thing then a straight recording. And it makes the emulator slow down a bit. It seems it won't work after all. Sorry. :/

This post has been edited by Zeromus_X on 29th May 2006 08:40

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OSonic Rave
/ \Last Arcanum
[ ]Strike Raid
XRagnarok

Quote (Zeromus_X @ 29th May 2006 02:53)

And it makes the emulator slow down a bit.

That's to be expected. You can't simply grab a stream of pixels and stuff them into a file or buffer each frame without suffering certain performance hits...

Typically emulators just record a single save-state and then the keystrokes entered. This cuts down tremendously on memory usage, but it also means the video will only be playable with that particular emulator.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 29th May 2006 21:54

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Quote (Silverlance)

You can't simply grab a stream of pixels and stuff them into a file or buffer each frame without suffering certain performance hits...

Then how do they record emulator movies onto AVI files?

Or does the recording program just slow down to the same rate as the emulator and the rest of the system, or do they just speed up/slow down the movie afterwards, depending on what's needed?

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There's no reason why a movie would have to be played at full speed during recording.

Also, depending on the techniques used, copying the video buffer can be relatively fast (mind you: relatively fast. Copying 640x480x32 bits is still nearly a meg per frame; 1280x1024x32 is nearly 5 megs per frame, which is going to be a severe performance hit if you have another process running at the same time.) Copying the contents of the screen to a buffer is very slow, but dumping the contents of the video buffer involves directly moving a block of memory with nearly zero additional overhead.

Assuming 30 FPS at 640x480x16bpp, you'd be copying ~17-18 megs per second of video memory alone. It's hardly unreasonable to expect a HD to be able to keep up with that nowadays, especially if the process it's being taken from has a relatively small CPU footprint. But a game running at 60 FPS in 1280x1024x32bpp is 300 megs per second... huge huge huge, and impossible to dump in real-time.

Would compression help? No, it would make things worse: compression is a relatively lengthy operation. Especially if it has to be done in software.

Typically video-capture software either instantiates a hook to catch WM_PAINT messages and halts the execution of the target thread until it can fully dump the new contents of the buffer (slowing down the app in the process) or attempts to run alongside the targetted thread and only dumps occasionally (ie, every 4-5 frames.) It might also sample less pixels (say, every other pixel) to reduce the amount of data it has to manipulate - but this obvious results in loss of quality (pixelation or a smaller resolution.)

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Sorry I missed this one so long. Moved to General Gaming.

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~Dorothy L. Sayers

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