Lets racing time

I feel like I've played enough ducktales to pogo cane my way through it without too much trouble (though I'll be damned if I know the optimal paths).

Brickroad's 150% speed ducktales LP is a good reference. And fits in a single video, to boot.

Thursday racer dudes: when do you normally start?

I won't be around to race anything tonight, but don't let that stop you cats.

I would totally attempt some racing times today. You mainland folks haven't had daylight savings yet, right? I need to catch some sleep, but I could totally do, say, after 4pm Pacific maybe (7pm Eastern)?

Mega Man maybe? Unoriginal, but never a bad choice. I'd be down for any of the NES games.

As a future idea: Spelunky race.

I would totally be down for Spelunky in the future, but not this week. Also, what version of spelunky, because I'm sure they have updated many times since I downloaded it.

And I don't want to embarrass myself with megaman games.

If it were 4, 5 or 6 we could all be embarrassed. Or at least I would be.

But I'm willing to be democratic about it. I'm pretty comfortable with whatever if folks are willing to play. But I do need to go knock out for awhile. Be bold, throw a few things you might be interested in playing, and we'll see what sticks.

Man, I would need like a 5 terabyte hard drive before I could attempt recording myself finishing Spelunky.

Apparently I'm the late night owl, as I usually become available around 9-10 Eastern.

Future races I'd be interested in:

NES:
The Disney Afternoon race (still a bit intimidated by the multi-game thing, but what can you do?)
Mega Man 2
Mega Man 3
The Legend of Zelda
Super Mario Bros 3
Castlevania

SNES:
Mega Man X

I'm sure there's tons of stuff I'm not thinking of right now.

Y'know what might be great? Super Talking Time Bros. A race to get the minimum number of stars needed to get to Bowser, might be a bit on the long-side but it should be entertaining.

STTB2 as well, though everyone's route through that game will pretty much be the same (play to Pyramid Peril, unlock Star Road, clear Tatanga's Starbase, warp to Bowser's Castle).

When we're done with the expansion sometime this decade that might be better suited for speedrun purposes. The stages will be a bit more difficult, but there'll be multiple routes to the end of the game, if the world map comes together the way I envision it.

I need to figure out how to use my SNES controller with SMBX now.

Oh, also, today I'm doing a 2 hour test recording just to see how my system handles the filesize.

SMBX should recognize your controller and let you config it. It does with my completely jury rigged PS3 blutooth setup. If not, you can always go the joy-to-key route.

...huh. 1h 55m of footage was only 1.66 GB?

That seems way off to me.

Footage of what? At what framerate? With or without audio? At what resolution? And what kind of compression?

As long as the video looks good (that is, no artifacts, smooth, no tearing) and the audio isn't desynced, I'd say you're doing it right. Maybe you can upload some of the footage to show us?

Compressed in Microsoft Video 1 with 75% frame compression and .75 Temporal Quality Ratio.

25 fps.

I didn't think I was recording audio since there was no mic plugged in, but that apparently defaulted to 'record computer speakers'?

I'd upload the footage, but it's mainly just a bunch of games running their demo modes or title screens for 2 hours, though I did play games randomly in the middle just to test desync. Doesn't seem to be any.

Oh, and resolution was x1, so just a tiny window.

I guess the filesize seems so small since I'm used to Full Frames videos being 1+GB just for ten minutes of gameplay.

This is probably a silly question, but if Brickroad isn't in a race, who would handle the video processing?

This laptop is 100 kinds of butt so just wondering who else has the know how?

What would be interesting to watch would be Super Mario 64. Not sure how practical it'd be between the issues of N64/DS emulation and the length of the game, but the non-linearity/high-skippability factor would lead to people taking some seriously different approachs, and you'd have different stuff going on on everyone's screen.

I don't. I'm working towards it, but I'm not there yet. This past week was a total wash. Work Stuff kept me occupied and left me pretty much with no desire or drive to do much of anything, so I've barely so much as looked at VirtualDub or Avisynth the last several days.

edit: Late reply, but speaking of which, thanks for the sound scripts, Brick! That looks a heck of lot easier then fussing around with Audacity.

Here ya go. This video has no audio by intent, but there was no desync in the original version. The footage is totally random but I don't expect anyone to sit and watch it anyway.

I haven't looked deeply into it, but with the scripts that brick posted it doesn't seem too hard to get things working. The biggest issue I would have would be getting all the files and uploading them to youtube, though that's just a time issue and not a technical issue.

Guys!

I was beating my head against avisynth last night and the "aha!" moment came. I'm not exactly sure why it didn't make sense before, but I was getting hung up on how scripts were defined and built. I understood what I was looking at in a general sense, but how it specifically worked eluded me. Once the lightning bolt hit though, it was shockingly easy.

Cobbled this together last night. Super Mario Bros. world one, timed properly, with some commentary and music. The commentary is from the left hand run. The second was silent.

It's still a little rough: It needs a timer, there's no subtitles, and it just hard cuts in and out. But I finally get it.

One problem I ran into was my second video was shorter than my first with commentary, so I needed a way to have it "start" later. In a nutshell, I basically wrote a short script that would put a blank screen of the needed length.

I then reprocessed and saved it as a new .avi, which gave the second run the needed "blank" frames to sync up with the left side. Crude, but effective. Putting in a placeholder image shouldn't be an problem.

Another I had was getting the audio balanced properly for the final product. The first was that the music was too loud. This I fixed using the AmplifydB command, which allows volume to be scaled down as well as up:

For another, avisynth can't mix audio with different numbers of channels. I'm not sure which was which, so I just solved it by converting both of them to mono:

Besides that, I roughly followed the scripts Brick posted in the thread.

Simple stuff, I know, but man it feels good to finally make sense of it.

edit: some specs on the final video.

filesize: 432mb (for about 5min.)
encoded with: Microsoft Video 1
fps: 30
resolution: 1060x472

I gotta say, I'm loving how this project have given me the kick in the pants to get some of this emulation and recording stuff figured out again.

Oh, nice. This solves a problem I was having with the Rockin' Kats video. I'll read up on AlignedSplice and report back.

The wiki is a good source of information provided you know what you're looking for, but it's not quite integrated well enough to discover new things.

Speaking of wiki, y'all might want to start one or a Google Doc or something to share all these codes before this thread starts getting to long.

Once I know enough about avisynth that I can make a working template anyone can use easily, I intend to do just that.

Is there like a way to see peoples Skype's on the forum?

Yeah, you can see it in the "Contact Info" section of whoever's profile.

Since I didn't know about that, I went ahead and filled in mine too.