Lets racing time

You can turn those off, though. Options > Program Options > Hide flashing rectangle during recording. As for capturing errant bits of window, you'll need to play around with the Fixed Region settings to choose the right part of your screen to record. Once you've found it, DON'T MOVE YOUR EMULATOR WINDOW.

So after a long night of testing different things, I've finally hit on a combination of settings that makes decent videos. I think my computer is having a bit of a tough go of it, because the smoothness of emulation takes a definite hit whenever I turn on the screen capture. It's smooth enough to play and the videos look decent, but I had to turn ZSNES down to 2x actual pixel size, and that's definitely smaller than I want the window to be.

Anyway, looks like I'm ready to go. Next time there's a race, hopefully I'll be able to participate. Still need to find a good way to reduce video size (VirtualDubMod doesn't want to work until I find some dll file it thinks I'm missing), but that can be a project for another night.

If Camstudio is too annoying, try Hypercam 2. It's free now, so it doesn't put annoying boogers on your videos. Other than that I don't know anything about it, though.

If you can't avoid recording those annoying bars and windows and things, VirtualDub is free and comes with an easy-to-use cropping filter.

I play all my emulators in 3x scale, and record at 30 fps. For the race, however, the first thing I did was resize all the videos to about 246x240. (That resolution will vary a bit depending on the emulator.) When processing future races I will probably ask people to do that on their end before sending me the videos.

Are there any noticeable differences between playing the SNES vs NES version of Mario 1?

I mean besides graphically, of course.

I think the SNES version has less space between the bottom of the level and the bottom of the screen. In the NES version there's two blocks; in the SNES version there's just one.

This is only a problem if it's 1994 and you have a shitty used TV from 1979 that cuts an inch off from the bottom of the screen and can't see where any of the pits are.

There's a story in that last sentence, isn't there?

We had a TV like that in my Genesis days, it was just bad enough that you couldn't see how many lives you had in Sonic games... so Game Overs were always a big surprise!

Ok, so I have to heartily recommend anybody mucking around with CamStudio give HyperCam a shot. I'm getting a significantly smoother recording and it's way, way, waaaaay easier to get recording in a fixed region. Like, way.

I'm good to go I think.

I'll have to give it a try.

The nice thing is that you can just drag the region size you need and then it just leaves a static frame around the recording space when you begin, making it very easy to adjust your window.

Hmm... avisynth looks like a thing what might be worth playing with, but I can't quite figure it out as of yet. In particular I can't get VirtualDub or VirtualDubMod to open .mp4 files.

Yeah, those programs primarily handle .avi files. You might need to get a converter to move them out of .mp4.

Putting it all together using Camtasia wouldn't have been so time-consuming if the videos had been processed before they were sent to me. Of course, I didn't know what specifications I needed them to be before I sat down and started futzing with it.

Either way, the next race should go much quicker, I think. Learning experience!

Considering everything that happened in this first run I'm amazed we're going to get a watchable video out of it at all.

I'm totally looking forward to you guys doing more (I'll be refraining from participating until my internet is reliable again).

It's pretty watchable. I mean, I watched it! Watching happened.

I just have to stick the timer on and let VirtualDub do it's thing tonight. Should be able to upload tomorrow.

Is the timer all that important? You can always see how much time has elapsed just by looking underneath the video.

We didn't start the run right at the start of the video, though. Also I left space for the timer on the side, so if I don't add one it'll just be weird and blank.

So, what processing needs to be done to the videos before sending them out, to help the process?

Mainly having them resized before starting. The first thing I had to do was get all four videos down to 240 pixels in height, which took a long time.

Duly noted!

I'm anxious to see how this turns out, and bracing to be extremely embarrassed. I'm more stoked to do this again! Is it too soon to start talking about what we wanna do next?

You should be. You are in last place for virtually the entire video.

Feel free to race whatever you want, with whomever you want, whenever you want. If you can figure out how to get that avisynth script to work, so much the better!

I'm aware!! Someone had to lose!

If my SMB3 video wasn't reason enough, I think I'd best wait until getting a controller before really racing.

I'm looking into one of the SNES to USB things, since I've got JUST LIKE NEW wannabe SNES controllers from the weird knock-off SNES thing I bought a while back.

Failing that, I really have to recommend a PS2 converter. I use one when I play SNES games, and they are fantastic.

I use one of my PS3 controllers with a bluetooth dongle and motionjoy. Yeah, it basically cannibalizes the dongle, so you can't use it with anything else, but that's okay with me. It's great for if I want to play stuff on the TV from my computer, too.

Ultimately my personal preference would be to get a converter to use my Classic Controllers. I also wouldn't mind being able to use my Wiimotes either. Honestly, the orientation of the buttons on the SNES controller and its progeny really screw with my muscle memory when I play NES games.

I use my PS3 controller, tethered to my laptop with a USB cable. It works like a charm, with some assistance from JoyToKey, the only side effect is that when I unplug the controller from my laptop it automatically turns my PS3 on, but that's about all. Flawless otherwise.

I can't get avisynth to change the font of the counter. The wiki says that all installed system fonts should be available, but it just keeps defaulting to Verdana.

ANNOYING.

At least it isn't defaulting to Comic Sans.

A small comfort. I'd like to get it to display whatever font I tell it, and can't figure out why it's not.

I cobbled this together this morning with a program called VideoPad. It's a side-by-side of me playing through Gutsman's stage twice. No voice (I turned my mic off), but I added in some music. It's rough (I basically just plopped the media in and hit go, nothing fancy), but it at least tells me that the software can do what I'd want it to with what I think is a decent enough quality. I just have no idea how to add a timer.

I've been looking for a "baby's first timer" tutorial or something, anything for like the past hour and nothing. I got VirtualDub, but I don't see anything that would allow me to do anything like that. This feels like it should be something easy to add, but so help me I have no idea.

Finally done.

I didn't figure out the timer font problem, but I reached a point where I was like MEH FUCK IT. Also I was going to add a death counter to the empty spot in the top-right, but I didn't do that because MEH FUCK IT.

It'll be here when it's done uploading: http://youtu.be/2fkZgzEF-Xk