Playback problems w/ Sega games

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First of all, it's great to see the site back. I missed checking up on the latest uploads every day. All of the recordings that were uploaded while Zwaxy was gone all seem to be there, which is surprising.

Anyway. During the downtime of the site, I tried doing some recordings of Sega Ninja/Ninja Princess on MAME 0.34 Beta 1. I had some pretty good scores, but I forgot one of them and had to play it back to see what it was. Except, it wouldn't play back correctly... the recording ended up dying all three times on the first level. I tried playing back the other versions, but same thing. :( So I decided to try making a recording without sound to see if that would work... no dice. I couldn't figure out why they were affected... later I tried making a recording for My Hero, but same thing happened. Both with and without sound. So, when Beta 2 came out I tried recording and playing back the games again, and they STILL won't playback correctly. I downloaded Angry's Flicky (Set 1) recording to see if that would at least playback right, but that doesn't work either. And, as usual, I tried it both with and without sound.

All of this leads me to believe that all the Sega games that have been added since 0.34 Beta 1 won't play back properly, maybe even some Sega games before then too. Why is this? I wish I knew... here's hoping Beta 3 will let us record properly, but I doubt it. :P

-BBH

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), September 09, 1998

Answers

Playback prob's - possible solution

I ran into some problems getting my Flicky recordings to play back, but was able to replay them.

Normally, when I playback a recording, I immediately press F10 and enable frameskipping to 1/4 just to speed things up. With the Flicky recordings, I saw all sorts of weird things happening when I did this (Flicky actually passed through walls/floors). I then tried playing back only pressing F10 to unthrottle the game, and it played back fine.

The Sega games may rely on every displayed frame to enable collision detection and/or other important game control features, which may cause problems playing back the files with frameskip enabled (or even disabled, if it was enabled for the recording).

I hope this solves the problem.

=Angry=

-- Angry (greggg@ix.netcom.com), September 09, 1998.


D'oh! You're right!

That was the ONE thing I hadn't tried... doing playback unthrottled. :) I tried it for Flicky and it worked fine. The funny thing is that if you throttle the Demo Mode then even that gets screwed up, so it would definitely seem that skipping frames makes a big difference in the replay for these Sega games.

Looks like I've got a bit of re-recording to go do now, since foolish me didn't save my old files... :P

-BBH

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), September 09, 1998.


Hi Gang :o)

Welcome back you people.

Well spotted on the flicky recordings. One thing though - it doesn't seem to matter whether MAME is throttled or not (that's F10) - all that matters seems to be that you have to use the same frameskip (that's -frameskip on the command line or F8 in the game) for both recording and playback.

Since that seems to be the case, it would make sense to note the frameskip you used for the recording in the 'description' box. I use frameskip 3 for flicky, since my PC is pretty ropey.

Chris.

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@bigfoot.com), September 09, 1998.


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