On pooyan, I changed the settings per the tournament, quit mame, then restarted and recorded with the T2 settings.

I then played the recording back with no .cfg file for pooyan. The dipswitch settings showed the default settings, but the extra life was set to setting when I recorded.

Is the dip switch setting supposed to show the current setting that the inp was recorded with? Other than the beginning of the game where it shows when extra lives are awarded, how would I verify that my settings are correct?

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), November 03, 1999

Answers

When I made my recording, I verified before I started by going into dip switch setup and making sure all was in order before I started the game. Not standard procedure for me, but I'd had a hangup or two with exactly what you mentioned. :) Seemed to stick, though, and it only took an extra few seconds to make sure.

Brian McLean

-- Brian McLean (bmclean84@hotmail.com), November 03, 1999.

I did check the settings after I restarted mame to record. I'm just not sure how it saves the settings within the inp file and if I or someone could verify the settings used to record with.

The only verification I could get, was that pooyan shows when extra lives are recieved. I have no way of telling if a recording was played on medium or not.

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), November 03, 1999.

Dave,

I'll look at your recording tonight. I am pretty sure that you should NOT delete your .cfg file. You should only do that for .inps recorded on MAME's default settings, and this is only to make sure that you are using default settings as well. If you are sure of that, then you do not even need to delete the .cfg. MAME will use default settings if there's no .cfg file. If there is a .cfg file, then MAME will use the settings from that.

So it's easy to tell if you used the correct settings. If you have the correct settings in your .cfg file, then it should play back correctly. If you change it to easy, it won't play back correctly. And, no, dipswitch settings are NOT saved in the .inp.

Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), November 03, 1999.

Here's the deal...

When you record, the dip switch settings are saved in the recording. For every frame. If you change the settings mid-game, that can be discovered from analysing the recording.

When you playback, the dip switches are read from the recording file, rather from the user interface, so they are set just as they were when you made the recording. And if you changed them during the recording, any affect that changing them had during recording will also happen during playback.

The user interface is separate though. The values displayed when you hit TAB and select 'dip switches' are the values stored in your .cfg file *when you started playback*. They may be different from the values in the recording, but this will have no effect (until the recording has finished playing back, at which time the user interface dip settings will be used).

Think of dip switch settings as just extra keys on the keyboard... You can hit keys while a recording is playing back, but they don't do anything (until the recording has finished playing back).

Is that clear?

Chris.

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@mail.com), November 04, 1999.

Zwaxy,

If only it were that easy... no, dipswitch settings are NOT saved in the recording.

Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), November 04, 1999.

Err... I take that back. I just had another look at the source code, and what I thought was just another 16 bits of input happened to be the dipswitch settings. Sorry, Zwaxy, you were right. Dipswitch settings are stored for every single frame.

Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), November 04, 1999.

Well, when DIP switches are saved to inp file and I am not able to see then during playback, how can I check that inp file is recorded with default settings or so? It seems to be impossible. Plese tell me if you have some special software for it or so.

-- Aley Keprt (AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com), April 19, 2001.