Emu replay movies, a great missed oportunity

Online Forums Computer/Handheld
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Returning here and finding a forum dedicated to online play and quite a bit of interest regarding emulator replays, I just wanted to get a little rant off my chest thats bugged me since I first discovered Emu gaming and the SF community.

Anyone who has been a part of the online SF community since before the current goforbroke, sfChina leeching age_of_plenty, when emulators were just starting to bring home cps1 and neo classics home at an affordable price will remember the years we waited for decent amounts of street fighter footage to surface. Even a game as universaly played and highly regarded as ST didn’t have decent Japanese tourney footage until a couple of years ago, for fans of non KOF NeoGeo games the situation was even worse and fans of niche classics like Fatal Fury Special were totaly in the dark until 2004 (thats 7 years on since it first became playable on emus!). Even today unless you have a home (broadband @ very least) internet connection and cd/dvd burners/ huge harddrive capcity, you will miss out.

Thing is it could have all been so different. From the earliest days of CPS1 and Neo emulation we could have all been sharing matches, combos and even huge superplays using files small enough to dld on a 56k modem and transport on a floppydisk.
The benefits of this would have been huge for the SF community. Standards of play would have advanced years ahead of thier time as tactics crossed over the Japanese-English boundary. Ranks would swell as players in remote part of the world and/or poorer players with outdated PC’s and limited internet access could keep pace with the ret of the scene. Popularity of online play would have prompted emulator programers to better overcome problems with lag, as in zsnes etc. etc…

The emulator that prompted me to buy a PC was called Callus, a dos emulator I’d seen in a friends PC magazine. All the way back in 1998, this made the (non rich pcb collectors) dream scenario of having Capcoms CPS1 games at home a reality (Neogeo emus like NeoRage soon followed, who remember playing neo games with no sound?). Not only did this emulator play well on an entrylevel pc, but you could record and playback entire movies lasting upto an hour on files smaller than 50kb! This made footage of top level Japanese players available around the world to anyone with a basic pc and even very limited access to the internet. The very fist site containing replays I found is still online and is a treasuretrove of amazing CPS1 superplays

http://cps.hp.infoseek.co.jp/index.html

Player ‘Landy’s’ Knights of the Round superplay is probably still my alltime fave.

http://cps.hp.infoseek.co.jp/korjmov1.zip

So why didn’t emu replays really take off? To me, its purely down to Mame. As it assimilated primitive CPS and Neo emu’s it also enveloped the bourgening replay scene with superior choice of games and greater audience potenial.
http://marp.retrogames.com/
But not only does mame constantly change its romsets, even for the same game, but the replays are also version specific! Meaning if you had 10 mame SF2 replays you might need 10 different versions of mame and 10 vesions of that one single romse to watch them! This killed things even before they really got going. In effect the replay scene was stllborn onto the world stage created by winmame’s fantastic accessability.

The scene (that didn’t recover until broadband iternet, cd/dvd burners and modern video compression codecs bacame commonly available in the last few years), could I think, be viewed as several years behind where it should be. Not only was this, in my view, a massive setback to the online SF scene, but a great loss of thousends of amazing_never to be repeated replays.
The single thing I would love to see developed most is a generic mame replay ini converter, that allows you to watch old replays on new versions of mame. I dont know why the replays have to be version specfic, I mean its only joick inputs isnt it? Doesn’t Kawaks have generic replay files?

Grrrr. stupid mame, Oh wel.

Finaly, does anyone have any good links for replays. Would love to get hold of the sort of stuff mame killed like CPS2 sidescrollers like alien vs predator or battle circuit shown tantalisingly here: http://cps.hp.infoseek.co.jp/cp2/index.html
Havecome accross a few packs containing mame+replay+rom for R-Type and R-Type2, anyone know you can get these for cps1&2 sidescrolles?

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How do you watch the replays in callus? I’ve searched the net, and found no info whatsoever. I try opening the replay files (all of which I downloaded from the linked site), with the callus executable, and get an error message that their is no language pack or file or somesuch. I have the language files, as well as the updated italian language file from callus’ official home page. I’ve tried both calice32 .6.4 and callus .42, with no success. Also, neither are recognizing my ROMS. .42 ID’s the ROMS, but I can’t open any SF game, and .6.4 doesn’t detect them at all (I get only two available ROMS in .6.4, even though I’ve got just about every ROM imagineable for MAME, kawaks, etc). Sorry if this is turning into more of a callus tutorial question, but I’d really like to view the replays. Any help appreciated. :slight_smile:

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Good to see you back online Karl.

Send me text or pm and we’ll hook up soon for a session.

(my karnov is getting sicker :karate:)

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I occasionally record my Last Blade 2 matches with certain people.
They’re fun to watch when you’re bored.

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Is there anyway you could upload them somewhere and tell me which emulator and rom version you used? I love watching replays of games, especially fighting ones. :pleased:

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Last Blade 2 / Bakumatsu Roman - Dai Ni Maku Gekkano Kenshi, The
Mame 0.64

Don’t have any webspace though, sorry.

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www.filefront.com perhaps?

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try yousendit.com, if you email me i can convert your inp replays into wmv :slight_smile: just send to jd.glover@ntlworld.com

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I’ll try to get some more matches with the good players on kaillera (the few that are around).
I doubt you guys just want to watch a bunch of squash matches.

I don’t think you can make videos out of these r3ko, they were from kaillera matches so you can’t convert them to AVI using Mame 0.90. You need to use 0.64’s “Play kaillera input” option.

I’m reluctant to post these though because the kaillera input does desync occasionally while you’re watching it, and the last thing I want is people going “Wow, these are horrible matches”, because of that.

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I have odd problems with recording. If I’m the one doing the recording, then some of my buttons (such as my kick buttons) just do not work. I hit them and my character does nothing. Oddly enough, my opponent does see me kick when I hit the button. This doesn’t happen if someone else hosts.

Kyokuji, if you want some recordings from kof2k2 against me, you’ll have to host yourself.

Edit: It is possible to convert input videos into avi files…I just don’t know how.

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I don’t convert inp to avi within mame, cause you can’t. If you try to convert a mame32k0.64 in mame32k.90 or some other version, then it won’t work. What i do is play the input back in mame32k0.64 and record the window with a 3rd party program heres a tiny example, i did with kawaks while in single player.

Kawaks uses less resources it seems than mame and i was able to record this while playing. In mame however things really slow down while playing if i try to record. My computer is a beast so i find this strange.So i have to record the inp first and play it back in mame and then record it. The hardest thing about this process is finding a good codec to record in, after a little bit of downloading and tweaking i can record at about 10mb per match(applies to ST only, haven’t tried other games) with pretty good quality. Then the time i convert to wmv the file size get further reduced while still maintaining watchable quality.

Also here are some mame matches i had with FatherBrain recorded in mame.
http://www.shoryuken.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2629272#post2629272

r3ko