Recording emulator video..

[yuppicide]

Is there anyway I can use an NES emulator and save my gameplay to video?! I'd like to take a video of something I do and upload it to the web for people to see.

[Flack]

Many NES emulators include an option to record video in them. That's probably the simplest method. The only other method I know of is going to involve a lot of cables, a VCR, and a video capture card ...

[Dones]

You are going to have to do some research of your own yuppicide. I don't know of any recent emu that does what you ask. Nesticle records movies, but as far as I know it is just a log of player input and memory data. I think their movie format was adopted by a couple of other emus, so it is sort of a unofficial standard.

 

You can also do it the hard way: recording video output to a video capture card, dvd recorder or vcr.

[NE146]

You outta check out those perfect speed runs and find out what emulator they used to create them. Generally they used save states until they finished a stage perfectly and managed to capture it all on video output.. it's quite amazing actually.

[yuppicide]

Thanks for the info. I'll try the NES one you mentioned. I'm not doing anything super uber hard or anything, but I can score over 20,000 points on the first stage of Mappy without losing a life and 20k is where you get the extra life. I can do it everytime without fail.

 

I figured I'd record it and post it on the net.

[Flack]

nester, nnnester, and nnnesterj all record AVI videos of gameplay.

[yuppicide]

I was just playing Mappy.. haven't really played in awhile.

 

I can probably beat most people using only 1 life, and not doing the bonus levels. I hate the bonus levels! They annoy me. I just press right to fall through and get that one balloon on the way, then get right back to the action.

 

If I recall, I could be wrong, but I think the arcade machine (not sure about NES version) flipped after level 30 or something like that, but I just played my NES version to level 32 and no flip back to level 1.

 

I just played to level 31 without using a life. That's when I started to lose my extra lives.. I think you get them at 20,000 and 70,000.

[spacecadet]

You are going to have to do some research of your own yuppicide. I don't know of any recent emu that does what you ask. Nesticle records movies, but as far as I know it is just a log of player input and memory data.

 

Yeah, and this is not really a movie. If you're lucky, it looks the same as when you were actually playing... but it's not a .wmv file or something that you can actually view in a media player, and it may or may not look exactly like what you did when you were playing. (btw, this is the same method most modern games that have an "instant replay" function use - I've seen some strange things in certain driving games when the replay gets an input timing slightly off or the physics are such that things don't always work out the same way every time.)

 

I honestly don't think there's an easy way to do what the original poster really wants, if what he really wants is to take an actual movie. I'm sure the perfect run-throughs posted on the web were done with video capture and then edited - that is probably the easiest way. To actually capture real video while you're playing takes some specialized hardware.

 

Most of the videos you see of games being played on the PC even from actual game publishers are captured with an analog capture card. It's stupid, but to do real-time digital capture does require a special setup and it's often just easier (and cheaper) to do it the stupid way.

 

You could try doing an analog capture of a replay movie, which would at least mean you'd only have to concentrate on playing, then worry about recording it once you've got things the way you like them. Still, I'd always worry that my replay movie wouldn't match up exactly with what I'd actually done originally. And you'd need an analog capture card if you don't already have one.

[spacecadet]

Sorry, I should add that there are software programs out there that will do digital motion capture - badly. I've tried these and you're lucky if you get 1 or 2 frames per second on even the fastest consumer PC. It takes more than software to do this kind of thing well.

 

(just to head off any replies in that direction...)

[yuppicide]

Worst comes to worst, my Game Axe portable NES has a A/V out. I have to get a cable for it.

 

WAIT! STUPID ME! I have the PERFECT solution!

 

I just bought a 20 gig mp3/video player with a 3.5" screen. Am waiting it's arrival. Not only can it play avi/divx, wmv, mpg, mp3, jpg, etc, but it has a timer funcation and can be used as a recorder! It has standard RCA inputs.

[chairmonkey4406]

You could just use Fraps"]http:fraps.com]Fraps which captures video of anything on your computer.[/url]