UPDATES: I've completley finished testing for Sega Genesis/Sega CD/32x, TurboGrafx 16/TurboGrafx CD and Sega Master System/Game Gear/SG-1000. This includes all of the foreign, translated, update hacks and any other roms that will be included in the Xtras. If anyone needs a datfile to make videos let me know.

I'm procrastinating now. I'm working on Gameboy and it's going to take me a few weeks/months I'm afraid. I saved the biggest and toughest job for testing for last (at least as far as the most popular systems go).

I've got about 400 games tested and the titleshots and action shots for them too. Just about 300 more for Gameboy.... then about 600 for gameboy color, and another 1000 for gameboy advance..........

.........

How would I go about making screenshots work with xports ST emu?

I have all the screens from the gamebase. Do they have to be named 0001.png? and in a folder.

Is there some way to batch convert ?

Well I would say download my Gamebase ST picture pack from the xbox repository, but unfortunately that site is no more...

Yes funkydub,

Unfortunately, you need to have the set converted first before it works. I don't know if I'll ever get around to the Atari ST though, so that one might be left undone until somebody else works on it. I've got a lot of other emulators to complete right now and it's not even on my radar. Hopefully somebody reads this that grabbed madmabs old version of this that isn't available anymore

~Rx

Hey MM,

I know you said you had some cart art for Gameboy.... do you know where I can find full GBC and Gameboy boxart sets? I don't need GBA boxart. I'm about halfway done with GBC testing now.

Thanks,
~Rx

Hey Rx,

I have a pack of GB/GBC snaps-titles-and box art. It has about 250 GB and 250 GBC boxes (that aren't duplicates of themselves.) I got it from a usual place, and you probably already have it.

Nice work on the testing! You are getting through it surprisingly fast (due to your dedication )

EDIT: Oh, also my personal collection of 250 (go figure) GBC box scans that I hand picked from moby games.

Hook me up since you have stuff you got on your own too?

Yeah.... testing is going pretty fast. A lot of GBC games seem to run just a little slow, and about 20 of them flicker if there is too many sprites on the screen. I'm wondering if there is a way around that. Overall though GBC is pretty good compatibility wise. I did a lot of the setup before so it was just a matter of running through them now. I've finished my first run through them, so I have about 100 or so to still go through.

Then it's on to the GBA which has a crazy amount of 1,000 or so games. That will probably take at least two weekends by itself.

Later,
~Rx

OK, I'll send you what I have put together. You want that pack too?

Sure... zip it all together. Thanks man. I'll probably get around to doing them tonight when I get bored of testing.

Later,
~Rx

Here you go Rx : MMQuestion - GB Art Collection
I just checked the "pack" and the box art doesn't have very good quality , but all my stuff is good.
I got every cart "mobygames" had for GB and GBC (pretty sure). I stopped around "T" for GBA. I also got things from other places, including Ebay and then edited many, (cropping for shape and fixing color /contrast on ones that made them look better) in my collection.

Thanks man,

I pretty much have GB and GBC done now as far as testing goes. Got a titleshot and action shot for all of them along the way too. Tons of work left on the artwork though. I should have an idea of how many videos need to be made in the near future.




I want us to focus on just the headline info in the synopsis for now. The text information can come later. I have some great ideas of what we can do with sorting, but it won't work until we have a basic synopsis that's similar to what we have for MAME emulators now. We'll save the rest of the text stuff for last. I'll figure out how it should go from here out in a few days and post it on the synopsis thread. Don't undo any of the work you've already done though. I will add any full synopsis stuff that somebody already did.

Later,
~Rx

Sorry if this question has been asked before, but I don't feel like reading through 41 pages right now

I am really interested in having a look at those lists, but it seems that you must have a Google account to look at them, no matter which system I click, I am asked to log into a Google account or to create one.
Is there a way to avoid this, I don't want a Google account just for looking at those emulator lists and also otherwise am not interested in having such an account?

I don't know. I have them shared which should mean that everyone has the ability to view them. If not, maybe you need to have an account. Nothing I can do about it then. I used to have them open for editing by anyone, but somebody vandalized one of them so now they're all only viewable by anyone.

The lists work without an account,
Rx, has not given access to the "SG-1000-MasterSystem/GameGear" and some of the "Other Emulators" .
(Rx, you probably just over looked the option on those.)

Althena, try any others, I am sure they will work, and Rx will fix the ones that don't soon.

Hey guys,

Just thought I'd let you know I've been using the new GBA beta and Gilles dynamic skin for testing and it works great. The only lock ups I get are due to the roms themselves being bad, I believe. Nothing acting funny or buggy with either the emu or the skin from what I can tell. I'm not testing synopsis, document viewing, rewind right now, but as far as navigating through the menus and selecting games, taking screenshots and saving/loading games everything seems to be working just fine.

Great job guys!

BTW Gilles, I did not experience any problems at all porting my personally saved configuration from emu to emu and starting it right up. We did it! It works just like I wanted it to now.


UPDATES:

I've basically finished testing and collecting action/title screenshots for GB and GBC now. I've also done the same for 200-300 GBA games. Who knows how many I'll actually get to before I quit for the night. It's going better than I thought... I'm really spending a lot more time on it than I thought I would... but I have taken breaks and played a few of the GBA games. Some of them are really great. Nice to see some games I'd actually want to play after the tedium of testing GB and GBC with about 95% of the library something I probably would not play with all the other games and systems we have out there.

I've got a 4 day weekend coming up and I hope to wrap up the artwork and testing for all of Gameboy then. This is really exciting because (minus arcade games) this marks the last major emu that needed to be tested and it is also by far the emu with the largest library.

Just need more help with videos while I wrap that up and get to work on manuals and synopsis collecting.

HELP US MAKE SOME VIDEOS!!!!!!!!!

Rx any way i can play with the betas?

I tried now all of them and the ones not working are: Game Gear, Master System, SG 1000, Apple II, MSX, Chip 8, VIC-20, MS-DOS, Mac Plus, MSX 2, NeoGeo Pocket, Odyssey 2, Pokemon Mini, Sharp X68000, Sinclair, Spectravideo, Texas Instruments, T07, Vectrex and Supervision.

All the others work now what is a little strange because I am sure that I tried yesterday for example NES or Super NES and I couldn't view even one list.

But right, like Mega Man (?) said, I hope the ones not working can be fixed, if some work I hope all can in the future

Hey Rx, Awesome job! You are on a roll.
l guess it's about time for myself to bring the thunder... again

Hey Althena, I believe that the ones you listed haven't been activated because a lot of the testing hasn't been completed on those (less main) systems. But, the main ones work for sure.

Yeah... I was really kicking ass the last few days and last weekend on the GB. I didn't keep the artwork synched up as I was going along though, so fixing that is going to be a huge project in itself. That's cool though. I just keep thinking that it's the last major popular emulator I have to do. Many of the lesser known ones have small libraries so they should be easy to knock out in a few weekends. The only things that will be left then for testing and artwork are the computer systems and Intellivision, neither of which I'm very inclined to take on at the moment. (Of course there's the PSX and N64 as well, but we know how those are going to go)

Maybe an Atari ST fan or a X680000 fan will help out in that area on their own while we're doing other work.

Major thing we need the focus on now, besides videos of course, is the Headline information for the synopsis. We can always easily go back and add text and web url's later. Let's focus on just the top info like this:

*
[CRCs]
[GAME TITLE]
Category:
Genre:
Release Year:
Developer:
Publisher:
Players:
*

*

Example:




Right now this is by far the most important thing to do with the synopsis. If we get this information for all of the roms in a set, we should be able to do all kinds of things with the sort function. I really want to test this out on an emulator in the near future. I'm hoping that since I kept every romname unique, we can just house them all (minus the Pr0n and non-working games) in the same folder like MAME. This should be possible if we add the "Category" line and have good identifiers for each rom.

Here's my list for the NES Categories:

Licensed - US
Licensed - Light Gun
Licensed - Multi-Game-Carts
Licensed - Europe
Licensed - Japan
Licensed - Australia
Licensed - Chinese
Licensed - Russian
Translated
Unlicensed
Prototype
Pirate
Pirate - Fighting
Hacks - Castlevania
Hacks - Final Fantasy
Hacks - Super Mario Brothers
Hacks - Zelda
Hacks - Other
Famicom Disk System - Translated
Famicom Disk System - Untranslated
Pr0n
Non-Working Games

I'm hoping that when we have this document complete and working properly, we can somehow make a feature that you can turn "on" or "off" different categories so you can sort by whichever categories you desire to see. Of course Pr0n and non-working games are off by default. That, coupled with lockdown mode, would be a good way to keep anyone who shouldn't be seeing that stuff from seeing it. (Especially if there was a rudimentary password protection put in place, like a 4 digit number to unlock "lockdown" mode)


Let me know what you think of this MM. I think it's great you're helping out with the project so much. I wish there were 10 of you so we could get those videos done quick too. We'll get them though.

~Rx

I really like the sort function idea. The synopsis format looks great to me. I have completed V - Z and I should be sending it to you soon. It has basically all the info already, and I like the info I have gathered for them. I will make them like you stated (with only the essentials) from here on out, but when you get mine, I would like you to look it over and tell me exactly what you change, so I can perfect my methods (and possibly later help with getting the rest of the info for them.)

All these option ideas seem great.
Thanks Rx

Love to see what you've done so far man. I knocked out the CRC purge and setting up the fields on I through part of K last night and will wrap up K and L and F tonight when I get some downtime. I gotta add the full M in that lawdawg did when I get a chance too. That one takes a bit longer since there is editing and fact checking involved since they're full synopsis. Maybe if I get enough done this week I will re-upload the synopsis as-is and you can try it out with all the new additions from the last one. I just don't like sending too many emails from work, so I just kind of save what I'm going to work on next into a Google document, bring it up at work and import it into the master file. The more I'm sending that out the more possibility I might get confused and do work on the wrong synopsis and find myself fixing stuff because I was stupid. (I would blame it on the beer, of course )

I think purging the CRC's is what I'll focus on from this point, until I start collecting the headline information when that's done. I want to have my hands-on experience with the CRC stuff for the most part because I know how easy it can be to add one or two stray CRCs to the tail end of a rom that really belong with the next rom if you're not careful. It shouldn't matter in the end since most people will be using the Xtras with either yours or my datfiles, which will be tested out, but if somebody has an oddball rom down the road the synopsis and sort functions might label the rom wrong if people weren't really careful when purging all that extra info when making the CRC collections for hte headlines. It can be fixed easily when spotted, but you know how I like things as perfect as I'm willing to put the effort in to making them.

After that, I think I'll go on to the next system (either Genesis or SNES) and collect the headline information for all those roms the same way...... and the next and the next and the next. I know we'll eventually get the synopsis information eventually filled out, but I'd really like to have a working sort system by release time and a majority of that work lies on us to have ready for when madmab starts implementing that change. The text in the synopsis is great and there is tons of cool information to learn about the background of the games when making them, but it's become a low priority to me compared to the sort functions and the extensive work needed to prep for them on all of the systems combined. (I've basically added another 4 months to my own involvement in this project, or subtracted another 4 months of my life if you're a pessimist about it)

Later man..... Love your help on the synopsis, but here's me hoping you jump on them Genesis videos soon. I hate having my #1 video guy doing grunt work like me.

~Rx

Rx, I understand.

I have been thinking about this, actually, and since you have been so adamant and efficient with the synopsis, I will return to making the videos soon.

I enjoyed working on the synopsis. It was a new experience that I am glad I figured out how to do and be apart of. You have been burning through them and I assume you will continue to do so with the other systems. Also, you have taken on the final editing and organizing, so we can get them all right. Plus, as you can see, there are more people willing to help with the synopsis than (lets just say) other things. Especially with "your" best judgment being able to keep them all in good form and order. The synopsis is gonna get done just fine and it's gonna be bad ass.

Question for madmab: When I made the NES videos, I used essentially the WME batch that Horscht made. But, when I saw the other videos made long ago elsewhere (emumovies), It seemed as though the sound was louder and maybe better, than what I made. I say "maybe" because, who ever made them used some kind of treble boost and though it is louder, it doesn't sound natural, (relative to the actual game.)

So, do you have any tips for a median I could use to improve my videos sound?

Thanks
PS. All of this is grunt work at one point or another Rx... no "one" can get this project where we want it, without team work. (I believe that is part of the beauty)

Hi Guys

going back to my ST question, I managed to track down the xbox art convertor pack but one small problem is this.



I'm not sure how to get 6 pictures off the same game into one folder, it makes a folder for each picture

Hey funkydub,

Few things....

1) Yuck man.... ya gotta fix those names and make them look good. I can't tell you how much time I've invested on the systems getting good looking romnames that are properly capitalized. Using the names like that gets the games working with the screenshots for sure, but the romlist isn't very pretty to look at. Something to consider before doing any more work.

2) It's easy to take it for granted, but I named every single screenshot/boxart/cartart in my packs by hand. That means that I made the romfolders with matching romnames, and then I renamed the artwork 0001, 0002, 0003, 0004 and put them in the folders. I did get much faster at the process as I went along, but it still is a staggering amount of work, and I'm really glad that it's about 90% done with the systems that I plan on working on. Since I haven't ever logged my time working on any part of the project so far, I couldn't tell you exactly how long this has taken me, but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody told me that I've spent more than 500 hours doing the artwork alone. (Thank God for Beer!)

All that being said, I'd consider yourself pretty lucky to have found that program just for naming your folders for you. I did all that by hand, so having that ahead of time would have been nice.

Sorry man... I'm sure that's not the answer you're looking for, but I'm pretty much the guy who did all of that for the other systems so far, so I'm about as much of an expert on the subject as you'll find here. If you do find a better way, let me know. I'll hate you forever for finding an easy way to do all of this after I did 90% or more of my work already.

Later,
~Rx

All I've done pretty much is got the screens & games for the ST gamebase.

I could probably live with just one screenshot for each game but I thought maybe you were using this program to do it, which I think was specificaly made for xport emus. I havn't really got the spare time to go renaming all by hand but I do appreciate the work you've done on the other systems like the nes, snes.

Xport_Xbox_Screen_Pack_Convertor by Sludge & Hybrid

This is the program to convert if you don't allready have it.

In the about box it does say it will convert 0001.png 0002.png etc.

I've only tried it with gif's, maybe I need to convert them to png first. If I do get round to it I'll convert all and make some dats if you're not interested in doing the ST.

Hey f-dub,

Hell yeah if you want to do that work I'll put it up here. Seriously though, you're doing the emu a great service if you clean up those names. You could use my work as an example. You'll be real glad when you did and it's all done and you're looking at it.

I was cool with just a title shot myself at first too. I didn't even know that there were some packs out there so I hand made titleshots for every game out there for every console emu on the Box. By the time that Nes made video previews possible for ZSnes I had already done box/cart/title/action artwork for NES, but that sealed the deal that I'd make it all someday. It totally has transformed the way that emus work and gives it the professional finishing touch emulation needed all these years.

We're getting much closer to that.

Thanks for the link. I'll have to check it out and see what I was missing. Actually, now that I think of it, it probably wouldn't save me much time since I'd be renaming the artwork before I made the folders anyways, but it would have been nice to experiment with anyways much earlier on.

When you convert, get a batch converter that will do all the files for you in a minute or so. Don't do them by hand. I use a program called Digitope Picture Converter. I'd post the link, but it's licensed software so I'll just let you google it and check it out or look for an alternate converter. It will save tons of time.

Let me know how it's going and if you get stuck on something that I can help with.

Later,
~Rx

I already went thru the Atari Gamebase a few years ago and split up the screenshots from the box-art, etc. As well as renaming the ROMS themselves. It's sitting on my hard drive. The only bad thing is alot of them use hard disk images which Winston does not support.

Plus Winston does not support ZIP files. Either that or picking files from a ZIP. I forget which.

Well when I had the same issue with the colecovision (adamX) videos I made I just took the files and ran them thru either NeroVideo or Pinnacle Studio and manually bumped up the volume. Although I'm sure there are other programs that can do the same. As long as you can save in an .avi format that the batch files can convert to .wmv then you should be ok..

ok. Well I still need to fool around with it more but here is what I found out about WinstonX.

The latest build is 0.5 which I think is the last version released.

Gamebase games that have hard drive files usually look like this inside the zip...

Hardisk.zip
BOOT.ST
GamebaseST.txt

If you take the Hardisk.zip file and extract it into the "D:\stdisks\hard_drv" directory. Then you can access that from the Gem desktop (in the emulator) as "Drive C". You can then manually go in and run the game.

For example "Elvira II - The Jaws of Cerebus" Hardisk.zip data will have the following directory after extracting and copying. "D:\stdisks\hard_drv\ELVIRA2".

You can then use the GEM desktop to go into that directory and run the "runit.prg" file and all will be good.

This is with WinstonX as it is.

In Winston for the PC if you "attach" the BOOT.ST file as drive 1 and boot the ST it will actually load the game automatically if you are using TOS 1.04. I'll have to check and see if other versions of TOS will work as well.

I tried this with WinstonX but for some reason it did not work, even though it is based off of version 0.5. It's possible I foobared the process so I'll try again later.

Anyways I'm gonna do some more research. I may (possibly) be able to just have WinstonX autounzip everything for the user or something like that. But I don't think the ZIP code it uses can read the path information in a zip file. I'll have to experiment a bit more before I come up with a solution.

I've not tried the hd games on winston. I just stuck with the normal disks. Have you got all the screens sorted for them?

Alright I figured out how it works now. If you wanna play a hard disk game you need to do the following. But it will only work with one game at a time for now.

Gamebase games that have hard drive files usually look like this inside the zip...

Hardisk.zip
BOOT.ST
GamebaseST.txt

Take the Hardisk.zip file and extract it into the "D:\stdisks\hard_drv" directory.

For example "Elvira II - The Jaws of Cerebus" Hardisk.zip data will have the following directory after extracting and copying. "D:\stdisks\hard_drv\ELVIRA2".

Take your Tos 1.04 file (you do have that right?) and name it TOS_A.ROM (or _B, or _C, or _D). Why WinstonX uses these crazy names is beyond me. Set your game configuration to use TOS_A.ROM (or whatever you named it).

The game should automatically loads. It gets the info from the desktop.inf file in the hard_drv directory.

What I'm gonna do for a future release of WinstonX is have it autounzip the HARDISK.zip file if it finds it and then "point" the emulator hard drive to that data.

To answer your question concerning the screenshots. I split them up between title, screenshot, and front/back box art. I did not keep any "extra" screenshots that may have existed. They were named after the ROM names. The user could then run a utility that would name them in the format the emu expects, thus allowing them to pick the picture number they wanted to assign them. For example some people wanted their title screen 1st, whereas others wanted their screenshot 1st.

I also hved .dat files to help match the ROMS with the names I used, thus making things easier.

Nice job madmab,

All I'd have to add is that I would make Boxart 0001, titleshots 0002, action shots 0003 and cart/diskart 004. On games where there is no boxart (which may be all of these games), I would still make the title shots 0002 and the action shots 0003 to match the rest of the Xtras.

I'm doing this on every emu in the hopes that we can choose to view or not to view different artwork while scrolling through the romlist. I figure since you've already found out how to sort the order by number, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to do this if we use the same numbers for the artwork across platforms. Somebody mentioned that having the videos makes the action shots redundant, which I tend to agree with, but not everyone will be using videos and after making all of them the idea of just deleting action shots doesn't appeal to me.

Wah?? hehe... I was just saying when I made the xbox filename compatible Gamebase stuff I did it in such a manner that they user could name them anyway they wanted (with the recommended tool of course!).

But if we decide to use these for our ResurrectionXtra's (highly likely now) then, yes, we can name them as you recommend.

I was talking more to him than you madmab. I just wanted to let him know how i've been doing the rest of the Xtras so if he goes to the trouble of doing the work it's like the rest of the Xtras.

Thought it would be cool to filter the type of preview artwork if we have a standard name for each type too.

Thanks madmab, I'll try some different things and make it work.

* Sega Genesis video making has commenced!
PS. I wish e51v50h was around to let me know what videos he has already done.

Maybe you should start with the more obscure ones and work your way back until he says which ones he's done.

Great to hear you're working on Genesis man. High quality work it's going to be.

Later,
~Rx

I never did get Horscht's "avi to wme" batch to work. I just used the "WME" profile (next to it) and did them individually. Due to the way I had my editing program setup, it was the only way I could do it any way. (unless I made a new batch file, which I have yet to learn how to do.)

The one I have is called "WMVXMV". That doesn't make sense.

I have the "app" "raw" and "converted" folders together. The instructions say to put the .avi's in the "raw" folder
and just click on the batch in the "app" folder. I do so, and nothing happens. I know you must have made this work, Rx. I am trying a new editing program too, and if it all goes well, I will make these easier on myself.

Can any or everyone help me figure this out?

Thank you.

For some reason that batch needs to be installed on the root C: directory. Just put the main folder on the C:
drive and it should work just fine for ya. Seems like you were doing everything else right.

Thanks Rx, it worked! But...

That batch adds "black space" to the sides of the videos.
If you make a vid with the emu (.avi) and open it in WMP, the video doesn't open full screen. it has "black space" on the sides that I believe is just "empty space" that will correct itself in another player (such as on the emulators)

But, If you take that same video and change the format (such as .avi to .wmv) It will make the "black space" part of the video and not just "empty space" (I think it has something to do with the dimensions of the vid changing) Horscht's batch has specific qualities (such as dimensions) and it made double the "black space" on the sides (permanently) leaving the video's (viewable picture) very narrow.

This is why I did them one by one. My editing program would make the "black space" permanent and then I would just crop each video properly within "WME". I think I will have to figure out how to make a new batch or just keep doing them individually.

Oddly enough, now that the nes Xtras have been released, I tried a video in WMP (made by someone else) and it opened the same way. (with the "empty space" on both sides). Since it was empty space, none of these have a problem reformatting to full screen inside the new xbox emulators. This confuses me, Rx, because didn't you use Horscht's batch to convert the avi to wme ?

I "will" get to the bottom of this!

Most of what you just said is beyond me MM... that's why we're lucky to have you around.

Yes, that is the program I used to convert over 700 SNES videos (and about 2000 plus other videos so far). I didn't change a thing to it since I did those. If you have any questions I would try PMing Horscht and asking him. I think he still comes around this site and may see your message.

In the mean time, I'd try it on, say 5 videos and then look at them within the emulator and see if they're messed up at all. I didn't have any problems with the SNES ones.

Good luck man,
~Rx

While you guys are all mingling over there in Xport land. I am trying to figure out this video stuff.
Lets just say: problem solved ...

...for now

Thanks for the pm's and the help everyone. This team is awesome!

Yeah man. Great team here. Gettin' more done all the time. (If horscht sees this, what's up man? Haven't heard from you in a while. Hope things are going well)

UPDATES: Finished basic synopsis headline fields for every included rom in the Xtras. I will begin working on filling that information in over the next couple of weeks. Don't edit the main document. If you have suggestions, let me know.

I also finished testing abotu 650 GBA games as well as got the title/action screenshots for them as well. It's by far the hardest emulator to do this with aside from Playstation. Hopefully I'll have it all wrapped up by the end of Feb. I've still got about 500 more to test at least, not including the translations and hacks, and alternate versions of non-working roms (which there have been an unusually high number of for GBA)

Later,
~Rx

Hi

I just got Megamans PM this morning asking me about my batch file.

It's been a while since I even saw it.

I myself lost interest in previews, tbh. I was happy to have all SNES previews and since that is pretty much the only emulator I use, I didn't realy felt too enthusiastic about doing other systems i never use. I have since then reformated my PC (twice) so I don't even have all the required tools installed anymore (And it was a bitch back then to get it working, I remember that graphically ).

Anyways, I still remember the dimensions we/I used.

SNES games have a resolution of 256x224 (NTSC) or 256x239 (PAL) (or 512x224/239 on high res games, which were rare). ZSNES' record function outputs videos at this size, that's why we made the profile use those dimensions (NTSC, 256x224). This kept the filesize as small as possible (to not blow up filesize by using twice the dimensions for example) and also proved to be of very good quality, because no stretching is applied to the source so no blurring.

I know that the NES Hardware has pretty much the same video output (256x224 NTSC, 256x240 PAL). If the NES emulator outputs a file with the dimensions of the real hardware (without black bars) my batch file or profile should output videos just as the SNES ones: correct aspect ratio, no black bars (note that 256x224 will look more square-ish than a standard TV i.e. it will have black bars left and right on a 4:3 TV/Monitor and even wider ones on 16:9), "visible" video size of 256x224 pixels etc.

given Megamans description, the emulator seems to output a 4:3 video with black bars already which would then need a revised profile to countermeasure these bars (make the profile crop them).

Finaly, keep up your work. While I am most likely not gonna have a use for it (I only have a full SNES and NES set on my xbox and only very few Genesis games) I am pretty sure other people like your work very much. I myself have abandoned the creation of videos for reasons i stated back then: I was putting more time into creating the videos than actualy playing the games.

PS Note that the Genesis has a resolution of 320 x 224 (NTSC) or 320 x 240 (PAL), so using the profile from my batch package would not be a good idea. You would need to create a new profile for that (possibly other systems)

Thanks Horscht very insightful!

So then, I can adjust the resolution in the WME profile (next to the batch) and the batch will read off of the profile. (thanks for listing the systems proper resolution)

Excellent! It is getting more and more clear to me. Now I can do these more accurately and with greater ease.

Thanks again

Yeah it sounds like all you need to do is find out the resolution of the recorded .avi files from the emu and adjust accordingly. Now ony if there was a way to automatically "bump up the volume" a little bit.

As for interest I understand. It always seems to be that way. My interest tends to lean towards the Pre-NES stuff, as well as the Atari ST, Amiga, and Dosxbox.

Well, the "Gens" emulator is outputting .avi's at 320 x 240. (I don't see a way to adjust this )
I have been making videos, few have full screen when viewed in WMP, most have a small horizontal line of black space on top and bottom, and about 1/3 of them (so far) have come out having the thick black space on the sides. (like the old nes ones)

I am doing nothing different between them. They all still state: 320 x 240. Maybe it's because some are PAL? maybe it is just the game itself? The ones like this, I crop individually.

If I run them through Horscht's batch, It will make them 320 x 224, (now that I modified it) and that will add black space to the top and bottom no matter what.

As for sound improvement, I have been boosting the clips sound by about 20% in my editing program. (I don't know if the compression and/or the batch will just set it back down again once i run them through. .

Horscht,

What's up man?



Haha.... yeah. Getting all that set up was a BITCH! I'd probably cry if my computer f'd up on me now before i finish the work since I smoked my short term memory away.



Very impressive. I don't even remember work last night now that I'm about 4 beers into it....



Ahhh yes, that's the reason. I'm pretty good about remembering names and giving thanks where it's due, but I forgot that you said that. I'm very guilty of that although I did finally play a game (Cryastalis on NES to completion, and quite a bit of time on some cool GBA games I never heard of because they were after my "time")

No worries man. Wasn't calling you out or nothing. To this day I still hold the work you did in very high regard and consider your video work a very high bar to match. Fortunately MM? seems very up to the task. As much work as I'm doing, I know I'll never be making videos or coding or making skins, so it's pretty awesome that there are others out there working on it too. Great team.

Good hearing from you. I didn't even know if you still came around anymore...

~Rx





Madmab,



Ideally, it would be awesome if we could "normalize" all audio to match the same maximum level without compromising quality. Then the emu-music could be set to match it exactly. (I've always wanted to patent a TV that kids could watch in the living room at night when parents are asleep that would make whispers loud enough to hear but reduce explosions right about the same volume so they didn't wake up the parents, without having to have the remote in your hand and constantly turn the volume down and back up again)

Ha old man! Making me feel young with my love for nothing older than a 5200 (Or is it really the same time and I'm now just feeling poorer since my parents would have never shelled out the money for a "PC" type gaming platform back in the day?)


Mega Man (?),

Maybe it's just me being non-picky for a change, but all of the pre-made videos I've ever converted from emu-movies for the project so far have gone through Horscht's batch and I've never noticed a single problem. This includes the Gen/32x/Sega CD ones (All the way down to the Vectrex ones that we don't even have a proper emu that could display them). Maybe I should send some Gen avi's your way and let you check them out. I'm curious to see if we have different results using the same batch. I doubt it, but much stranger things have happened in PC-Land.

Later guys. I got a big meeting tomorrow at work and gotta get my beauty rest. (Haha... I don't care. The meeting is meaningless and I'm just there for appearances )

~Rx

Hey guys,

I'm new here but have been lurking in and out of the forums here for a few years. I really like the project and hope you keep up the good work.

I'm trying to complete your NES rom set, and I've thrown every different NES rom collection that I've got at it (including TOSEC and the latest GoodNES set) and I'm still coming up with 132 reds. What really surprised me was that even really common games were coming up red such as Mighty Bomb Jack! I can't imagine a NES rom set without Mighty Bomb Jack!

I came across a post that mentioned that some of the roms the ressurection dats are based on may be dating back to 97 - 98. I was wondering if you have considered taking roms from the latest collections and using those in place of the older roms? That way it would make it easier for people to just run the Ressurection dats against GoodNES and be done with it. There probably aren't that many that would need to be updated.

-sl0ppy

You'll be happy to know that Mega_Man_(?) has already done the very laborious task of replacing any roms not found in the latest goodset with their more modern counterparts, and has also tested them to make sure they work like the older ones did.

Check IT out....

Happy to hear you're enjoying the work. Look for a public beta release by madmab in the relatively near future for the latest changes to mendafenx_nes. It's good to get yourself set up beforehand because you'll probably be spending way too much time playing with the new features to be organizing stuff.

I see you did your homework with the dates of some of my roms.... Heh... yep, some of them are really so old that they aren't even in the TOSEC database (I know this for a fact since I'm using their datfiles for the synopsis work). I've never noticed any problem with any of my older roms, and I did do testing on the non-working roms using newer ones and they didn't work either. If I find any problems or if any are reported with old roms that aren't found in new ones, I will replace my set with the new ones that MM? has used in his datfile. (I will probably keep the old ones though because they're almost like collector's items in a completley worthless way....

Not surprised you didn't see the alternate dats though. I should probably think of a better way of presenting my stuff here, given my limited abilities to do so on a message board.

Enjoy,
~Rx


P.S. Just want to say that this is really a great team to be a part of. All equal... all working on something that pushes the limits of what we can conceive and then sharing it with anyone who want it and inviting anyone to contribute in their own way, big or small.

We could use some teamwork like that in some other things in the world...

Glad to be a part of it here.


Thanks for the 3 NES videos Barbie_On_Weed and introducing me to Robocco Wars. Thanks Croc. for making the last 10 SNES videos and finally wrapping up that project so I could get it all uploaded here.

I can't remember every little thing that people have done to help (that's what the spreadsheets are for), but it's all one less thing that I have to do in the end and that means a lot to me. That's why after thinking about it for a while I've come public and have been releasing work that I've been doing for about 2 years on my own before I started this project in a public forum. Thanks to everyone who has contributed in any little way and to those who have dedicated large amounts of time and effort.

Imagine every hour spent by everyone who helps with this project.....

Now imagine somebody who would most likely spend an hour of their lives at some point doing all of that alone because nobody had done it yet......

Yep...... You guys (and gals?) are saving my life here......

And I thank you.

Here's to all of you,
~Rx

Thanks for all the info. Actually I did try MMQuestion RXtras NES Datfiles (12-18-08) against the latest GoodNES and Tosec set and am still coming up around 133 short, and still missing Mighty Bomb Jack. Maybe I am doing something wrong on my end?

Got a question about SNES. I've got ZsnexBox running, and I've downloaded all your sets (videos, rumbles, skins, etc). And I think that I've got most of it going, but I don't see the videos being used yet. I put them in the videos directory. Is this the right directory because it seems to be the place for storing video captures from the emulator. Or does ZsnexBox 3.5 not have any option for video previews yet?

Thanks,
sl0ppy