MAME Movie Maker released

[Buddabing]

Movies are being created fine, but the loop detection seems to be a problem for me on some games.

Aquajack is one.

[Silver]

Others, I'm not sure why the BIOS type screens are there.   MK series or radikalb.

If no loop is detected, it will cut out at the "maxmovielength" frame and start at the minmoviestart. So if its a long one it may just be not finding a loop?

[Silver]

If anyone else has ideas on other ways to detect the loops, or refinements or changes to the default options, LMK. If I can raise the percentage of games where the default settings work, it will save a bunch of effort for the end users.

This may not help the default settings, but for the games that cut out too early it could be handy to have an option to set the number of "matches" before ending. Deafult obviously is 1, but being able to cut out on the 2nd identical match could help some games.....

Just wanted to say I think the detection actually works much better than I thought it would for at this stage, especially after so many encoding issues!

One final thought. Before running an entire batch, which could take a week, try adding -ftr 100 to the mame command line in batch.bat and commenting out the virtual dub part. The run the whole batch, which will play every game in the list for 100 frames. Finally, remove the -ftr 100 from the batch.bat and uncomment out the virtual dub part. That way, the nvram files will be created and maybe some of these problems will be avoided.

Great suggestion -  I would actually use a different command line for mame so that you don't slow it down with png and wav capture. e.g.:

mame %1 -resolution %2 -ftr100

or something should fly through a bit faster (make sure the window option is still set in the ini file)

[Howard_Casto]

Out of curiosity, what settings are you guys running mame on when you capture?

[MPS]

Buddabing:

[Silver]

Actually no.... I have the resolution forced to 320 by 240  still 3fps average

And remember, my developer's pc is like a 2.6 gig with a radeon 9600 video card, so I don't think it's a resource thing. 

Hmmm, capturing the pngs/wavs does significantly slow things down - a lot of games can't do fullspeed when normally they could - but I've never had it that slow on an XP 2800.

What games are you trying?

On my work P4 2.8gig, onboard rubbish gfx, I get average 35fps in 1941 using buddabings mame.ini from above, and options:

mame 1941 -r 384x224 -makemovie -writewav 1941.wav

[Howard_Casto]

I've been trying cps1/cps2 games... i figured they look the best and require modest resources to run. 

I just tried 1941 with the settings you suggested... I'm getting 2.47 fps.

I hope you guys aren't trying to capture every single frame.  50% of the video cards out there (even really good ones)  can't handle more than 15 fps at native mame resolutions.  Or at least that's what the test's )p( and myself did found in the past.

[Silver]

I've been trying cps1/cps2 games... i figured they look the best and require modest resources to run. 

They would be slower, but I can't test till I get home from work.

I just tried 1941 with the settings you suggested... I'm getting 2.47 fps.

Hmm something is cleary amiss. Not quite sure where the slow down is. I presume it runs full speed when you do not use -makemovie. Does the rest of your system slow down? Is your harddrive light fully saturated?

I hope you guys aren't trying to capture every single frame.  50% of the video cards out there (even really good ones)  can't handle more than 15 fps at native mame resolutions.  Or at least that's what the test's )p( and myself did found in the past.

The mame patch captures every frame - this is not ideal in terms of speed, but even if buddabing only saved 1/2, mame still has to render every frame so it can perform the analysis (I believe). If saving 1/2 produces a huge speed boost then maybe Buddabing would change it.

However, we are ditching every 2nd frame during the encoding, so most of the avis are around 30fps (or half there native speed). I found that this looks great - again not really thinking of low end/textures. In terms of encoding, again its trivial to knock it down to 1/3 or 1/4 the original if it would help. Perhaps Buddabing can add this to the "256x256" option so that you can either have large 30fps avis or you can have 256x256 15fps ones.....

[Howard_Casto]

I've been trying cps1/cps2 games... i figured they look the best and require modest resources to run.

[Buddabing]

I've been trying cps1/cps2 games... i figured they look the best and require modest resources to run.

[Buddabing]

Buddabing:  Thank you very much for your hard work.

I'm trying this out for the first time.  Would it be possible for you or someone else with working knowledge of the Movie Maker to post a complete list of the necessary steps to make all of this work?  This thread is starting to get really long, and I am having some difficulty finding the information I need.

Thank you again.

The stuff you need to download is on the first post in this thread.

You'll also need two more files: batch.bat and makemovies.bat. Here's a sample batch.bat. Cut and paste into a file and modify.
@if not exist e:\mame\movies mkdir e:\mame\movies
@if exist e:\mame\movies\%1.avi goto end
time /T
@mame %1 -window -makemovie -resolution %2 -wavwrite %1.wav
@if not exist %1.vdb goto end
@\virtualdub\virtualdub /s"%1.vdb" /wait /x
@del %1.wav
@del %1.vdb
@del snap\*.png
@move /Y %1.avi e:\mame\movies
time /T
:end

The second file you need is called makemovies.bat, which calls batch.bat for each of your ROMs.

Here's a sample:
@call batch 005 224x256
@call batch 1941 224x384
@call batch 1943 224x256
@call batch 1944 384x224
@call batch 19xx 224x384
@call batch 2020bb 304x224
@call batch 280zzzap 256x224
@call batch 3countb 320x224
@call batch 3stooges 256x240
@call batch 3wonders 384x224
@call batch 40love 256x224
@call batch 4dwarrio 256x224
@call batch 4enraya 256x224
@call batch 4in1 224x256

You can generate your own makemovies.bat by using my ListGen utility, a link to it is in the first post of this thread.

HTH,
Buddabing

[sWampy]

Does anyone else run into games that seem to never finish? 

If it's not something that only happens on my 2 machines, an option to set a max time passage, not just frames, so you don't waste hours sitting on a game that runs at .1 frame per second, or whatever.

Silvers idea to go to a batch mode on virtual dub where it doesn't hang with dialogue boxes also seems like a good idea.

Making a dummy avi file if it either mame or virtualdub fails, or some other way the batch file can auto skip these next time it's run would be nice.  I sometimes have to break my batchfile to use the machine for some other purpose, and when I come back, I have to either edit the batch file to remove all the games that have failed, or reclose all the virtualdub error messages. 

[Buddabing]

Does anyone else run into games that seem to never finish? 

If it's not something that only happens on my 2 machines, an option to set a max time passage, not just frames, so you don't waste hours sitting on a game that runs at .1 frame per second, or whatever.

Silvers idea to go to a batch mode on virtual dub where it doesn't hang with dialogue boxes also seems like a good idea.

Making a dummy avi file if it either mame or virtualdub fails, or some other way the batch file can auto skip these next time it's run would be nice.  I sometimes have to break my batchfile to use the machine for some other purpose, and when I come back, I have to either edit the batch file to remove all the games that have failed, or reclose all the virtualdub error messages. 

Hmmmm. I don't ever get virtualdub problems anymore. Look at the sample batch.bat that I posted above. Make sure you have a line that says "if not exist %1.vdb goto end" . That should take care of the dialog boxes popping up.

I've got 1000+ videos now and I've restarted the makemovies.bat several times. It runs without stopping now.

[sWampy]

Hmm, I had missed the go to end before the virtual dub line.  That should fix those, I changed mine to go to failed and had failed copy failed.txt to %1.bad and at the top skipped the ones with a %1.bad file.   So it will skip all those quickly, unless  a new version comes out and I want to try the bad ones again.

I'm at almost 1300, and I've maybe had 20 hang in mame/take several hours, I'll try to notice the next time it happens what rom it is.  But it's pretty disgusting, when you get up in the morning, look and it's made it through 3 roms since you went to bed cause it hit some chd game marked as working, but that has been running for 6 hours and still hasn't done 10000 frames or whatever and exited.

I did have one this morning that did get some virtualdub error that wasn't caused by something other than not having a script,  I'll make a note of what it was if that happens again.

4.8 gigs of avi's and growing. ;-)

[big daddy]

<quote>
The stuff you need to download is on the first post in this thread.

You'll also need two more files: batch.bat and makemovies.bat. Here's a sample batch.bat. Cut and paste into a file and modify.
@if not exist e:\mame\movies mkdir e:\mame\movies
@if exist e:\mame\movies\%1.avi goto end
time /T
@mame %1 -window -makemovie -resolution %2 -wavwrite %1.wav
@if not exist %1.vdb goto end
@\virtualdub\virtualdub /s"%1.vdb" /wait /x
@del %1.wav
@del %1.vdb
@del snap\*.png
@move /Y %1.avi e:\mame\movies
time /T
:end

The second file you need is called makemovies.bat, which calls batch.bat for each of your ROMs.

Here's a sample:
@call batch 005 224x256
@call batch 1941 224x384
@call batch 1943 224x256
@call batch 1944 384x224
@call batch 19xx 224x384
@call batch 2020bb 304x224
@call batch 280zzzap 256x224
@call batch 3countb 320x224
@call batch 3stooges 256x240
@call batch 3wonders 384x224
@call batch 40love 256x224
@call batch 4dwarrio 256x224
@call batch 4enraya 256x224
@call batch 4in1 224x256

You can generate your own makemovies.bat by using my ListGen utility, a link to it is in the first post of this thread.
</quote>

First off, thanks for the work on this...works great on the few that I've tried.  For those like me that are a bit slow, you might want to add the above information to your first post...I couldn't figure things out until I read this part. 

Thanks again!

btw - anyone know of a good movie screensaver?  Be pretty neat to randomly cycle through different attract videos in full screen now that I have a pretty complete list

[Buddabing]

First off, thanks for the work on this...works great on the few that I've tried.  For those like me that are a bit slow, you might want to add the above information to your first post...I couldn't figure things out until I read this part. 

Thanks again!

Done, thank you for the suggestion and the kind words.

[Howard_Casto]

alright... i figured out the issues and you'll be glad to know you had nothing to do with it. 

First off, the new instructions on the first page helped out a lot.  Thanks for updating them.

I looked at the mame code a little and apparently autoframeskip (even when it's not being used)  totally looses it's count when a snapshot is taken.  Thus it thinks it's losing frames, skips and few, and the result is a severely choppy display.  When I installed your build, of course I simply used -cc to create an ini and that was turned on by default.  so I turned off autoframeskip and everything sped up to an acceptable level.  There were some other settings I found that greatly improved performance.  I think these settings should be added to your example bat file:

autoframeskip 0
syncrefresh 1
samplerate 22050
resamplefilter 0

(the latter is because, with wav recording you'll be doing triple audio processing, and with a cheap sound card it could slow your system)

and the optional (for better pcs)

triplebuffer 1
waitvsync 1



so all is well

this really seems to be shaping up.  Good job to all involved.

I'll test out those dx-friendly options later in the week and let everyone know how it turns out. I appreciate you adding them btw. 

And I didn't think about games you can't run full-speed, that's a good point.  But then I have to ask the quesiton.  Why would you bother to make a video of a game you can't possibly play? 

[Silver]

I did have one this morning that did get some virtualdub error that wasn't caused by something other than not having a script,  I'll make a note of what it was if that happens again.

I'd love to hear which rom(s) caused this error...  I think we have the encoding pretty much nailed down now.

[Silver]

I looked at the mame code a little and apparently autoframeskip (even when it's not being used)  totally looses it's count when a snapshot is taken.  Thus it thinks it's losing frames, skips and few, and the result is a severely choppy display.

Thanks for the mame tips....  Does throttle get confused by the same thing? I find setting it to 1 or 0 while using -makemovie has no effect whatsoever. My games either run at less than 100%, or dead on 100% - never seeming to go as fast as possible.

[sWampy]

Anyone have any suggestions for how to get as many rom dip switches set to play audio in attract mode as possible, without going in one by one and setting them?

[Buddabing]

Anyone have any suggestions for how to get as many rom dip switches set to play audio in attract mode as possible, without going in one by one and setting them?

I've looked at the code and it is possible to force all demo mode sound dip switches to be on. The code on how to do it is in the new validity check code.

I think I'll implement something to have an option to allow the user to force demo mode sound on, force demo mode sound off (my own personal preference), or to use the current dipswitch setting. This would be useful even out of the movie maker mode.

There are more than 2000 games with demo mode sound dip switches. It would be inconvenient to have to switch all of them.

Look for this change in the next version.

[2600]

Excellet. Great work Buddabing.

[sWampy]

Anyone have any suggestions for how to get as many rom dip switches set to play audio in attract mode as possible, without going in one by one and setting them?

I've looked at the code and it is possible to force all demo mound sound dip switches to be on. The code on how to do it is in the new validity check code.

I think I'll implement something to have an option to allow the user to force demo mode sound on, force demo mode sound off (my own personal preference), or to use the current dipswitch setting. This would be useful even out of the movie maker mode.

There are more than 2000 games with demo mode sound dip switches. It would be inconvenient to have to switch all of them.

Look for this change in the next version.

Cool, I usually leave them off, but it sure would be better to make the movies with sound, then let the frontend enable/disable sound, rather than having a lot of soundless avi files that need redoing if you ever deside you want sound.

[Howard_Casto]

That's definately good news...  something of note though is that all games with internal settings menus generally have the demo sound option in there, instead of the mame dip menu.  Some examples are all capcom games, all neogeo games and most model 1, 2 ect games. 

In other words, all the games with the really cool intros have to be adjusted manually.  Fortunately, most of them also have dmeo sounds turned on by default.    Of course, someone could hack the nvram/cfg files of each game. .....

[Nailz]

Awesome work on this!!!!!  I think this thread is worthy of being sticky....  No, not that kind of sticky... perverts!   

[Buddabing]

I've looked into the turning on demo sound issue, and it turns out that games that have dipswitches for controlling demo sound must have the dipswitch set by default or else the validity checks will fail. That means that no games have a dipswitch setting for demo sound that is off by default. So the 2000 games with demo sound dipswitches already have demo sound on, unless the user has changed it.

Therefore there will not be a code change for this issue.

I've completed my stress test of generating all the videos. I used MAME 0.89, -movievideo 2 and filtered out duplicate games and pr0n with ListGen. Result: 2084 videos, a little less than 25 gig of space used.
Top 5 disk space used:
propcycl 342 meg
toobin 212 meg
f1en 105 meg
cyberbt 103 meg
karianx 88 meg

The stress test ran all the way through without any stops caused by VirtualDub. It passed missing ROMs gracefully. I did stop it several times during the run. It took right at one week to complete, including stoppages.

I'm still checking to see if there is a way to turn on demo sound in games without the demo sound dipswitches. Next, I'll delete the 25 gig of movies and generate them again with -movievideo 3 to see how much space is saved.

Regards,
Buddabing

[Howard_Casto]

Just one more correction to your faq.  I wondered why I wasn't geting any compression and it turns out, if you don't have the xvid codecs installed, virtualdub doesn't error out and just makes an uncompressed video.  Also you say that xvid comes with wmp10....  to my knowledge it doesn't, and even if it did 90% of your divx codecs overwrite it anyway.  I found a site that has several to choose from, and they take over divx compression as well, thus keeping everyone from loosing functionality. 

http://www.divx-digest.com/software/xvid.html

I hope that helps everyone. 

[Buddabing]

Just one more correction to your faq.

[Buddabing]

I've uploaded a new version of my MAME build of MAME 0.90. The only thing changed is that the hard-coded snap directory has been changed to whatever is specified in the snapshot_directory MAME parameter.

I didn't change my version 0.89 because my source for 0.89 is currently in a state of "flux".

[donnyj]

Ok, I thought I was smarter than this but I guess I'm not

[Buddabing]

Ok, I thought I was smarter than this but I guess I'm not

[Buddabing]

Hello,

I made a small change to ListGen. I added the -showusage flag which will dump out the list of options and their meanings just like MAME does. I also made the default front end moviebatch and the default output makemovies.bat.

Hopefully this will help out people attempting to make movies.

[donnyj]

The included .ini file is still set at output.txt and plaintext

Hello,

I made a small change to ListGen. I added the -showusage flag which will dump out the list of options and their meanings just like MAME does. I also made the default front end moviebatch and the default output makemovies.bat.

Hopefully this will help out people attempting to make movies.

[donnyj]

Thank you VERY much for your kind reply 

The problem with ALL the snaps came with the line in your .bat file from the first post "@del snap\*.png"

One possible suggestion, allow saving the pngs with zero compression, should be a bit faster

Is there an easy way to launch mame and virtualdub in the background?

Thanks for such a great project!!!!

The first thing to do is to check and make sure ListGen knows where MAME is. Edit your listgen.ini and make sure that the rompath and mamepath variables are set correctly. If your MAME executable is not named "mame.exe", then put a line with the correct name:

mamename mamepp.exe

or whatever your MAME executable is named. Also, by default, the output is named "output.txt", not "makemovies.bat". So change that line too. Make sure the "frontend" parameter is set to "moviebatch". That may be your problem right there. 

Gameplay.ini is not strictly necessary unless you want to filter with it. It is bundled with the Kymaera front end. You'll need to copy it whereever your ListGen is.

The program shouldn't delete all your snapshots, it will, however, delete the snapshots with the first three chararacters of the name matching your rom name.

SQL=<S>tructured <Q>uery <L>anguage. It's a widely-used way of interacting with databases. The filter.sql contains several examples of different filters. If you want to play with the filters, just uncomment out the one you want to use and comment out everything else by putting two dashes -- at the beginning of the line.

HTH,
Buddabing

[Buddabing]

Is there an easy way to launch mame and virtualdub in the background?

Yes. Silver worked out a method.

In your batch.bat, use this to launch MAME in the background:
@start /min /wait mame %1 -window -makemovie resolution %2 -wavwrite %1.wav

For VirtualDub:
@start /min /wait \virtualdub\virtualdub /s"%1.vdb" /wait /x

I removed the del snap\*.png from the batch.bat. Thank you for that correction.

[Silver]

One possible suggestion, allow saving the pngs with zero compression, should be a bit faster

Thats an interesting thought. I'm not sure which library mame uses for png support (libpmg? I'm guessing) or how easy it would be to switch off..... It would increase the temp disk space used obviously, but no impact in the long run.....

[Buddabing]

One possible suggestion, allow saving the pngs with zero compression, should be a bit faster

MAME uses the standard libpng library. Compression is done with the standard zlib library.

IMO using uncompressed pngs may be faster computation-wise but will take more I/O time. Plus, standard libpng doesn't support it and it would have to be hooked in.

So I don't think it's a good idea.

BTW, the del snap\*.png is necessary in order to delete the snapshots. If it's taken out then gazillions of snapshots will accumulate there.

[Silver]

Hmmm maybe it would be best to use a seperate directory for the temp pngs than the mame snap dir if thats where everyone keeps there frontend snaps?

Although it may be easier for people to say rename there snap dir while making movies....

[Buddabing]

Hmmm maybe it would be best to use a seperate directory for the temp pngs than the mame snap dir if thats where everyone keeps there frontend snaps?

Although it may be easier for people to say rename there snap dir while making movies....

Another option would be to change the delete step of batch.bat slightly:

@del snap\*0?.png

This will not delete pacman.png but will delete pac00000.png and all the other movie snapshots.

It'll delete 720.png, that's relatively minor "collateral damage".

[donnyj]

Why the resistance to just use a separate directory?  Then it won't delete ANYTHING it shouldn't?

Just a thought...

also, when I attempt to compile mame with the changes, I get a mame that recognizes the new switches but doesn't act on them???

What am I doing wrong?