MAME Movie Maker released

[papaschtroumpf]

different users may have different requirements as far movie size or encoding, but I'm sure a lot of people would love to not make their movie themselves and just download the finished product. For example even after Buddabing realeased MMM people were asking about the attract video torrent.

On the other side, anyone wanting to host a full set needs to realize the storage and especially bandwidth requirements.
I'd recommend doing "packs" using bittorrent for distribution. For example having the majongh and adults games in separate packs since most people aren't interested in them.
The nice thing about doing a torrent is that not every bit of bandwidth comes from *your* server, and as you do updates, people can still use their old torrent and it will "sync up" and download only the parts that are missing while providing uploads to others for the part that they already have.

Anyway, I compile my own MAME and I want to use the built in CPViewer, so I'll keep using BuddaMame. It gives me total control over the kinds of video I want to make.

[zander]

OK i understand how big a full set of vids may get. I saw something about ssf discussed earlier. How about if someone (who has the most vids completed already) maintains a database listing of game, resolution, startframe, endframe.  A tested gold standard default list if you will... so others can tweak the list of course but at least we will have a standard to work from. I think having the start and end is important for attracts with non standard loops plus you can cut out any black intro frames, maybe make the overall size smaller, it adds up.  Did anyone do this already? If so where could I get the list. Maybe we should host the list...?
Thanks keep up the cool work.

[Buddabing]

OK i understand how big a full set of vids may get. I saw something about ssf discussed earlier. How about if someone (who has the most vids completed already) maintains a database listing of game, resolution, startframe, endframe.

[zander]

Buddabing and silver this is a great thing maintaining the list. It will save many of us time from trying to figure it out.

However when i go to

http://www.silverfoxy.plus.com/AttractVideos.htm

and click the download link i get a file that has only 10 items.

Then if i type this in the browser
http://www.silverfoxy.plus.com/ssf.txt

I get a bigger list  but not still not all the parents. Am I missing something here?

[Buddabing]

Buddabing and silver this is a great thing maintaining the list. It will save many of us time from trying to figure it out.

However when i go to

http://www.silverfoxy.plus.com/AttractVideos.htm

and click the download link i get a file that has only 10 items.

Then if i type this in the browser
http://www.silverfoxy.plus.com/ssf.txt

I get a bigger list

[Popcorrin]

Silver or Buddabing, did you guys figure out why mmm videos were not compatible with the 3dArcade frontend?   Did that get fixed?

[dbaleckaitis]

I would like to start off with a big thank you for this; it's a great addon when using MAMEWAH.....

However I seem to be having one problem, Virtualdub doesn't seem to be cutting the videos.

[Buddabing]

I would like to start off with a big thank you for this; it's a great addon when using MAMEWAH.....

However I seem to be having one problem, Virtualdub doesn't seem to be cutting the videos.

[dbaleckaitis]

That worked......Thank you.

Dan

[papaschtroumpf]

the output from listgen is empty.
listgen.tmp contains thousands of lines like this:

005|005|005|1981|Sega|raster|vertical|good|preliminary|preliminary|joy4way|224|256|0|3|4|2|1|2|segar.c||||||||0|0|60.000000|1|yes|no|Yes|Yes|No|Yes|1|0|0|0|
11beat|Eleven Beat|Eleven Beat|1998|Hudson|raster|horizontal|good|preliminary|preliminary||512|512|0|4|3|0|1|1|aleck64.c||||||||0|0|60.000000|0|no|no|No|Yes|No|Yes|1|0|0|0|
1941|1941 - Counter Attack (World)|1941 - Counter Attack|1990|Capcom|raster|vertical|good|good|good|joy8way|224|384|0|3|4|2|2|2|cps1.c||||||||0|0|60.000000|1|no|no|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|1|0|0|0|
1941j|1941 - Counter Attack (Japan)|1941 - Counter Attack|1990|Capcom|raster|vertical|good|good|good|joy8way|224|384|1|3|4|2|2|2|cps1.c|1941|1941||||||0|0|60.000000|1|no|no|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|1|0|0|0|
1942|1942 (set 1)|1942|1984|Capcom|raster|vertical|good|good|good|joy8way|224|256|0|3|4|2|2|2|1942.c||||||||0|0|60.000000|1|no|no|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|1|0|0|0|
1942a|1942 (set 2)|1942|1984|Capcom|raster|vertical|good|good|good|joy8way|224|256|1|3|4|2|2|2|1942.c|1942|1942||||||0|0|60.000000|1|no|no|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|1|0|0|0|
1942b|1942 (set 3)|1942|1984|Capcom|raster|vertical|good|good|good|joy8way|224|256|1|3|4|2|2|2|



so I think it finds the games OK
If I set the output to verbose, this is what the end of the log looks like:

Processing listfull.txt
gamelist line: <  turn. Some games also have a "Flip Screen" DIP switch setting
to turn the>
rom name   turn. not found in rom tree
Failed to find ssf.txt, no -movieloops 2 allowed!
Writing intermediate file listgen.tmp
Reading intermediate file into filter database
create temporary table gamedata (  romname varchar[12] unique primary key,  full
_desc varchar[64],  stripped_desc varchar[64] key,  year varchar[4],  manufactur
er varchar[80],  screen varchar[24],  orientation varchar[24],  color varchar[24
],  status varchar[24],   sound varchar[24],   control varchar[36],  width integ
er,  height integer,   isclone integer,  aspectx integer,  aspecty integer,  pla
yers integer,  buttons integer,  coins integer,   sourcefile varchar[24],  clone
of varchar[12],  romof varchar[12],  catver_category varchar[48],  catver_veradd
ed varchar[48],  nplayers_category varchar[32],  gameplay_category varchar[32],
 gameplay_layout varchar[32],  gameplay_mnop integer,  gameplay_nosp integer,  r
efresh varchar[32],  channels varchar[8],  service varchar[8],  tilt varchar[8],
  gamelist_working varchar[8],  gamelist_correct_colors varchar[8],  gamelist_so
und varchar[8],  gamelist_screen_flip varchar[8],  movieloops integer,  moviesta
rtframe integer,  movieendframe integer,  filler integer  );
copy gamedata from 'listgen.tmp' using delimiters '|';
Filtering database into result.tmp
Writing game list to output.txt


What's the filtering step? I see a filter.sql do I need to modify it?
I think I'm missing something.

Thanks

[Silver]

Silver or Buddabing, did you guys figure out why mmm videos were not compatible with the 3dArcade frontend?   Did that get fixed?

Yes its an incompatibility between the Xvid decoder and the call from 3DArcade for video - 3dArcade does not seem to pick up the resolution size and errors out.

To fix - simply go to Xvid Decoder options (Start menu,Xvid,Configure Decoder) and tick the 'Compatibility Renderer' option. They work fine like this. (This should not effect performance at all btw)

[Silver]

the output from listgen is empty.

In my use, I usually find I have the filter.sql file set to filter incorrectly. Check what it is filtering for....

[Popcorrin]

Yes its an incompatibility between the Xvid decoder and the call from 3DArcade for video - 3dArcade does not seem to pick up the resolution size and errors out.

To fix - simply go to Xvid Decoder options (Start menu,Xvid,Configure Decoder) and tick the 'Compatibility Renderer' option. They work fine like this. (This should not effect performance at all btw)

Cool, thanks

[papaschtroumpf]

the output from listgen is empty.

In my use, I usually find I have the filter.sql file set to filter incorrectly. Check what it is filtering for....

OK, I'm not familiar with the sql syntax but I'll figure it out. Does -- indicate the start of a comment? because if that's the case the default filter file would be set to only generate movies if movieloops=2 (i.e. from your databse rather than autodetect) which wopuld explain my empty list.
I'll experiment...

[papaschtroumpf]

OK, I think I'm getting the hang of this. The post on listgen helped too.

Buddabing, my mame executable is not mame.exe but it looks like listgen makes that assumption, putting the name of the executable in mamepath doesn't work either. Not a big deal though, I just renamed the local copy of mame to mame.exe.

[papaschtroumpf]

Buddabing and silver this is a great thing maintaining the list. It will save many of us time from trying to figure it out.

However when i go to

http://www.silverfoxy.plus.com/AttractVideos.htm

and click the download link i get a file that has only 10 items.

Then if i type this in the browser
http://www.silverfoxy.plus.com/ssf.txt

I get a bigger list  but not still not all the parents. Am I missing something here?

so which one are we supposed to get? I assume the one dynamically generated from the htlm page? (the one with 10 entries)

[papaschtroumpf]

sorry for the deluge of questions today, but after doing some movies by hand I'm now trying to use listgen to automate makingthe full set. The post on listgen mentions PacManFan's gameplay.ini: I can't seem to find a copy of it?

Also: how can I filter out CHD games?

Also: is there some kind of overall log that might alert me to movies that may have failed (I have not played some of the games in my rom collection since I rebuilt my harddrive, so some games may never have had their rom initialized by pressing F2 for example).

[Buddabing]

sorry for the deluge of questions today, but after doing some movies by hand I'm now trying to use listgen to automate makingthe full set. The post on listgen mentions PacManFan's gameplay.ini: I can't seem to find a copy of it?

Also: how can I filter out CHD games?

Also: is there some kind of overall log that might alert me to movies that may have failed (I have not played some of the games in my rom collection since I rebuilt my harddrive, so some games may never have had their rom initialized by pressing F2 for example).

I don't know how filtering out CHD games can be done. I would sure like to do that, though. I'll look at the source (I need to port 0.94 anyway) and maybe I can make a filter criterion for it.

Gameplay.ini is distributed with Kymaera. I'm not sure how up to date or complete it is.

It might be smart to run each game for a few frames before generating the movies so that the nvram is generated. There was a method for doing this previously in this thread.

The description of your ListGen error tells me you have a missing or bad filter.sql.  All you need is one line:
select * from gamedata;

MAME does not need to be named mame.exe. Do a listgen -showusage for a list of parameters. The one you need is -mamename.

I don't have an overall log, but you can pipe the output of the batch to a file via >, ie. makemovies > log.txt.

HTH,
Buddabing

[papaschtroumpf]

thanks.
I figured out the sql thing.

Great job! I'm glad to see someone that doesn't try to re-invent the wheel every time (such as using mysql), the SQL filtering is very fast and the syntax not that hard to get the hang of.

[papaschtroumpf]

It might be smart to run each game for a few frames before generating the movies so that the nvram is generated. There was a method for doing this previously in this thread.

anyone knows what the option is off hand? I haven't founf it in the thread yet or in the windows.txt file from MAME.
EDIT: the -ftr option is what I was looking for, finally found it in WINDOWS.TXT
I added "mame %1 -ftr 120 -window -resolution %2" before the call to mame that actually generate the movie. Adds a few seconds to the process but it's not that big a deal. I could even check for the presence of an .nv file in the nvram directory to avoid this step when the game has been ran.


Also, I'm toying with the idea of having the movies larger so they are no so fuzzy in full screen playback. I could either post process output.txt to change the resolution when it's below a certain value, or I could add -artres 2 I suppose?
EDIT: I can't seem to figure it out, I can't make a movie at twice the game original resolution.

[papaschtroumpf]

Anyone tried the rom called 4enraya?
It reboots my computer when I try to make a movie! (not just a crash to blue screen or anything)
At first I thought it was because I was using my own athlon XP optimized build(My computer is an Athlon XP 2400+) but it does the same with the buddamame binary provided in the zip file.
I can play the game just fine, I just can't make a movie.

weird and reproduceable.

[papaschtroumpf]

I'm done through the end of "A" and had trouble with the following:

"arlingtn" and "arabian"  both produced the following error in virtualdub" "Cannot initialize video compression due to codec error: the source image format is not acceptable". Not sure what that means. Please note I'm using the DivX codec, not Xvid.

"aircob22" amd "astorm" generated 2:46 minutes of black screen (max frames exceeded). It turns out that when you try to play those it tells you that it doesn't run properly. I thought it would have been filtered by my SQL filter:
select * from gamedata where
   catver_category <> 'Unplayable'
   and catver_category not like '%Mature%'
   and catver_category not like '%Mahjong%'   
   and full_desc not like '%Quiz%'
   and full_desc not like '%Japan%'
order by romname;

Edit: I added "and gamelist_working <> 'No' "

The loop detection still seems to be foiled by black frames, I thought it wasn't supposed to detect black frames?  "avspirit" is one of the games that gets cut short. Others that re not properly detected include: 4in1, 64street, ainferno, alibaba, 8ball, apb, appoooh, 3stooges, ...

several of these games have warnings of sorts but should be playable, although maybe I need to refine my filter to only get really playable ROMS.


other games like 280zzzap don't have the loop detected properly but are good enough to show what the game is about.

[Silver]

so which one are we supposed to get? I assume the one dynamically generated from the htlm page? (the one with 10 entries)

The dynamic one is the correct one - the other ssf.txt is an old file designed to skip startup frames for missing the bios (nothing to do with videos). Perhaps we should change the default name for this? I think listgen looks for ssf.txt though.

[Silver]

I'm done through the end of "A" and had trouble with the following:

"arlingtn" and "arabian"

[2600]

Silver,
Haven't had time to help with the SSF recently, but will get to it sometime. 

What version of virtualdub are you using?  I've generated a set using 1.62 on one machine without problems.  I set up another machine with 1.64 and have gotten the out of bounds errors about 5 or so times(I'm up to Y on that machine).  There are a couple of games I noticed may need tweaking, but for the most part everything is great.  Pretty good odds considering well over 2000 attract modes.  (I'm also sticking with .92 romset and .92 version of Mame)

[M.A.M.E Power]

Hi All

Now I really like the idea of this project and would love to be able to incoperate this into my Mamewah. However being relatively new to MAME I need a real basic tuturiol.

This is what I have done so far downloaded the VirtualDub and XvID and Dix X I am running MAME 0.93 what is the binary files for? Do I need these? I have then copied and pasted the two bat files and saved them into the Mame folder under Movies do the bat files stay like this

"@if not exist"?

So i have copied this

 @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" /x
@del %1.wav
@del %1.vdb
@del /Q moviesnp\*.png
@move /Y %1.avi e:\mame\movies
time /T
:end
 
and this

@call batch 005 224x256
@call batch 1941 224x384
@call batch 4enraya 256x224
@call batch 4in1 224x256

They have been copied and pasted them as they are in the thread acept I have changed the file paths to accomdate my settings

Ok all where do I copy and paste the Mame.ini file into the ini Mamewah file?

Now I know that this may be really basic to all your programmers etc if anyway has written a simple guide or is just willing to help me try and set this utility up then I would be very grateful.

Thanks for your time

Lea

[Silver]

Silver,
Haven't had time to help with the SSF recently, but will get to it sometime.

[Buddabing]

I'm done through the end of "A" and had trouble with the following:

"arlingtn" and "arabian"

[papaschtroumpf]

I'm running this on a 0.92 romset with default settings. The only filter applied is "catver_category <> 'Unplayable'".

I've got to "M" so far. I have had no virtualdub errors at all. There have been a few errors in mame - most of these are due to games not being run before so incorrect bios ram. (Some have run and just made a video of a bios error). I have not had a chance to review them.

I'm running 0.92 also, although my filter is more aggressive for now.
Are you using DivX or XVID? I'm using DivX so that might be the difference?

Not sure why 4enraya crashes my machine. What kind of hardware fo you run on? I wonder if it's something related to the processor type.

[papaschtroumpf]

I'm using the default posted in the first post of this thread for just about everything except that I encode using DivX. If there are better values, could you put them in the top post?

moviematchlength is "hidden" in page 9 of this thread and even though I read the thread several times by now, it didn't "click". I agree that it sounds like the problem though.

since I generated my ini file using buddamame -cc, I'm more than likely using whatever the default is. Is it set to 10 by default? If not is might be a good idea to do that.

[Buddabing]

I'm using the default posted in the first post of this thread for just about everything except that I encode using DivX. If there are better values, could you put them in the top post?

moviematchlength is "hidden" in page 9 of this thread and even though I read the thread several times by now, it didn't "click". I agree that it sounds like the problem though.

since I generated my ini file using buddamame -cc, I'm more than likely using whatever the default is. Is it set to 10 by default? If not is might be a good idea to do that.

It's set to 1 by default for backward compatibility.

I'll make it 10 by default going forward. BuddaMAME v0.94 will be out imminently. I'll also put something about -moviematchlength on the first page.

[papaschtroumpf]

Great thanks!
I'll re-run roms through "A" tonight to see if I get better results (sounds like I will for sure).

[Silver]

4enraya worked fine for me.

Yes I'm using Xvid not DivX - I've not tested DivX anywhere near as much.

Assuming you can run the game itself normally, then it could be DivX. I will look into it next week to check. The only other thing is if you are using an Athlon64 - I have no idea if that would cause a problem with Vdub/mame but it may be possible. I can't see any other processer having a problem...

[papaschtroumpf]

The problem is not with Vdub, it happens as soon as I launch buddamame with the moveimaking options even though I can play the game with buddamame.
It's pretty rare for a computer to reboot itself consistently like that, which is why I thought that maybe this tried to execute instructions that the Athlon XP doesn't like, but I don't think the binary included in the buddamame 0.92 zip is optimized in any way.
Weird but not a huge issue.

[Silver]

Hmm, sorry missed the bit about rebooting....

So you can run mame 4enraya and play it fine, but if you run mame -makemovie (moviesettings) 4enraya it reboots your pc?

Does it reboot straight away or at a certain point?

I'm running an AthlonXp too with no problem (WinXP,sp2 for the record). I doubt very much that there is much in BuddaBings code to cause this...

Its possible that its an IO issue with your system. Mame taxes your CPU quite a lot, mame with moviemaker also gets your system to write a load of files as fast as it can - but it would only reboot if you had a faulty system. Do you have another pc to test on?

[papaschtroumpf]

it reboots immediately after running buddamame -makemovie....

I don't buy the "system taxing" part because it's very consistent, always when I run this ROM, and no other that I have found, and always as soon as I start it. My cab comp has been stable and runs pretty cool (47 deg C under load).
 It's possible that it's because of a "flaw" in the comp, but it's got to be very subtle such as generating something that this particular version of the graphics drivers don't like, or something of the sort.  It could be a weird interaction with the sound drivers (Maddog 5.1 in 2.1 mode),  antivirus (AVG), or any number of other things.
I'm not going to worry about it.

I may try it on another comp later, since this is one of the games that's popular with the kids.

[papaschtroumpf]

are you guys happy with the maxmovielength of 10000 or do you run with something different from the default? just wondering, not saying it's a bad default.

[2600]

Silver,
I think the virtualdub errors may be my own fault.  I checked 1.6.4 on another machine.  If I see something I'll let you know.

[Buddabing]

are you guys happy with the maxmovielength of 10000 or do you run with something different from the default? just wondering, not saying it's a bad default.

I'm very happy with 10000.

I need to rerun my entire movie collection and then see what exceptions still exist.

For movies in front ends, 10000 should be adequate to hold your attention while selecting a game, thats 2 1/2 minutes or more of video.

[papaschtroumpf]

yes I agree that  it's plenty long for an FE. I just also use the movies for screensaver and I was curious to know if anyone saw a benefit to extend them.

On that same topic, I have been trying to make the movie double their size (at least for the smaller ones) because some look awfull when played (mostly) fullscreen on my 19" monitor.
For the life of me I can't figure it out though . I can get mame to render them twice as large on the screen but the movie still ends up smaller.
I tried all kinds of combinations of -artres 2, -zoom 4, manually multiplying the window resolution by 2, etc...

Come to think of it I haven't looked at the virtualdub command file. Maybe buddmame write the resolution in there regardless of what the mame command line does?

I may not not like the results (quality or movie size) once I get it working but I would really like to give this a try. Any help would be appreciated.


Also, for an FE, seeing the NeoGeo animated logo everytime you select a NeoGeo game is kindof annoying, but short of specifying the start frame manually, there isn't much we can do about it is there?