A complimentary support thread for (MameMovieMaker)

[mccoy178]

Based on this seventeen page thread, could you please explain the process on how to create mame movies.

[Buddabing]

Just read the first post in this thread.

[mccoy178]

I believe I have everything installed, including buddamame .99 binary.  I made a .bat of the roms from listgen 1.0 of Screamings.  I made the batch.bat, and moviemaker.bat (just incase my rom list is not the right way to do this).  When I run moviemaker.bat, the first rom flashes quickly then the command prompt shuts down.  When I run moviemaker.bat that has the entire rom list from listgen, it does go through all the games, but it says -makemovie is not a valid command.  So, what am I missing?  I have carefully read that first post about fifty times, and I'm stumped.  I noticed someone mentioned movie.zip in a later post, but I find no such link anywhere.

[Buddabing]

Okay, let's try to break down the problem into pieces.

First, try to launch mame from a command line:

mame gridlee

This will verify that your rom paths are correct.

Make sure you have a BuddaMAME binary. To do this run:

mame -showusage > usage.txt

Then edit usage.txt and search for movie. If you don't find movie, you don't have BuddaMAME.

Next, comment out all lines in your batch file except gridlee. In edit, do a global replace on @call with @rem @call. Then uncomment out gridlee.

Now run moviemaker.bat from a command prompt.

If that doesn't create a movie for gridlee, try removing the ampersands (@) from the first character of each line of batch.bat. That might give us more information on what the problem is.

Make sure you have VirtualDub and Xvid installed. You can't create movies with BuddaMAME without some kind of supported video codec and a recent version of VirtualDub.

[mccoy178]

Thanks for the quick reply, I will try the suggestions now.

[mccoy178]

Mame is correct and I am using Buddamame.  When I run the original -makemovies.bat, it says it is an unknown option.  Maybe my paths in makemovies.bat aren't correct?

[mccoy178]

The entire problem was that my batch.bat said -makemovies, and not -makemovie.

[papaschtroumpf]

what neither this thread nor the official MMM thread nor the official buddamame page explains is how to generate the makemovies batch file.

I just lost all my movies due to a harddrive crash so I'm about to re-generate them and I remember buddamame sometimes had trouble with some games and needed to be manually told what start end end frames to use. There was a file sff.txt or something like that that had a collection of good frame settings.

I'll have to go throught the original thread to figure it out again.

[papaschtroumpf]

OK, I stand somewhat corrected, the listgen doc linked to from the buddamame page does go over some of it, not obvious to find though.

[mccoy178]

I attached my makemovies.bat to a thread.  It was the parents only and had the loop detection set.  It was for .99u4 I believe.

[papaschtroumpf]

I saw that, I would just have preferred explanations on how to generated it with my own filter. Yours has games I don't have and vice-versa.

I used Buddabing's ListGen, and for  the game arcadecl (to pick one) it generated
@call batch arcadecl 336x240 1 0 0
whereas yours contains:
@call batch arcadecl 336x240 2 540 3000

I assume yours is better since it doesn't use the default fames, but how did those numbers get in your batch file?

[cdbrown]

The file sss.txt contains the start and end frames.  I have attached it for your convenience.  Just save it in the same dir as listgen, makemovies etc.

Make sure to have in your filter to only do playable games, nothing worse than the process hanging for ages because the game is unplayable.

I have finished the process of producing vids and am now going through each one to check if it works.  I am also cropping each movie so I just get about 20sec of action.  Many games have big intros and it takes a few minutes before you get to see what the game play is like ( I am still keeping all the original vids).