Stumbling through Super Metroid - Part 10

[davidn]

Celebrating ten parts! But this is, without a shadow of a doubt, the dullest video to produce that I've done in this entire project. After making what I thought was great progress for the last few videos, here I was reduced to running around the entire game in a very big circle for just shy of two hours, after which I asked Kjorteo to give me a pointer and through him I remembered about the giant scary face in the rock that had scared me off several videos ago.

This video is mostly me hoovering up secrets, messing about and getting frustrated. Once again, over two hours of gameplay have been compressed down into exactly fifteen minutes.

http://youtu.be/Fh2_50_qgFw

Comments

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

Prime should be easy for him to record, as long as he's got a gamecube and a TV tuner. Consoles beyond the Dreamcast/PS1 era get difficult to emulate and I'm not sure they ever made serious headway there. Some things exist, but you need a seriously beefy computer to do it. It's pretty much better/cheaper to just get the actual console for a game as common as Metroid Prime.

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

Oh. Or he could just get Dolphin and hope his processors are good enough. The CPU requirements are kind of vague.

http://www.dolphin-emulator.com/system-requirements.html

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Well, it's the TV tuner I'm not sure about. I don't think he's ever needed or wanted to record something from console before, although I guess speculation is pointless; he either has one or he doesn't!

Maybe he should get one *hint hint* for if he ever does want to stumble through a difficult-to-emulate console game *hint hint*.

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

Well, seeing as how Dolphin is claiming that not all games have audio (if they even work) so, uh, I'd say that the Tuner is the best bet. A compatibility list would be nice, though.

They're pretty cheap, I think I saw one for about $40 and you might know that you can actually watch TV on your computer with one, so it's not only useful for capture, if what I heard is true.

[davidn]

Trust me, here the ability to watch television of any form is not something I'd describe as an advantage :) I was actually thinking of getting one with a DVI input for this project, until I tried FRAPS and found that it did the job just as well as a dedicated card - it's still definitely a possibility, if these projects take off like this one :)

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

Wait, FRAPS does *what*? I thought it only recorded gaming on a computer screen, not on a TV input. Does... gamecube (or wii?) have the ability to plug straight into a computer's HDMI or whatever? Does that WORK? I just do the emulation and software, Max is more the hardware wizard.

I'm testing the possibility of emulation for you right now, actually. It could be that you can get away with emulating Prime with a 360 controller and maybe joy2key or something, as a possibility before you sink any money into things you're not going to use much. I just played Double Dash at about 60-70 FPS with only one or two hiccups. Waiting on Prime now, then I'm going to test a recent a wii title (4+ gb, wow!).

I've got a AMD Phenom II X4 945 and 8 gb of ram on Win7 x64. I remember your PC being a little slower but you will probably manage just fine. Wii and GC were designed to be behind the curve but in exchange they were really streamlined.

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

OK, I've tried Prime and there was a good deal of slowdown during the intro video, up to 70% speed or 50 FPS at times. Gameplay itself wasn't so bad, but I think things could get hairy, especially because capture software is a real hog with processor power. You'll want to purchase a capture device of some kind if you want to do Prime or any recent gaming, it seems.

[davidn]

Ah - FRAPS is the one I'm using for Super Metroid on an emulator just now. Previously I'd used Camstudio 2 for Hatoful, but FRAPS gets around a lot of the slowdown that Camstudio caused by hooking into DirectX/OpenGL (I think) rather than just recording the screen output, and also not doing any compression on the fly (hence - new hard drive!) I don't think my graphics card has any inputs - I'd have to get a video-in/capture card for that.

Thank you for your experimenation on my behalf :) Yes, I have slightly less in terms of specifications (I've been meaning to upgrade to 8GB for ages) - but I was surprised by how absolutely flawlessly FRAPS could record Unreal Tournament 3 on it (with minimal effect on the framerate that I get when playing).

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

Pff, no problem, emulation is one of my hobbies and I've neglected trying any of the 2000's systems, mostly because my last computer was very far behind the curve. I was going to do it at some point anyway, I just had an excuse/time to do it today! It's surprising just how much an emulation system needs. It's like running a virtual OS.

[davidn]

I'm really glad there's demand for it, at this stage :) I'll definitely consider it!