Launching emulator movies from GameEX

[evilpenguin]

For those of you that don't know, you can find insanely cool videos of people beating old video games crazy fast over at Bisqwit's Nes Video's. One of the coolest things about the site is the ability to download a small binary file that you can load along with the game's rom that will play back the movies though your emulator.

Up until recently, loading these emulator video files was far to complicated to script for GameEX (trust me, I tried ), but recently some of the emulators have been modified to launch videos directly from the command line. This in turn allows you to launch them directly from GameEX.

The only two that currently work are FCEUltra for NES and Visual Boy Advance for GBX and you need to download the modified version from the Nes Video forums.

The command line calls are

fceu.exe -playmovie "[rompath]\[romfile]" "[rompath]\[rom].nes"

and

vba.exe -rom "[rompath] \[rom].gba" -play "[rompath] \[romfile]" 1

For this to work you need to rename the emulator video files with the exact same name as the associated roms and place them in the same directory. Once you've done this all you need to do is setup a new emulator config for the video files that would be setup almost exactly like the actual emulator's config except that you use the video's file extension and the above command line calls.

I highly recommend this for showing off to your friends

P.S. - Now that this works, I think it would be great to setup the attract mode to exclusivly launch these videos as they are far more fun to watch than MAME intros

[evilpenguin]

I went though all the NES rom videos and changed the names to the GoodTools names that most people use. If I get the Nes Videos webmaster's permission i'll post a nice zip of all of them so no one else will have to waste their time.

[jedah]

That would be sweet. Those videos are cool.

J.

[evilpenguin]

I heard from the webmaster and he doesn't approve so I can't post the renamed files. I can understand where he's coming from though as renaming the files and distributing them independent of the Nes Video's website pretty much removes any awknowledgement of the creator's hardwork.

I'll see if I can't put together a database file containing all of the websites information for each video that would gives the creators of the video the proper recognition, and see if he approves it then.

[Vynce]

Perhaps you could just write a batch file or script or ClrMame dat that just renames the original files. That way users can download the files from the original site and rename them with your script to the correct names.

[evilpenguin]

The other option is that there is a CLI program on the Nes Videos Forums that you can launch the emulator video files though and it will automatically pick out the correct ROM based off of the ROM's internal hash.

The only catch on this is that GameEX would be launching this CLI frontend program instead of the emulator directly so GameEX would need to know to wait until the actual emulator exits. The problem I was running into with this was that the CLI frontend program closes immediately after the emulator launches so it makes GameEX think that the emulator has closed and it trys to take back control.

I'm not sure if GameEX can handle this gracefully right now.

[evilpenguin]

Ahh, i've got a good idea now. All I need to do is use the CLI program that automatically picks and launches the correct roms and instead of pointing it to an emulator point it to a batch file that will copy the movie file to the rom directory with the rom's name. That way all you have to do when you download a movie is double click it and it will copy itself.

I'll crank something out tommorow during lunch.

[evilpenguin]

Ok, here we go...

1) Download and unzip the emulator movie frontend from this forum topic

http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3474

2) Download the movie_renamers.zip and unzip the contents into the same folder as the emulator movie frontend.

3) Setup your emuMovFront config.ini file with the paths to your ROM directories and the paths to the renamer batch files.

[config]
dirs=C:\fceu_roms;C:\vba_roms
fcm=C:\EmuMovFront_0.4\fceu.bat
vbm=C:\EmuMovFront_0.4\vba.bat

4)Finally, head over to NES Videos and download a bunch of .fcm and .vbm files, open them with emuMovFront.exe, and let the batch files do their magic.

The first time you try and open a movie file, emuMovFront.exe will tell you that it can't find the movie and ask you to scan your rom folders. After it scans your rom folders it might tell you again that it couldn't find a matching ROM but don't worry about that, just try opening the movie file again and it should work.

Enjoy!

P.S. - Download the modified FCEU emulator from the same forum topic that you downloaded the emuMovFront program and the modified vba emulator is from the link below...

http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2050

movie_renamers.zip