A former user of MacSpectacle, having upgraded to Mac OS 10.3, would like to thank you for Mac FUSE. But may I make two requests, one almost being a bug fx, and the other being a manifest feature?
1. Key assignments don't work. I'm playing that all-time great, Jet Set Willy II, and find shift-command-S awkward for Save Snapshot As... (as it makes Willy jump), so have used System Preferences...: Keyboard & Mouse: Keyboard Shortcuts to assign F4 to this menu item. But to no effect: F4 does nothing.
2. I'd like to record my completing JSW2 as an MPEG, or similar, to post on a website. There is some trickiness relating to the need to save the machine state frequently so that rooms can be re-(re-re-re-re-re-re-re-)played. Would I be alone in making this feature request?
Thanks.
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2. One possibility is that the entire MPEG is attached to the .z80 file. When a new .z80 is saved (using the keystroke in 1!) it has the entire new extended longer MPEG attached to it. It does mean that a few hours play, with a few saves a minute, will take much disk space, but that's the user's lookout. (It might be easier for the user if files were saved in pairs: xx.z80 also creating xx.mpeg; thus allowing deletion of unwanted MPGEs).
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I don't think I've understood. The z80 file format stores the 48k or so of machine state. I want to make a movie (avi, mpeg, whatever can be viewed on Mac & Windows & Linux), potentially megabytes long, of the screen display. The z80 format doesn't have the history, only the current state, so can't be converted.
However it is to work, bear in mind that many JSW2 screens will need to be played more than once (yes, really), and hence the 'history so far' needs to be saved with or attached to the saved snapshots.
If these comments reflect my misunderstanding, then apologies for that.
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Fuse comes with the facility to record your activity on the emulator (e.g. playing JSW2) into a dedicated playback format called rzx, see the File->Emulator Recording menu. The file format is supported by several Spectrum emulators and has been used to record people completing games (see <http://www.rzxarchive.co.uk/> although it seems to be down at the moment). You could record yourself completing JSW2 using this.
If you still wanted a movie there are Mac utilities which will record the contents of any window into a movie file. You could use one of these programs to record a movie of the rzx file being played back in the emulator.
What we don't have at the moment AFAIK is any way to snapshot your progress in a recording so that you can continue your recording after losing a life etc.
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Thank you. I hadn't realised that it could do that much. However, JSW2 is rather difficult, and in trying to improve the times of my previous run-through http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/games/jsw2/jsw2-route.html
, I've reached DownT'Pit at time 14:23, and have used dozens of attempts trying to get past the razor without loss of life. Dozens. So the ability to save and resume play would be essential.
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[ Sorry for the slow reply - just noticed this thread existed ]
There is currently a discussion occuring on fuse-emulator-devel about embedding multiple snapshots in an RZX file, which would allow the kind of save-reload idea you're thinking of.
See <http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=5220096&forum_id=35697> for details. (Unfortunately, the list has been missed out from some of the discussion. I've just requested that people keep it in the Cc:s).
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Thank you. That thread seems to be discussing exactly what I want, though at a technical level far beyond my knowledge. I suppose that I'll have to wait and see what happens.
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It seems that Windoze people now have a feature called rollback, and that this is used (in non-competition mode) to make the walk-throughs at the aforementioned http://www.rzxarchive.co.uk/
Please sir (and madam, of course), can I have one too?
(It might work with an adjusted snapshot format, which contains a pointer to an rzx file, and a time and line within it. Play would resume from there.)
Please?
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(Thanks to pak21 for the feedback of a moment ago.)
If anyone has compiled this for the Mac OS X, and is willing to send me same, I will happily use it and test it. But I lack the technical competence to do this myself. (Of course, any beta version is, well, just like a beta version, and might not work properly, or even at all.)
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My wife is going away over New Year, and I would like to spend some of the time running through JSW2. Please would somebody clever send me a Mac OSX version of Fuse with rollback, ideally before end-December? Please?
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1) The rollback support is basically untested. Don't expect it to work.
2) There is currently no utility for converting an RZX file featuring rollback (probably very large) into a normal RZX file. Don't rely on being able to distribute anything you do with the rollback support at this stage.
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> 1) Don't expect it to work.
I'll test it before playing for hours and hours. At my own risk!
> 2) Don't rely on being able to distribute anything you do with the rollback support at this stage.
This is more worrying. Will there be, eventually at least, such a conversion facility? Without a reasonable prospect of a conversion facility, this might be a foolish undertaking.
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I would certainly hope that a conversion utility would be available at some point in the future, as I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of ripping out all the snapshot blocks (and possibly merging all the input recording blocks into one). However, if I'm wrong and we should have saved more data in the 'rolled back' file, it obviously won't be possible to convert it.
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Might it be possible, in theory at least, to play-and-record the fat rollback format into the thin format? Rephrased, is it likely (no guarantees I understand) that it will be possible to convert it?
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I should be able to send you a beta of the new release in the next couple of weeks, I'll send it to your sourceforge.net address unless you'd rather I send it elsewhere.
Phil's cautions apply, but we'd be pleased to hear your feedback about any problems or successes you have!
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I presume my sourceforge.net address forwards to my usual address (that's where new-post notifications come), but in any event my home email is available at http://www.jdawiseman.com/author.html
Again let me say, thank you.
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As Fuse for Mac OS X uses SDL for it's keyboard access, it is not possible to remap any menu shortcuts using System Preferences. Do you get the same problem if you use the joystick option?
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> I should be able to send you a beta of the new release in the next couple of weeks
Knowing, as we all do, that people do this for the love of it, and for the gratitude of grateful retro gamers such as myself, one is loath to nudge the process along. But the wife departs for Japan in not so long, and hence the window for rollback usage draws nearer. Please, if possible, don't forget me.
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I'd just suggest turning on the Kempston joystick emulation and setting JSW to use the Kempston for input. JSW may not read the keyboard when a joystick is selected.
Unfortunately, I am a lot more time poor than I would like, and I haven't been able to put as much effort into Fuse as I would like. I should try to learn to make no suggestions on times things may be done :)
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I've just received an email purporting to come from a contributor to this thread, containing an executable. Being a good chap, and wisely paranoid, I deleted it.
But if it was kosher, will it also be posted on sourceforge?
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A former user of MacSpectacle, having upgraded to Mac OS 10.3, would like to thank you for Mac FUSE. But may I make two requests, one almost being a bug fx, and the other being a manifest feature?
1. Key assignments don't work. I'm playing that all-time great, Jet Set Willy II, and find shift-command-S awkward for Save Snapshot As... (as it makes Willy jump), so have used System Preferences...: Keyboard & Mouse: Keyboard Shortcuts to assign F4 to this menu item. But to no effect: F4 does nothing.
2. I'd like to record my completing JSW2 as an MPEG, or similar, to post on a website. There is some trickiness relating to the need to save the machine state frequently so that rooms can be re-(re-re-re-re-re-re-re-)played. Would I be alone in making this feature request?
Thanks.
I'll look at getting 1. to work for 0.7.1, as for 2. how would you like to see it work? I guess there could be a save and revert to saved shortcut...
1. Thanks.
2. One possibility is that the entire MPEG is attached to the .z80 file. When a new .z80 is saved (using the keystroke in 1!) it has the entire new extended longer MPEG attached to it. It does mean that a few hours play, with a few saves a minute, will take much disk space, but that's the user's lookout. (It might be easier for the user if files were saved in pairs: xx.z80 also creating xx.mpeg; thus allowing deletion of unwanted MPGEs).
maybe the soluction would be to create a tool rzx2avi or something like that.
I don't think I've understood. The z80 file format stores the 48k or so of machine state. I want to make a movie (avi, mpeg, whatever can be viewed on Mac & Windows & Linux), potentially megabytes long, of the screen display. The z80 format doesn't have the history, only the current state, so can't be converted.
However it is to work, bear in mind that many JSW2 screens will need to be played more than once (yes, really), and hence the 'history so far' needs to be saved with or attached to the saved snapshots.
If these comments reflect my misunderstanding, then apologies for that.
Fuse comes with the facility to record your activity on the emulator (e.g. playing JSW2) into a dedicated playback format called rzx, see the File->Emulator Recording menu. The file format is supported by several Spectrum emulators and has been used to record people completing games (see <http://www.rzxarchive.co.uk/> although it seems to be down at the moment). You could record yourself completing JSW2 using this.
If you still wanted a movie there are Mac utilities which will record the contents of any window into a movie file. You could use one of these programs to record a movie of the rzx file being played back in the emulator.
What we don't have at the moment AFAIK is any way to snapshot your progress in a recording so that you can continue your recording after losing a life etc.
Thank you. I hadn't realised that it could do that much. However, JSW2 is rather difficult, and in trying to improve the times of my previous run-through
http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/games/jsw2/jsw2-route.html
, I've reached DownT'Pit at time 14:23, and have used dozens of attempts trying to get past the razor without loss of life. Dozens. So the ability to save and resume play would be essential.
[ Sorry for the slow reply - just noticed this thread existed ]
There is currently a discussion occuring on fuse-emulator-devel about embedding multiple snapshots in an RZX file, which would allow the kind of save-reload idea you're thinking of.
See <http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=5220096&forum_id=35697> for details. (Unfortunately, the list has been missed out from some of the discussion. I've just requested that people keep it in the Cc:s).
Thank you. That thread seems to be discussing exactly what I want, though at a technical level far beyond my knowledge. I suppose that I'll have to wait and see what happens.
Please have a look at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1042986&group_id=91293&atid=596650
Gergely
It seems that Windoze people now have a feature called rollback, and that this is used (in non-competition mode) to make the walk-throughs at the aforementioned http://www.rzxarchive.co.uk/
Please sir (and madam, of course), can I have one too?
(It might work with an adjusted snapshot format, which contains a pointer to an rzx file, and a time and line within it. Play would resume from there.)
Please?
Rollback is already implemented in the current CVS version. Please test and make comments!
(Thanks to pak21 for the feedback of a moment ago.)
If anyone has compiled this for the Mac OS X, and is willing to send me same, I will happily use it and test it. But I lack the technical competence to do this myself. (Of course, any beta version is, well, just like a beta version, and might not work properly, or even at all.)
My wife is going away over New Year, and I would like to spend some of the time running through JSW2. Please would somebody clever send me a Mac OSX version of Fuse with rollback, ideally before end-December? Please?
Two disclaimers before you try that:
1) The rollback support is basically untested. Don't expect it to work.
2) There is currently no utility for converting an RZX file featuring rollback (probably very large) into a normal RZX file. Don't rely on being able to distribute anything you do with the rollback support at this stage.
Thanks.
> 1) Don't expect it to work.
I'll test it before playing for hours and hours. At my own risk!
> 2) Don't rely on being able to distribute anything you do with the rollback support at this stage.
This is more worrying. Will there be, eventually at least, such a conversion facility? Without a reasonable prospect of a conversion facility, this might be a foolish undertaking.
I would certainly hope that a conversion utility would be available at some point in the future, as I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of ripping out all the snapshot blocks (and possibly merging all the input recording blocks into one). However, if I'm wrong and we should have saved more data in the 'rolled back' file, it obviously won't be possible to convert it.
Might it be possible, in theory at least, to play-and-record the fat rollback format into the thin format? Rephrased, is it likely (no guarantees I understand) that it will be possible to convert it?
I should be able to send you a beta of the new release in the next couple of weeks, I'll send it to your sourceforge.net address unless you'd rather I send it elsewhere.
Phil's cautions apply, but we'd be pleased to hear your feedback about any problems or successes you have!
Thank you. Excellent.
It would be helpful if the first request in
https://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=2668955
was also fixed: it'll make it much easier for me to use it.
I presume my sourceforge.net address forwards to my usual address (that's where new-post notifications come), but in any event my home email is available at http://www.jdawiseman.com/author.html
Again let me say, thank you.
As Fuse for Mac OS X uses SDL for it's keyboard access, it is not possible to remap any menu shortcuts using System Preferences. Do you get the same problem if you use the joystick option?
A brief attempt had no joy. Are there particular (more detailed) settings I should test?
> I should be able to send you a beta of the new release in the next couple of weeks
Knowing, as we all do, that people do this for the love of it, and for the gratitude of grateful retro gamers such as myself, one is loath to nudge the process along. But the wife departs for Japan in not so long, and hence the window for rollback usage draws nearer. Please, if possible, don't forget me.
I'd just suggest turning on the Kempston joystick emulation and setting JSW to use the Kempston for input. JSW may not read the keyboard when a joystick is selected.
Unfortunately, I am a lot more time poor than I would like, and I haven't been able to put as much effort into Fuse as I would like. I should try to learn to make no suggestions on times things may be done :)
I've just received an email purporting to come from a contributor to this thread, containing an executable. Being a good chap, and wisely paranoid, I deleted it.
But if it was kosher, will it also be posted on sourceforge?