Batch Dirty Mame Video Creation Part 1

[Nologic]

Okay first off dirty is in no way, mean xxx games. Instead it's meant to refer to the creation of a video without actual live game play involved.

This is an attempt to automate the bulk of the work involved, as well as a transition to a newer method of encoding. The end result will be in some ways superior and in others inferior to what Circo has released right now, namely the lack of live game play. Maybe the lack of live game play will gather more contributors.

The first part of this is the creation of raw captures, that will be grabbed using Fraps, then processed using VirtualDub and encoded using TSCC.

The average final file size at this point will be 90mb for a 3min recording @ 60FPS and a resolution of ether 640x480 or 480x640 depending on orientation & aspect ratio of the game. This means if all games where fully emulated it would take a 1tb drive to hold all the original processed captures. Hehe however we are not doing all of them...matter fact we are starting with just the games listed as working based off the Rankings.ini DAT

Which only lists 3426 games which if someone was to do the whole thing it would take their system nine and half days to complete the whole thing...for this phase, averaging 4 minutes per game. Provided they have 350gigs to spare.

Those looking to contribute to this project will need to be able to maintain 60fps while running Mame & Fraps...I'm able to do this fine except for 3D games on my AMD X2 4600...which I imagine for most this shouldn't be hard, but we may have to look to those lucky enough to own an i7 to bang out the 3D games. Hehe I'm eye balling Circo and Brian here.

Once we have this aspect done we'll likely fairly manually end up cutting the processed captures into two segments <Game Name>_[Title/Play/Complete].avi which should cut down the 350gig- total down to +/-90gigs total which will then ideally be uploaded by all to the FTP so that Circo can store them locally and hopefully a few others will also keep local backups...for just encase shit happens.

After that point I will have a script and a tool chain in which to automate Volume Gain, Transition Fade between Clips, and final encoding. At this point the set should ring in at 13gigs or less and would include a fair amount more video's than the current set. If we proceeded to do a full set of working games clones included the whole thing would likely come in around 21gigs.

If we can get 15 contributors to this project we would roughly have each contributor responsible for only 230 videos, which would take their system roughly 15 hours to process the first phase. So go to bed, go to work...come home and its done. The cutting into clips probably less than 8min to do each game...so under 30 hours total, so spending maybe 2 hours a day doing this and we could have a new set in roughly two weeks.

To do the whole Mame set would likely take us a full month...course the more helping hands we have the faster it goes.

For those looking to actually lend a hand in this, besides the above mentioned software you'll also need to have AutoIt installed as you'll be running a raw script of mine. Which really shouldn't be to bad as really the only stuff you have to edit is at the top that has comments above and below.

; ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
; //  End User Settings - Start
; ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
$Mame_EXE   = 'mame.exe'                                    ; Mame Executable
$Mame_Path  = 'Z:\Emulation\Emulator\[Arcade] MAME\'        ; Mame Executable Path
$Mame_Roms  = 'Z:\Emulation\Assets\[Arcade] Mame\Roms\' 	; Mame Roms Path
$Path_VCap  = 'C:\Video Capture\'                       	; Root Capture Path - Fraps Needs To Be Set to This Path
$Fraps_Path = 'C:\Fraps\fraps.exe'                          ; Fraps Executable & Path
$Fraps_Key  = 'y'                                       	; Fraps Record Hot Key - Must Match What Fraps Is Using - Must Use AutoIt Syntax Here
$Fraps_Time = '3'                                       	; Fraps Record Time In Minutes
$Batch_Num  = '100'                                     	; Number of Games To Process
$Path_VDub  = 'C:\Program Files\VirtualDub\VirtualDub.exe'  ; VirtualDub Executable & Path

HotKeySet ( '=' , '_Quit' )                             	; Early Quit Key
; ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
; //  End User Settings - End
; ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Not very scary stuff, just the stuff enclosed in single quotes...anyways download the script and take a look; then hit me up with any questions or suggestions...and with luck we can get started on this in the next few days...I kind of what to get the final script and tool chain roughly working before getting folks tearing into things.

If you are game and want to get an early start please post here saying as much along with what games you intend to take responsibility for in an attached text file so that others can add its contents to their exclude list.

Batch Mame.rar

[brian_hoffman]

This looks very interesting and I do have some CPU power to kill. My Grandmother passed away last monday and we did the funeral this past friday. Things should be getting back to normal over the next week. Expect a couple PM's regarding this as my time free's up. Id like to get some better videos of the more cpu intensive games.

Gauntlet legends anyone?

[Nologic]

Sorry to hear about her passing, my condolences.

Yeah feel free to PM any time and maybe we'll get this thing off the ground.

[vglord57]

I might be getting a core 17 820 soon, so I may be able to help