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GENS: How to Record Game Clips


kingraph

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This tutorial will show you how to record a highlight clip in a game. It’s meant as a supplement to the “How to Make Game Movies” tutorial by smozoma. You should read that if you want to record entire games. Many thanks to smozoma for laying down the foundation for the following tutorial.

The basics of recording a clip are:

  1. Create a savestate
  2. Load the savestate in gens11b
  3. Go to Instant Replay
  4. Record the Instant Replay (avi file)
  5. Convert the avi file (to .wmv in this tutorial)

With this method, your highlight can only be as long as an instant replay (about 20 game seconds, or 7 real seconds).

Two things you need before we start:

First, you will need Gens11b: http://code.google.c.../downloads/list

This is a “rerecording” emulator that you will use to record AVIs (raw movie files).

Second, download and install the “Lagarith Lossless Codec: http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

This will save you some disk space when recording.

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, here’s how to record your clip:

When playing your ’94 games on gens or gens-netplaysave, you can press F5 at anytime to create a savestate file (you must use gens-netplaysave if playing online). This file is a snapshot of the game at that moment. You have 10 “slots” (0-9) available to house each savestate for each ROM. The file created will be called “ROMname.gs0, .gs1, .gs2...” where the “ROMname” is the name of the ROM you are playing and the number at the end is the savestate slot used.

For example, let’s say I was playing the nhl94.bin ROM and I wanted to record the last goal I scored. I would press F5 shortly after I scored. A little note on the bottom left of my game would appear, “STATE 0 SAVED”

01savestategame.png

Shown without the scoreboard in the way:

02savestategameclear.png

This means I was in slot 0 and I now created a nhl94.gs0 file in the same directory as my nhl94.bin ROM.

03gs0file.png

Note: Pressing F6 and F7 will move my slot down and up by 1. To be safe, I usually press F7 to move up 1 slot and I would see the following message:

04emtpyoccupied.png

Empty means there is no file currently saved in that slot, while occupied means there is a previous savestate file already saved in that slot. Pressing F5 will overwrite anything you had there before.

Now that you have created your savestate file, open up gens11b and load your ROM. In this tutorial, I'm using the nhl94.bin. Then go to File --> Load State --> Load State (Shift +F8 is the shortcut). A prompt will open and you should choose the savestate highlight you saved earlier, in my case nhl94.gs0 (see above).

05loadstate.png

You’ll notice the game goes to the exact moment of the savestate. Immediate pause and go the Instant Replay. Then go to Tools --> AVI --> Start AVI Dump…

06startavidump.png

A window will open up prompting you for a filename and location. After hitting save, another prompt will open up asking for video compression. If you installed the Lagarith Lossless Codec as instructed above, you should see that option:

07codec.png

Your video is now recording! Play your instant replay. After you are done, go to Tools --> AVI --> Stop AVI Dump.

08stopavidump.png

You now have your AVI movie clip! AVI files are large, uncompressed files…and YouTube doesn’t like them :P . You should convert this file using your preferred movie editing software. In this tutorial, I’ll use Windows Movie Maker, as it comes standard in Windows XP/Vista/7, and is simple to use.

Open up Windows Movie Maker and Import the AVI video you just created.

09importvideo.png

Drag it down to the timeline and then click “Save to my computer”. You can now name your new file and choose the location. On the movie settings, you can pick “Best quality for playback on my computer (recommended)", but I usually choose “best fit to file size” and max out the quality to get the best results.

10importvideo.png

Click next and that’s it! After WMM process the video, you will have a .wmv file that you can use to upload to YouTube!

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  • 2 years later...

Ah...if you "record a movie", there is a .gmv file. Check out the link in my OP to smozoma's thread as he goes into more detail, but you can playback that .gmv file in GENS11b. When you playback the movie, you can do the .avi dump of the whole movie. That's how I do the full games on YouTube.

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