We seem to have some new publicity

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nicksen782
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We seem to have some new publicity

Post by nicksen782 »

The video info is difficult to understand. It seems this person finds video games (seems like retro games) and makes recordings.

He links to his friends but not to uzebox.org . He actually has my website, nicksen782.net in the url title but no actual link to it. It would be nice to have a link since there isn't much point of publicizing something if there isn't a hyperlink back to the source(s).

https://www.youtube.com/user/petsasjim1 ... ery=uzebox

Take a look though.
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Artcfox
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Re: We seem to have some new publicity

Post by Artcfox »

It was really interesting watching him play through the games I made. It doesn't look like he figured out how to turn on the laser in any of the Laser Puzzle games though, but he did catch on with Bugz and it was fun "watching his thoughts" as he played through the first 4 levels.

Odd that he hasn't found this forum (or credited it) though, but maybe he will eventually discover it. I thought about leaving a YouTube comment, but it doesn't seem like English is his first language.
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uze6666
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Re: We seem to have some new publicity

Post by uze6666 »

Looking at the vids, I have to ask a question that hurts...so far the web emulator generally has that problem with inconsistent sound speed. I though it was my machine initially but obviously, with a youtube vid, its not. Guys, this is not acceptable. Uzebox emu sounds terrible. Can we fix this?
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Artcfox
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Re: We seem to have some new publicity

Post by Artcfox »

uze6666 wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 6:11 am Looking at the vids, I have to ask a question that hurts...so far the web emulator generally has that problem with inconsistent sound speed. I though it was my machine initially but obviously, with a youtube vid, its not. Guys, this is not acceptable. Uzebox emu sounds terrible. Can we fix this?
My guess is that it's because he was running screen recording software at the same time on not so great hardware, capturing and encoding part of the webpage. He wasn't recording from the native emulator. You can see the "Please choose a game" web page text in the beginning of the second video of the playlist.
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Jubatian
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Re: We seem to have some new publicity

Post by Jubatian »

Artcfox wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 6:43 am
uze6666 wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 6:11 am Looking at the vids, I have to ask a question that hurts...so far the web emulator generally has that problem with inconsistent sound speed. I though it was my machine initially but obviously, with a youtube vid, its not. Guys, this is not acceptable. Uzebox emu sounds terrible. Can we fix this?
My guess is that it's because he was running screen recording software at the same time on not so great hardware, capturing and encoding part of the webpage. He wasn't recording from the native emulator. You can see the "Please choose a game" web page text in the beginning of the second video of the playlist.
There is absolutely no way to fix it then, it is CUzeBox of course, but running it in the browser is already costly (worsened by garbage collection bursts of the JavaScript engine), putting the additional load of video capturing on top of this sure can bring down the rig to its knees (it would be choppy if it wasn't wobbly, neither good). The native CUzeBox has a video capture option which would record 60Hz video with perfect sound no matter how poorly it actually runs (then your gameplay may be choppy, the sound may wobble around as the video capture strains your machine, but the recording taps the source before the output, even frames which are dropped from the output, and adds the sound at the correct rate for the video stream). So you can record with great quality using CUzeBox, you just have to enable the feature when building it.
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uze6666
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Re: We seem to have some new publicity

Post by uze6666 »

Frame dropping is IHMO much less damaging than sound. That was the choice made in uzem back then. A frame off here and there was much less noticeable than sound picthing up an down. Guys, that's my view and you can digress of course, but we have to keep the sound super steady in the emulators, video frame rate will catch up eventually. That wobbly sound is really bad. :(
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Re: We seem to have some new publicity

Post by Jubatian »

uze6666 wrote: Thu Sep 14, 2017 7:15 am Frame dropping is IHMO much less damaging than sound. That was the choice made in uzem back then. A frame off here and there was much less noticeable than sound picthing up an down. Guys, that's my view and you can digress of course, but we have to keep the sound super steady in the emulators, video frame rate will catch up eventually. That wobbly sound is really bad. :(
CUzeBox normally can have steady sound, it has sort of a PID controller to determine the ratio of the native video and audio frequencies (which run from distinct oscillators, video card and sound card, so even in theory it is impossible to come up with a math formula which would be correct) to allow for having perfect sync with both (provided the host OS' APIs work correctly). Doing anything else would end up having either choppy video or choppy audio, usually likely not much noticable, but if an user's system for some reason is more than sligthly off to the usual 60Hz, then it will also be annoying (and CUzeBox can sync perfectly to that, so even if for some reason your monitor runs at 60.5Hz, the whole thing will just run a percent faster - CUzeBox tries to sync between 58Hz and 62Hz).

This wobbling sound problem only surfaces when something is messing around with the host, taking away CPU power from CUzeBox. It can even survive this in native mode if you have a slow PC (so the emulator steadily lacks the power to run), what it can't deal with is when it is kicked around in bursts (sometimes having enough time for a while to emulate, other times not getting the necessary CPU time). Running from the web is a killer for this: the host's performance is wobbly (due to garbage collecting, probably also due to the extra bursts from disk writes trying to video capture), so stuff end up being wobbly. Otherwise it would be skippy, probably with annoying loud <click>s on the speakers.

Those recordings have another flaw, that he recorded CUzeBox's scanline effect, which ended up producing ugly interference. This is something which really really shouldn't have been done this way especially not through the browser, no matter what the emulator did, the result wouldn't be very good. I simply can not detect if someone tries to record it and tell him to stop it and use the emulator's own recording capability :P
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Artcfox
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Re: We seem to have some new publicity

Post by Artcfox »

What if the web page version of CUzeBox had a "Download this emulator with screen recording support" link, where you could download a Linux, OS X, and Windows build of the emulator (compiled with screen recording support, and bundled with ffmpeg), bundled with all of the game files that are on the server?
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Re: We seem to have some new publicity

Post by Jubatian »

I checked emulator's frequency scaling. It does nothing wrong, even under heavy load the long-term frequency is steady. What causes the wobbling is that the audio component tries to eliminate skipping on short-term by stretching the input data, so where you hear a wobble, if I disabled it, the audio would skip. There just isn't any way to fix those in any way so you get a clean audio: there is just no data to feed into the audio buffer.

It doesn't leave the buffer unfilled even when skipping, so it isn't very bad. I will experiment a bit with what could be done, but no matter what, there will be audio distortions there (since at those points the host has not got the resources to run the emulation, so the buffer is drained). So if someone records that, then he will record those too.
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nicksen782
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Re: We seem to have some new publicity

Post by nicksen782 »

Here is a (maybe?) simple starting point: I see that the FPS of CUzeBox will vary from 30 to 60. It usually plays at 30 now. What if that FPS was forced for Emscripten builds? Or maybe even some hot key could be pressed? I saw something like that on the CUzeBox documentation, the Frame Limiter. What does that do?
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