NES emulator as a screensaver?

[Banshaku]

That is a good suggestion. Rendering two movies simultaneously would probably be nicest but would also require a bit more architecturalish code changes than I'd like to undertake at the moment. (As an aside, how would you treat audio in this configuration? One game goes to left speaker, one to the right speaker? What if stereo sound isn't supported?) I think a good, easy compromise would be an option to alternate monitors between movies. I'll see what I can do!

In a scenario with more than one monitor, if you do show more than one movie, the sound will be an issue like you said. In that case, I would:

- disable the sound or
- Select witch monitor as sound priority

The second option seem strange unless you can specify that on monitor X, always the game you like the most play and this is the monitor that you want sound from.

But for now, if it can alternate between monitors or you can select to be on only one monitor, this is already more than enough

[BMF54123]

You know what I would love to see? A dual-screen Darius/Darius II emulator screensaver.



beautiful~

[Banshaku]

You know what I would love to see? A dual-screen Darius/Darius II emulator screensaver.

I agree. That would make a nice one. Only issue (?) is you can only run it with dual monitors

[Luke]

I posted a new version of the screen saver today that implements almost all of the features discussed in this thread including multiple-monitor support, ability to "take over" the current game/movie being displayed, and ability to play NES games in their native demo mode rather than requiring UberNES movies.

Here is the screen saver homepage: http://www.ubernes.com/nesscreensaver.html

And just for fun here is a page with some YouTube demo videos: http://www.ubernes.com/nesscreensavervideos.html

Cheers!

[Banshaku]

I had a chance to test it tonight and in general I like it. The fact that you can enter at any time in one of the 1 to N movies shown on the screen is a very fun option. Maybe I shouldn't bring that at work

It died on me once thought. I would like to know the meaning of the red icons for the movie (could it be the cause of the crash?). I didn't saw the meaning on the site (yet).

[Luke]

The red movie icons just mean that screen saver cannot find the ROM for the given movie. I'm sorry that it crashed for you, I will continue to work on it this weekend!

[Banshaku]

Ok, good to know for the movie. I will check which rom is missing then add them and see if it's still fail.

I think in both case, I was playing in one of the games shown on the screen. I had 4 of them at the same time, using direct draw, NTSC filter. I set dual CPU. I use system pool for buffer. I don't scroll any text. I don't think I did any other settings.

[Kasumi]

I'd like to request an option to get rid of the black grid that separates the game windows when you have more than one. I'd also like an option to show/hide the top and bottom 8 scanlines in the screensaver settings.

Edit: I just recorded a bunch of umf files of me playing Super Mario Bros. I started recording at each level's intro (World ?-? screen) and stopped at every death or at the very end of each level. (after the flagpole fanfare) It's not stellar play, just me messing around, and I did most levels up to somewhere in World 7 where I got a game over. Some levels there isn't a video for, because I screwed up with the recording. If there's interest I'll try to do one for each level, and upload them. It's kind of cool to have the screensaver play random Super Mario Bros. levels.

[Banshaku]

It's kind of cool to have the screensaver play random Super Mario Bros. levels.

The way I understand it, the movie has many "checkpoint" in it. So if you had only SMB in your screen saver with the full movie of the game, it would show random part of the game every 1 minute (or the setting you set). Is it what you're looking for?

[Kasumi]

It's not. That statement wasn't a feature request. I already recorded a bunch of separated level plays and I was just wondering if anyone else would be interested in them.

[Luke]

I'd like to request an option to get rid of the black grid that separates the game windows when you have more than one. I'd also like an option to show/hide the top and bottom 8 scanlines in the screensaver settings.

Thanks for trying out the screen saver! I'm not happy with how cumbersome the GUI is for the video stuff so while I'm redoing that I will try to get these features added. The grid spacing will be very easy to add, but the show top/bottom scanlines will be a tougher nut to crack for tedious implementation reasons.

Banshaku's post is correct in that a single SMB movie with checkpoints at each level could be displayed as a big wall of SMB levels just the same as having a single movie for each level; six of one a half dozen of the other. Along those lines, a "no-warp" play-through of SMB would be a really nice addition to the online movie gallery to go along with the speed runs already there.

[Banshaku]

The screen saver is nice but it dies on me too often, even when I'm not playing games in it so I had to remove it.

If you can create a debug version that could catch and write logs about the possible error, I could always try it.

[Luke]

A new version of the screen saver was just posted here. The crashes reported by Banshaku have been fixed (thanks for the help again Banshaku!), the grid spacing is now configurable, and movies can be repeated in a grid which lets user fill out an entire screen's worth of movies even if the CPU cannot emulate a unique game for each spot in the grid. Thanks again for the feedback and suggestions!

[Banshaku]

One suggestion: make a package with the DLL dependencies or in a different file. I re-installed my os recently and it ask for specific DLL (MSVCP71.DLL, maybe will ask for another one once I have this one). I checked on the net but I cannot find any VS C++ redistributable for VS2003. They are only available for 2005/2008. Maybe they came with dot net 1.1 framework but I didn't re-installed or have no intention to do it.

[Luke]

Good catch! The screen saver has just been updated so that is not dependent on the VS 2003 C++ runtime DLLs. (I had mistakenly set my "Code generation" settings to "Multi-threaded DLL" rather than "Multi-threaded".) Hopefully that will fix the issue!