Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi all,
 Again, I must reiterate how amazed I am that even my specs tend to run Dolphin quite well.  Kudos to the developers!
 That said, I have some typical newbie questions.  Now, before you all get irritated with me, I have tried to search the forums here but I'm not coming up with much of anything.
 So...
 I'm not understanding why, when I dump frames/audio from a recording, the audio is around twice the size of the video.  Not a complaint per say, just something I hope one can explain so I can fix it.
 I see that, though the initial guide recommends various settings for ideal performance, some of what I DID find on the forums seem to contradict the developers own recommendations.  How does one know what to actually set things to? ... mere trial and error?
 For now my last question is something that I hate to admit to duplicating a question I already posed but, why do some games (IE, the Mortal Kombat games) play back results that are nothing at all like what I performed/experienced when recording?  All I can assume is that it has to do with how "random" such games work, in terms of characters/moves/arenas chosen.  Perhaps during playback Dolphin doesn't know how to "deal" with the factors that go into the MK games' coding?
 Thanks in advance for your patience
 - tarf

(05-23-2015, 08:15 AM)takearushfan Wrote: [ -> ] I'm not understanding why, when I dump frames/audio from a recording, the audio is around twice the size of the video.  Not a complaint per say, just something I hope one can explain so I can fix it.

If both the video and audio had been uncompressed, the video would be much larger than the audio, and probably also too large to fit comfortably on your hard drive. Dolphin supports compression for video but not for audio. I don't know for sure why it's like that, but I guess it's because audio already is small enough that its size isn't going to be a problem in practice.

(05-23-2015, 08:15 AM)takearushfan Wrote: [ -> ]I see that, though the initial guide recommends various settings for ideal performance, some of what I DID find on the forums seem to contradict the developers own recommendations.  How does one know what to actually set things to? ... mere trial and error?

Well... I can't really comment on the correct way to set every setting, but if you have a more specific question, there's probably someone who's willing to answer it

(05-23-2015, 08:15 AM)takearushfan Wrote: [ -> ]For now my last question is something that I hate to admit to duplicating a question I already posed but, why do some games (IE, the Mortal Kombat games) play back results that are nothing at all like what I performed/experienced when recording?  All I can assume is that it has to do with how "random" such games work, in terms of characters/moves/arenas chosen.  Perhaps during playback Dolphin doesn't know how to "deal" with the factors that go into the MK games' coding?

It's impossible for a game to be truly random. All "random" selections need to be based on something, like the player's input or the CPU's internal state, though most games will try to give wildly different results when there are small differences in input so that the "randomness" is unpredictable enough. If Dolphin emulates every part of the hardware the exact same way every time and uses the exact same controller input every time, you will get the exact same result. The problem is that Dolphin sometimes only does things almost the same way, which isn't good enough. For instance, if you enable dual core, the speed of the emulated CPU in comparison to the emulated GPU will vary a bit depending on what speed your real hardware happens to run on, so the pseudorandom number generator gets thrown out of sync. Many people have been able to make tool-assisted speedruns using Dolphin's input recording functionality, so it's definitely possible to get it to sync. However, it's not the most straightforward thing to get to work, and there might be additional desync problems in the recent dev builds compared to other versions...

Thanks for the response.

As for the A/V sync, I did get it to work by disabling the Dual Core and Idle Skipping speedups and using the DSP LLE recompiler. The speed is pretty much flawless (in the game in question) with the settings. Naturally, when dumping both the audio and video with these settings while playing the game, well yeah, it'll be significantly slower. Fortunately, it plays back perfectly.
As for the movie playback issue. I'm still unable to not have it do, (pseudo) "random" things ... the playback is hardly anything like what I recorded. For now I won't dwell on that too much though. I'm too impressed with everything else about the project

Here's some TAS dumping instructions:
http://tasvideos.org/EncodingGuide/Video...ml#Dolphin

Quite the checklist...

Also not mentioned there, I assume a TAS replay doesn't contain your save file, so if you play your TAS file without using the same save file as when you made the video, the game could be desynced by reasons such as random number generation/loading times etc. being affected by the difference in your save file.