this would explain a lot...

I just tried playing back both of the recent recordings for bublbobr, the RomStar Bubble Bobble clone, and neither of them worked for me. I guess this is due to the problems that Bubble Bobble recordings have with frame skipping ( see Angry's guide to recording troubles at http://www.primenet.com/~greggg/marp/inp-prob.html ).

He writes:

In Bobble Bobble, the frameskip setting used during recording must be used during playback.

When making a recording with thise game, it is important that you don't *tweak* the frameskip setting during your game or the playback will fail when it reaches that point of the game. You should set the frameskip before starting the emulation.

Since MAME these days automatically frame skips when the going gets tough, this will probably affect most bublbobl recordings. To prevent MAME from autoframeskipping, you can give it the option: -frameskip 0

when you start it, or more permanently, you can put frameskip = 0

in your mame.cfg (you probably already have a mame.cfg wherever your mame.exe file is, and it probably already has a 'frameskip =' line in it - just change that line). The same problem with frameskipping is also reported for other games on Angry's page - particularly the 1983/4 Sega games (Flicky, et al).

Let's be careful out there. :o)

Chris.

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@bigfoot.com), April 27, 1999

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), July 11, 2000