Amiga Longplay [324] Who Shot Johnny Rock? (American Laser Games)
15American Laser Games are arcade games where you use a gun and shoot stuff on a big screen. These games happen to run on my favorite Commodore Amiga, the Amiga 500. It uses Amiga's genlock to display the video.
This game was crazy hard. Would have cost me a million dollars to get to the end if I played it on the real thing.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
02:18 - Thingy
02:28 - Credits
03:36 - Time to play
16:26 - Ending
Extras (only picked what I thought was worth showing):
17:14 - The doctor and his nurse
18:12 - Funerals for the dead innocent people
18:58 - You're getting shot
As with all my Amiga videos, I record them using WinUAE (an emulator) with its built-in avi recorder. But couldn't this time as it doesn't capture the audio for genlock stuff (or I just don't know how to make it happen), so had to resort to using a third party recording tool instead, which caused a bunch of problems.
Couldn't use the typical savestates method I normally do as I can't use WinUAE's own avi recorder, so had to come up with a new way. I re-encoded the video with a frame counter outside the game-display area, so I could more easily cut out unwanted mistakes and match the different parts together as I was constantly saving and loading states while recording one big video file.
The video needed to be re-encoded anyway as those I found online that were recommended for use with WinUAE had the wrong aspect ratio (you can tick the "keep aspect ratio" box on the Genlock tab in the emulator, but it only makes it a little bit more accurate, not fully). They also have interlace line stuff (and the seeking took too long for my taste, so made them seek instantly instead). I found on YouTube a higher res version of some of these ALG games without interlace + they were in 60fps instead of 29.970/30. So was thinking of using them for my longplays instead, but... fuck it, couldn't be bothered, and the ones I used were the "recommended" ones anyway, even though I myself could make better looking/running ones. Even with any scanline/interlace stuff turned off (afaik) in WinUAE, the emulator still added some of its own lines for some reason. You can see them in the white flash when shooting for example. These lines are not part of the video. Maybe the flash is an image by itself, dunno.
Another problem I had was getting a smooth video playback, like I get with real media players. In WinUAE via genlock it's random. Sometimes smooth, sometimes laggy (has nothing to do with how fast my computer is etc). Turning on "Standard Vsync" in the emulator helped a bit as it made the video frame rate more stable more of the time, but still stutter at least once per minute. So, I constantly quick saved and quick loaded, so whenever there was a stutter, I loaded and replayed the part until it ran smooth (I left some stutter in maybe here and there, but they are super minor). So yeah, LOADS of editing needed (https://i.imgur.com/TkJJn06.png).
Turning on the Vsync made the the sounds not part of the genlock video (like shooting, inserting coin, reloading...) play too fast. I solved this by setting my desktop refresh rate to 60 to match WinUAE's frame rate it was using for the game.
Then there's the accuracy problem of where you shoot as well. In the service menu of the game you can calibrate the aim, but that only seem to make the red dot match where the crosshair is, which is not enough to accurately be able to hit stuff. The accuracy is a lot about how wide/tall the video is and where it's positioned on the screen (yes, I even played around with the "genlock_offset_x/y" in the .uae). Seems the default non-correct aspect ratio that makes the video way too wide (IMO) makes it more accurate, but I wanted 1:1 aspect ratio. Wish we could change the width of this "flash" area, as it seems the hitboxes are based on this white area, so if we don't have the genlock video properly sized and positioned this white area is made for, shooting things will not be accurate. I made an example of what I mean: https://i.imgur.com/bfMRqEX.jpeg (this example is for Mad Dog McCree, but same goes for most/all these ALG games in WinUAE)
So, anyway, with the video aspect ratio I chose to use, I often have to shoot far to the left or right of the things to hit them, and I sometimes try to mask this by randomly spraying the bullets on and around the target. IRL I would just hit them in the center with one bullet :) as I've played these games in the arcades before.
Oooor, maybe I just do something wrong and there was an easy solution to everything and I didn't have to go through all this trouble/effort to get a smooth video playback, or bad shooting accuracy because of things not lining up properly, and heck maybe I could even record with sound with WinUAE's avi output and use the standard way of saving/loading states. Well, so far I couldn't come up with anything better than what I've been doing after hours of research/testing.
Meh, text cap reached, had more to say.