[TAS] Pac-Man CE DX+ 5 Minute Championship 2: 2,163,300 Points
334So, I have some explaining to do. Read the description for how I was able to do all of this.
I was able to find a Virtual Machine program that allowed tools effectively identical to savestates found in most game console emulators. The thing with these savestates (Known as "Snapshots") is that a single Snapshot has to store the entire Virtual Machine's RAM in order to function correctly. When emulating consoles, it isn't that much of a deal, as they have extremely small amounts of RAM compared to today (Even the Wii only had around 50-60MB of RAM). These Virtual Machines (Depending on the Operating System) require much, much more RAM than that, in the range of Gigabytes as opposed to Megabytes. Larger Snapshots requires more and more space, and takes longer and longer to load, so it's a good amount of hassle.
Thankfully, Pac-Man CE DX+ can run on a figurative toaster (With its system requirements on Steam citing only 1GB of RAM and a 1GHz Processor), so I was able to cut down on requirements down to what Steam said. As a consequence, the game still stuttered a frequent amount on a Windows XP Virtual Machine (Combined with probable issues due to the game running in a Virtual Machine in it of itself). I wasn't able to port the finished replay over to the version on my actual laptop, so I had to record the Virtual Machine through FFSplit. Sorry for the stuttering (I tried fixing it), the audio oddities (I couldn't fix them), and the rendering error near the end; I'll try to fix them next time, if I do this again.
As for how I exactly did this, I simply ran Pac-Man CE DX + and Cheat Manager within the Virtual Machine at the same time and set the game's speed to 0.25x. It wasn't entirely perfect, but it's the closest that I've gotten to TASing PC games that aren't compatible with Hourglass (A very old program that allowed you to TAS a very small amount of Windows Applications). This specific method also only works with games that have its own functioning version of Input Recording, so there won't be many games that can be done in this fashion.
Finally, I know that this isn't the highest score. I'm pretty sure there's a better route that I didn't take or plan out, but working with this is frustrating, and I didn't want to waste any more of my time with it.
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