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

Answers

I've had that problem with Auto-Frameskip before... Skito and I are in a battle for 10 points on Battle Flipshot, and he said on my score he couldn't play my inp back, and I couldn't either, I think it was because of the Auto-Frameskip being fussy (from m35b10 onward, Mame32's auto-frameskip is usually at 11 for neo-geo games, and I had to adjust it to frameskip 8...but that didn't work either...)... This may not be an isolated problem, if you're trying to verify any of my other scores, there MIGHT be problems, if there are, just e- mail me... Regardless, I'm hoping to get that 10 points in Flipshot...Skito is gonna go DOWN! --SportsDude (I'm not super-gifted at arcade games, but when it comes to NeoGeo, I'm not your typical gamer...=)

-- James Reisdorf (shyboy820@aol.com), April 29, 1999.