Just coming off my Time Soldier high (probably my proudest MARP achievement yet, even though no one else is playing it), I noticed something weird... zipped up it's 107k, even though it only encompassed about a half hour or so of gameplay. Looking back at other zips of mine, the 1942 ones are 60k-70k, even though it takes about an hour to complete. My two-hour Nova 2001 recording was 100k.

Is it the analog control that makes the recordings bigger? Would make sense to me, considering that more player inputs need to be recorded to the file for proper playback. My Heavy Barrel recordings are around 70k, and Midnight Resistance less than 50k... I forget how long it takes to finish these games, but they're certainly not THAT long.

Hard drive space isn't a concern, I'm just curious to know if this is why they're bigger...

-BBH

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), July 24, 1999

Answers

You're right - it's because of the analogue inputs. Take a look at the size of any centipede recording, and you'll see that they are a lot bigger than non-analogue games. Analogue inputs are 8 bit inputs, and moving the mouse a little can affect a lot of bits, so from frame to frame there's a lot of changes to store. With a joystick, you're probably not going to change its position more than a few times a second, and each movement only affects one or two bits, so the zip program can compress the recording really well. When you move a mouse, though, the 8-bit number(s) change with every frame, leaving less score for compression.

As far as disk space goes, the recordings take up most of the space at MARP (not surprisingly):

11.9 megs of graphics, including screen shots 47.5 megs of old versions of MAME 107.6 megs of recordings

Chris.

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@bigfoot.com), July 25, 1999.

I still think it's pretty amazing that almost 6000 MAME recordings only take up 0.1 GB of space!

-- ***PL*** (laffaye@ibm.net), July 25, 1999.

In fact, as of now it's something like 8939 recordings taking up 107.955 megs, making for an average of something like 12077 bytes each.

The site's scripts keep a record of all the recordings ever submitted, and often people submit scores which better their own old recordings. These old recordings don't show up on the searches, but they're still kept, just in case the new recordings don't play back.

Chris.

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@bigfoot.com), July 25, 1999.

Neat, I was actually right about something :) Thanks for the info Zwaxy.

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), July 26, 1999.