[hatari-devel] Hatari feature suggestion

[Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

On Friday 05 November 2010, Anders Eriksson wrote:
> while recording demos with Hatari, I've often wanted a timer that tells
> me how long (in seconds) the video file is currently. As the recording is
> non-realtime and the filesize varies (PNG) it's hard if not impossible to
> know how far the recording as gone.
>
> For example, you want to record 2 minutes of a cracktro, you can only
> guess how far you've come and more than once I've had ugly words come out
> of my mouth when realising I hadn't recorded as much as I wanted :-)
>
> Would be much appreciated with such a feature.

Hatari already has a feature that can be used for that, the "--run-vbls"
argument (frameskip shouldn't affect it).

For example, to record 10 emulated secs when Atari's running VBLs at 50Hz:
  hatari --avirecord --run-vbls $((10*50)) --avi-file 10s.avi

Before this you probably want to save a memory snapshot and tell Hatari
to load that snapshot...


If you don't want to use memory snapshots, other alternative would be to
start this from the debugger at run-time, but there were some issues with
that.  I just commited a fix that allows using --run-vbls from the debugger,
but avi recording cannot be enabled from the debugger (or remotely),
only from UI, key shortcut or at bootup.

So, at run-time you need to do it like this from the debugger:
* Set recording parameters & exit timeout
  setopt --frameskips 0 --run-vbls 500 --avi-file 10s.avi
* Press the (AltGr+A) recording shortcut in Hatari window
* Continue emulation from debugger:
  c

If you're using Hatari (python) remote console, you can script this
(including key shortcut invocation).


	- Eero

PS. I fixed the debugui.c compile warning, I'll look at the other warnings
(which aren't reproducible with my GCC version) later on.