Something Unreal

The second and much-shorter part, as I clear out some random rubbish in my room. There are a few more old electronic devices, including a ~25-year-old LCD game, plus some paper stuff…

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This time, I didn’t throw away or dismantle everything in the video! I did thoroughly rearrange whatever remained afterwards, though.

I thought the “randomly running away” part was weird, and the freezing confirmed my suspicion.

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You sometimes have to talk to the maid with the sign 2 or 3 times to trigger the running away. The first time I tried, it happened on the first try. While recording, I needed to try 3 times (I cut the first try out of this video). Still way too easy, though.

When I have a source of money again, I think I’ll get my Vita modded so that I can capture the video directly. That way, I won’t want to have to point a camcorder at my Vita as if I’m featuring on Retsupurae.

This started off as a test for recording HD videos from a PSP emulator, but I ended up with actual gameplay videos, so I decided to upload them. Please forgive the stuttering game audio (even though my computer can handle screen-capturing in HD at 60 FPS, the emulator’s audio stutters whenever I screen-capture, no matter what the frame rate or resolution).

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I played as MISAKA #10032 (no partner, except for the second battle, where I called in Shirai Kuroko for a Unison Raid), and the opponents were, in order: Stiyl Magnus + Tsuchimikado Motoharu, Kamijou Touma + Misaka Mikoto, Mugino Shizuri + Shirai Kuroko. CPU difficulty was set to highest (to be honest, I was quite lucky at several times in this video). A successful Unison Raid gives a VERY satisfying feeling. It’s very rare that I add music to my videos, but I decided to for this one, as the emulator can’t decode the game’s original AC3 music and I thought it sounded like something was lacking otherwise. And that concludes today’s random facts.

The emulator’s web site is here (I recommend downloading the newest “automated build”, which will be much newer than the version I used).

EDIT: I do hate what YouTube does with audio/video sync. Not had a video with sync this far off for quite some time…

This PS/2 keyboard accepts a maximum of 2 arrow key presses at once – if you press more, the PC speaker beeps and no keypresses are detected. The beep is sometimes 1 second in delay.

[Watch at YouTube]

From 1:52 to 1:57, I switch to my normal (Logitech G15) keyboard to see if the simfile is actually in-sync.

The song is dBu’s remix of 「月時計 ～ ルナ・ダイアル」 (Lunar Clock ~ Luna Dial), the theme of Sakuya Izayoi, the stage-5 boss of Touhou 06: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. The StepMania theme is CyberiaStyle 4 for StepMania 3.9.

This started as a test for screencapping PSP gameplay on RemoteJoyLite, but turned into something else for a friend.

In the gameplay, I wanted to avoid using my partner (who, confusingly, was also Mikoto).

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An attempt at playing a simfile properly, using these very strange-looking gloves which I modified into a StepMania controller (using the I-PAC board). I’m still getting used to using them, especially the fact that I don’t need to use as much effort as I do to press keys on my keyboard (I keep hitting the arrows for the first half of the simfile or so early for this reason, gradually compensating). I’m not quite sure how I managed AA, with all those missed notes at the start…

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There are bare wires on the fingers of the gloves that touch the tin-foil on the thumbs. The wires are attached to the board, which then simulates keypresses and releases on a standard PS/2 keyboard port. Only the 2 fingers closest to the thumbs on each hand are used, because they’re the fingers I use when I’m playing with 2 hands on a keyboard. This way, I don’t need to completely re-learn to play.

The connections can still be extremely unreliable (it took many attempts to even get a run as good as this). Also, I use this board rather than my Arduino because I got the I-PAC a long time before I ever got the Arduino, and since this board is actually made for the job, it’s easier to use, and probably works better too (there’s a limited number of interrupts on an Arduino).

I did make another video, showing things in slightly more detail, and doing the very first gameplay test, but I didn’t edit it because it was just for a few friends. You can still view it here, but I kept the video as “unlisted”, because it’s messy as hell, and insanely amateur-ish (not implying that most of my videos are “professional”, though). It’s also low-quality – I recorded it in SD rather than HD, because it’s quicker to compress, and, as I said, it was just originally to show a few people.

Here’s me attempting to play along with Dream Express (stage one theme from the PC-98 game Touhou 05: Mystic Square) with the melody channels disabled, on my keytar.

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(High-quality MP3 download)

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A few days ago I bought a nice LED message display, and after finding out what data to send to it to control it (without using the sucky software which it came with), I have something new to work with StepMania! ^^

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My program controlling the display works by reading StepMania’s log file to see what you’re doing on StepMania. However, StepMania only updates its log file when it’s built up enough text to write (to avoid making the hard drive do unnecessary work), which means that my program sometimes doesn’t realise what’s happening (or doesn’t until it’s too late). At the end of a song (when StepMania shows “Failed” or “Cleared”) is when this happens the most. Unfortunately, detailed gameplay info (for example, how many “Great”s you got, or what your longest combo was) is not written to the log file. orz

The voice which announces the name of the song is just pre-recorded audio files, and I haven’t recorded files for all songs. As you will hear, only the first 2 songs have their names announced.

Also, I forgot to set my camcorder’s focus to manual, so the flashing of my StepMania lights messes up the autofocus a bit. Sorry xD

On a graphics tablet~.

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I was recently introduced to the rhythm-based game “osu!”. Since it’s a clone of a game from the Nintendo DS which takes advantage of the touch-sensitive screen, I decided to try to emulate that playing style.

I know that this beatmap is really not hard compared to most, but my “Yes!” was due to the fact that this was the first time I’d got a 100% accuracy rating.

The wires coming out of the pen are soldered to the battery terminals inside, and have a D-size battery (which you can see on my desk) connected on the other end. I did that because the internal battery compartment of the pen had a connection so bad that the tablet was simply unusable when using it.

I don’t think I have the input/song sync set correctly since there is quite a noticable delay between pressing the pen and the game detecting that (you can see, and even sometimes hear the tapping at times, in the video). I set the offset to the same as what I set StepMania’s to, and, since both games use DirectSound, I thought that that would make the offset perfect here too, but clearly that’s not the case.

I hadn’t uploaded a new StepMania video in quite a long time, and I surprised myself at being able to AAA this, so I decided to record myself trying to do it again. After about 6 more frustrating attempts, I finally managed. Unfortunately, people were trying to sleep at the time I was recording, so I had to keep fairly quiet (apart from the unavoidable tapping sounds, of course…). This also meant I had to play on headphones, so I mixed the song’s audio in afterwards (although I normally do that anyway).

[Watch in HD]

Note that the theme I’m using, CyberiaStyle 4, shows
“A-” for “A”,
“A+” for “AA”,
“AA” for “AAA” and
“AAA” for “AAAA”.
You can see more info about this theme (for SM 3.9), and download it, from the author’s site, here.

This song is actually from the opening of an H-game called 「魔界天使ジブリール3」 (Makai Tenshi Jiburiiru 3). In this video, I play it as part of the “Otaku’s Dream 2nd Hentai Mix” song pack. You can find out more info about tha pack, and find download links for it, here.