Morten's Blog

Ever wanted to record your Super Mario skills on the Super Nintendo console, without the console? Don’t worry, most of todays computers are powerful enough to pretend being, or emulate, a console machine. Most likely so is your’s.  And you’re in luck, Super Nintendo is one of, if not the best, emulated console system there is. All you basically need is an emulator, the piece of software that magically turns your PC into a good ol’ console; and the ROM file of your favorite game. The game ROM’s are in most cases copyrighted, so i can’t nor won’t supply you with those. Make sure you own the game cartridge, or else you might find yourself in violation of copyright laws.

The things you will need:

• A Super Nintendo emulator for Windows called ZSnes, coded by zsKnight and _Demo_ *
  
• The ROM image from your favorite SNES game. Look around, they are not that hard to find.
• MEncoder by Gianluigi Tiesi

* At the time of writing, ZSnes has reached version 1.51

Copy your ROM image(s) to any folder. Preferably one that doesn’t require you to click trough too many folders to get to it.

Installing the software is pretty straightforward, just extract the two archives, each into their own folders. It might work having ZSnes and MEncoder in the same folder, but i haven’t tried it. Also, i think that’s a little messy. You are going to add the MEncoder location to window’s PATH environment variable instead, so remember the location where you extracted it. Follow the instructions below as the procedure differs a little depending on what version of Windows you are using.

Edit your Path environment variable

For Windows Vista you can go to the Control panel and click on the System icon, select Advanced System Settings in the left menu and then the “Environment variables” button. Then, in the list under “System Variables”, look for Path (might be lower- or uppercase). When you have found it, edit it and add the location of the folder where the MEncoder executable file is located. Remember to add the semicolon that is needed to separate the various folders listed in the Path string. Click OK, and your done.

(How to set the path in Windows 2000 / Windows XP)

When that’s all done, let’s start up ZSnes and configure it a little. The main things to check out is the Screen Resolution, Filters and Input

Choose your optimal screen preferences under “Video” in the Config menu. I have a widescreen and wanted ZSnes to fill the screen completely, so i made a custom screen setting it to 1360×768 with the DS F option (check the legend for description). Choose the Filter that you feel gives the best result. Configure your Input, and let’s load up a game already! Click GAME in the top menu, and select LOAD. Then browse to the folder where you copied or extracted the ROM file(s), select the game you want to play and click the LOAD button. If the game runs, great! if it doesn’t, seek help!

Let us record a short game session that we will later use to generate the movie. Press ESC, so that the game pauses and the top menu pops out. Under the MISC button, you should select MOVIE OPT. This will bring up the control panel for the ZSnes movie recording feature. There are two tabs in the window, but let’s leave it on CONTROLS for now.

ZSnes' movie recording control panel

Select one of the movie slots, and remember which one you picked. Also activate the RECORD FROM:RESET radio button. Finally, click RECORD and start playing! When your done playing, hit ESC again, and go to the control panel and click STOP. You could go straight to the DUMPING tab and encode the video right away, but the output would be of rather poor quality. Let’s exit ZSnes for a moment, to configure the way MEncoder will create our movie into a format that can be played in a normal video file player, or uploaded to YouTube.

Open up the file called zmovie.cfg (located in the same folder as the ZSnes executable) in a text editor. I’m no expert on digital video, i honestly don’t have a clue, so check out the MEncoder documentation on how to optimize your settings for your needs. But these are the changes i made:

Change:

md_xvid="-ovc xvid -xvidencopts fixed_quant=2"

Into:

md_xvid="-ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=4200:vhq=1:max_bframes=2:quant_type=h263:chroma_me:me_quality=6"

Change:

md_command="$md_prog $md_other $md_no_sound $md_raw $md_vcodec -o $md_file -"

Into:

md_command="$md_prog $md_other $md_no_sound $md_raw $md_vcodec -vf scale=1360:768 -sws 2 -o $md_file -"

Change the screen resolution (1360:768) according to your ZSnes settings. Save and close zmovie.cfg. Now start ZSnes again, and load the same ROM you used when recording. Press ESC, and go to the movie recorder control panel. But this time you will go to the DUMPING tab.

ZSnes movie dumping settings

Select the movie slot you chose when you recorded. Select the XVID LOSSLESS option, and DUMP AUDIO. This will output the sound and video seperately, leaving the sound uncompressed. You can mix the two together later using your favorite video editor. (If you want to compress the sound using ZSnes, you are going to need the Lame mp3 encoder). Click the START button. ZSnes should minimize and start MEncoder, encoding the ZSnes movie into an AVI file. By default a file called video.avi is created in the same folder as the ZSnes exe file is located. The sound file is by default called audio.wav also located in the same folder.