Hi, those were probably my TAS videos! The main unfortunate thing about TASing SRB2 is that I've had to compile slightly modified EXEs to get around the following issues:
- The RNG seed is initialized to a different value every boot, and Hourglass doesn't seem to hook in early enough to lock that in. There's an srand call somewhere in the source, and changing the passed-in argument to 0 makes it consistent enough to use.
- Hourglass seems unable to feed arrow key input to SRB2 properly? My usual workaround is mapping numpad 2/4/6/8 to the arrows in the win32 input-handling code.
I don't have a current EXE to post since the last TAS work I did was around three patches ago. I can put one together if you're interested. I've found that Hourglass only works well with the DirectDraw builds, so if you've tried running srb2win.exe through it you won't have much luck.
As far as running the game, you need to change Message Sync Mode to Unchecked (native messaging) and Wait Sync Mode to Asynchronous (unchecked waits). This has to be done every time you open Hourglass as it isn't persisted.
Finally, I use the following command-line arguments:
-win -height 800 -width 1280 -nojoy -nomouse -nomusic -nodigmusic
-win is required to run the game in a window; otherwise the game won't look right.
-width and -height can be whatever, and generally shouldn't affect sync if you change it
-nojoy and -nomouse are simply disabling systems that Hourglass can't hook into anyway. You might not need these, but it's better safe than sorry to me.
-nomusic and -nodigmusic will disable all game music. Sorry. I had severe sync problems whenever music was running.
Once you've accomplished aaaaaaaall of that, it's a simple matter to make the TAS. The game will probably crash a lot when you load savestates, though, which will get super-annoying when you're working on a longer TAS. My old Windows 7 laptop had periodic game crashes, and my new Windows 10 laptop has near-constant crashing. (I almost gave up on the TD TAS because I would have to replay the file three times before it let me do a few rerecords without crashing. >:U)
Oh, and make sure to clean up any save files generated by the game before you replay the movie! That will cause a lot of desyncs if you don't. (gamedata.dat, config.cfg, and any srb2sav*.ssg files should always be reset to the state they were in before the movie.)
