Spin
(Ver 0.6 Test, authors: Spin team, 2006.
Februar, For windows.)
Homepage
ZX Spin is under heavy development at moment (Febr.
2006). You may pick up latest version at WOS forum - http://www.worldofspectrum.org
, forum, emulators section. I will describe here mostly Video Recording
in new version, because setting requires some knowledge (or lot of
experimenting).
Program is distributed as ZIP file, installation consists
of unpacking archive in some directory. From first moment is obvious
that program is concepted ambitious, with lot of features. We have
load/save of binary files to/from desired address, recordings, diverse
tools as debugger, Z80 assembler, etc.
There is help included, but it is old one, from 2003, I hope
that we will see soon help for new version. What is emulated,
you may see from this screenshot:
From V 0.6 we have added 2 new video
renderers: direct 3D and Open GL, beside GDI and Direct Draw. It is
good, especially when screen is resized to some custom resolution -
advanced filtering gives much better look (with newer video cards).
Video recording works only with
Renderer set to GDI, else you will get blank, white screen. If you have
some newer machine (1 GHz or more). you may record AVI with XviD codec,
what will give pretty good quality with small file sizes, and will bo
no significant slowdown by recording. As on right picture above, you
must set audio to 16 Bit, Stereo. No need for resize video, it will
just increase AVI file size, but will not give sharper pic. It can be
always resized during playback.
Left above is main XviD setting panel. Bitrate of ~1000 kbps is enough
for res. 352x296 (with borders). Right pic is 'Advanced Options' -
Maximum I-frame interval is set to 25, because it is good for direct
recording. Motion search precision of 4 will result in less CPU load.
Here is short AVI file recorded with mentioned settings: CheqFlagRec . If you want even smaller video files
there is some hint: recompress audio to MP3 (not recommended direct
recording to MP3, it usually causes audio/video desync). Use 2 pass
post compression - then can use much lower bitrate (500 kbps without
borders should be enough, and recording border has only sense when
there happening something). In that case may use bigger bitrate by
recording, or even some other codec as MJPEG or even no compression...
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