Is there a site where we can browse and download RetroArch replays?
Are they compatible between core/RA versions?
Seems like a much better way to view gameplay longplays/speedruns than video files. They are much smaller, you can stop them and get in the action in real time and you can also use shaders.
no such site currently, but feel free to start posting them here on the forum. If we get a few, we could make a dedicated thread, etc.
They include a savestate, so anything that would break a savestate will break a replay.
I didn’t know RetroArch could do this.
I just got another vice. 
Between AR versions sure yes, between different cores (nestopia - mesen) I don’t think so, and…
…if a core is upgraded, there is a chance that they will break.
Will it be worth the work?
For a long time I am thinking of doing that too! This topic is very interesting to me. I thought about uploading them to Github maybe, so that the access is standardized and preserved for everyone, but not sure how happy Github would be if we only upload binary files.
Oh, but if the savestate is tied to the replay, then it’s a problem for longevity of the recording. The best would be then to archive the emulator core version too and use it for playback.
Yeah, that’s a good idea. Inconvenient maybe but it still beats having GBs of raw videos or having to watch them online.
Back in the day, before RetroArch existed, I wrote such a little automation tool. The idea was to use the tool whenever I was recording highscore attempts of regular MAME. At the end of the recording the script would ask a few stuff like name and score and then create and archive of the script with that text information. Later this could be used to automatically download the correct MAME version to a cache and replay the recording. That was needed back then, because there was no way of knowing the versions from record file.
But nowadays this wouldn’t be needed with RetroArch anymore, right? If the recording file has all information, this could be used by a script to download the core from buildbot archive.
I am re experimenting with replay files. Another big plus of replay files is, that we not only can watch the play in our preferred resolution and shaders, but also play at the end (or even anytime we want to?) when the replay file ends. But off course we can’t easily share this with others who don’t have the exact same setup and who just wants to watch the video. So there are pros and cons.
After searching and thinking about it for a while, I think the best free platform to archive such recordings would be archive.org. We would only need someone to constantly download and upload those files to an account and probably even update a webpage with a description for each. If we want to have an organized and central place to go. Just some random thoughts. The biggest problem would be spam and people try to upload non replay files.
if there’s going to be someone curating, they could just use google drive or onedrive.
Yes, you can stop the replay whenever you want and play from that point.
You can probably use fast forward and maybe re-wind without messing the replay? Gotta test this when i have some time.
Yes you can, it’s the first thing I tried, I have “Hotkey Enable” configured with Slow / Fast-Forward, Rewind and now Replay. A console for sports games.
Wouldn’t it be better to make a script to modify the replay saves, with the new core version? How difficult can that be?
So you can also use those replay and saves instead of thumbnails, for the title and a gameplay.
Wouldn’t it be better to make a script to modify the replay saves, with the new core version? How difficult can that be?
You mean replay the file with the core you have installed right now? That is something to avoid, because incompatibilities with never core versions can occur, because it includes a savestate. But we don’t need to modify the replay file anyway, if you want to use a different core version. In the commandline options (there are no GUI options for in RetroArch) we can point the replay file, game file and core file directly to run RetroArch. It would directly play the file then. Like this:
retroarch -L '/home/tuncay/Desktop/mybsnescore.so' -P '/home/tuncay/Desktop/mytest.replay' '/home/tuncay/Emulation/Roms/snes/Super Mario World (U) [!].smc'
Or do you suggest to modify the replay file itself, not just its meta information in the header (does it have a header?)? Because if you suggest to “correct” the recording itself, I feel like this is an impossible task. The recording of the key presses aren’t the problem here, but the savestate, which is a dumb Edit: dump (lol the typo was dumb) of the memory of the core (as far as I understand).
I mean that when the core is updated, it can break the saves and replays in question. Then, you would have to load an old core to see the replays. This can be a bit cumbersome.
I am a total ignorant on this, it is an idea because I have seen that the saves are modified and adapted, maybe it is a better option to repair the saves for current versions, than to have a collection of old cores.