Heya buddy, I have a surprise for you! I implemented the animated GIF exporting! This actually turned out to be a pretty sweet feature!
So I'm not exactly sure what file type "vms00.bin" is, but judging by the name, I'm assuming it's simply .vms. If that's the case, you are going to have to change the extension before trying to load it into EVMU, and I'm really not sure why the hell they are just using a .bin extension...
Once you have the emulator opened and the file loaded, there are a few features that are going to make your life so much easier.
Here's a link to the Dropbox folder with all of the latest builds:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rai7db85bqq5iz0/AAAbnQfEJpTFaHkQ8K6nP6kVa?dl=0Recording an AnimationFrom the file menu, go to Tools->Capture Animation->Record to begin recording, or simply push CTRL/CMD+R.
You should see the red "recording" icon, and a little message. Once you see that, everything that's happening on the VMU is being captured for the animated GIF.
Once you're done capturing whatever it is that you want, either stop recording from the file menu or the shortcut again. The animated GIF should automatically be generated and should be opened with the default program. If you want to actually view the files, they're located at:
Windows: C:/Users/YourUserName/ElysianVMU
MacOS: /Users/YourUserName/ElysianVMU
Linux: /home/YourUserName/ElysianVMU
The files should be named the same thing as the ROM image, and every new recording should simply append a number to the previous recording output.
Halt and Advance FrameI decided that I should also implement these two, because you might be capturing a very quick/precise segment of an animation, and you want to only record the relevant frames. By Halting the emulator execution, then slowly advancing the frames until you've run through everything you want to capture, you can more easily record precise segments.
From the file menu, the Emulation->Playback menu should have the actions for both Halting and Advancing the frame, or the shortcuts are F2 and F3 respectively.
Note that "halting" or slowing down the execution does NOT actually effect the timing of the animated GIF output, so don't worry about screwing up the timing. "Advance Frame" basically advanced the emulator 1/20th of a second, which is usually a single frame for a ROM. This may be only half a frame for certain ROMs, so you may have to advance twice to get a full frame.
Note that the output GIFs are EXTREMELY optimized and efficient, since the VMU is at such a low resolution and only has a 2 color palette. You can record fairly long, complex animations without the file size getting more than a few KB. I figured that the exported resolution should probably say the VMU's native 42x38 to keep the file small and to allow you to stretch/scale as you see fit later on. Didn't want to introduce any inaccuracy at the raw output level.
Note that this whole feature was developed on MacOS, but it should work fine on Windows. Let me know if anything is wrong or you run into any bugs.
Here are a few animations that I captured:
EDIT: Oh yeah, if you want the BEST POSSIBLE TIMING, with minimal frame glitches, be sure to load the "jap_bios.bin" from File->Load BIOS along with the ROM. Without the exactly timings used by the official Sega BIOS, it's possible some frames may update in the middle of drawing, so you might see a bit of flickering or half the screen updating like this... although looking at the Shenmue animations, they're so slow, I highly doubt this will really matter.