Following the events of "AVerMedia Live Gamer ULTRA 2.1 on macOS", I've been making some content while utilising the card with a new PS3 that I bought. Here's a tweet about that:

The goal here was to play PS2 and archive some moments for personal purposes. Since the PS3 was backwards-compatible with PS2 games and had an HDMI port, it was possible to record gameplay through the AVerMedia Live Gamer ULTRA 2.1. So that's exactly what I did. However, I was not expecting to run into issues while uploading videos to YouTube.

So, let's tell a story. I want to document the entire production process. That way, the problem can be replicated or avoided. This blog post is, admittedly, kind of a mess. I may edit it later to clean it up.

A close friend of mine has a tendency to recommend games to me on Steam with easy or really trivial achievements. This makes it really easy to get all achievements. Recently, she recommended me a game called Bongo Cat, which simply monitors your button presses/mouse clicks and increases a counter. It's literally just a "numbers go higher" game. It has 7 achievements on Steam. The highest one requires 1 million presses. I'm not too concerned with hitting that manually. But I wanted to have some fun with this.

I am a computer scientist. One of the fun parts of the hobby is finding out how other software works and trying to break it. To me, that's fun. It isn't to cheat (even though it literally is cheating). It's a puzzle to solve. Every game has their quirks and I just like breaking them or writing a bot to automate it. No one said I can't do that. I've been a game developer before. So I am no stranger to this.

This will be a quick one. So let's get to it. Just for old times sake, I will be using Game Maker 8 Pro to bust this game wide open.

As I became more accustomed to macOS, I realised my PCIe capture cards will not function. This is kind of because, unless I have the money to blast on a Mac Pro, I won't have PCIe support. This knocks internal capture cards off my checklist for a while. That being said, there's another option: external capture cards. So with that, I bought the GC553G2, known as the AVerMedia Live Gamer ULTRA 2.1. This capture card allows 4K60 SDR capture, and HDR capture up to 4K30. It's not the same as my superior AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K, but the expectation is different for a USB-C capture card.

This is the fourth capture card I purchased, and the second one from AVerMedia. Let's put it through the tests and see what it is capable of. My end goal is to record gameplay from a PS3 and upload a new game series to YouTube. So we will need recording scripts. The usual procedure.

I've experimented with quite a few capture cards recently. Whether it be my own or through the help of my friend antsrokket, I've written scripts to bypass software from Elgato and capture data from the capture cards directly in the highest possible quality. Every card except for Elgato's 4K60 S+ allow for at least nearly lossless capture of video and audio if the 4K Capture Utility is completely bypassed. This requires applications such as FFmpeg, which can communicate with the card directly through dshow.

Nerd talk aside, the reason I bring this up is because I've always had a problem with these capture cards. They never were able to record multi-channel. They were always stereo. At DERPG, all PC gameplay is recorded in 5.1ch at minimum. MW (2019) and on is recorded at 7.1.4.4. The Nintendo Switch supports LPCM 5.1ch audio. So why not record gameplay in that format? It's because the capture cards don't support it for some reason. Even my Elgato 4K60 Pro MK.2 doesn't support it.

So let's take a deep dive into its competing card, the AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K, otherwise known as the GC573. This card claims to allow for 5.1ch/7.1ch passthrough. But of course, we will need to take a deep dive to see what it really supports. I haven't been able to find much information about this on Google. So let's get into it.

To start, I'm quite pissed off. Sometimes I just want to record some audio from multiple devices in sync, losslessly. There's quite a few purposes for this. In my case it's gameplay with microphones and Discord audio all separate but in sync. Back then, software like Dxtory had the functionality to record multiple audio tracks in perfect sync. But it requires a game open, and it doesn't work with modern games. In fact, it struggles with Windows 11. There are other solutions, like OBS. But, again these include a video track. What if I just want the audio in perfect sync?

GeForce Experience provides minor multitrack support. But it does it with AAC and only allows one additional track. Its options are very limited, to the point I complain about it in "Grind Series: Quantity without compromising Quality". Audacity was called a "Multitrack recorder" at one point. But ironically to the name, it doesn't support recording from multiple sources in sync either. But what powers it definitely can: FFmpeg. So let's take a dive into how to record multiple audio tracks on Windows in perfect sync.

I had something in mind for my library of gameplay footage, at least in the past few years. Why not give users the option to visually see inputs? Not only am I curious about my own inputs sometimes (especially in a rhythm game or FPS), but it could also be quite satisfying to see keys light up alongside the video. It's something extra. But it's cool.

It does have some practical use though. When I was teaching online due to COVID, I did something like this to help students see what I was doing in VIM and TMUX. Here's what I mean:

I'll be brief on this post. MWIII requires a prior launch of MWII to run. Since these games are coded specifically to not run via clicking their EXE files, a few extra steps are taken to force execution. I'll provide two ways: an automated batch file, and a manual way if you don't trust me. 😉

This is for the Steam version of the game. And it relies on a steam.exe to boot up the game in the end. Given this blog post was written before the final release of the game came out, I may have to edit it to account for multiplayer later on.

Recently, I wanted to record some Nintendo Switch gameplay. Since the built-in 720p recording feature is garbage for anything other than immediate highlights, I figured I'd sink some money into a device that can capture a full 1080p feed and record it.

I looked at some options. A close friend of mine uses an Elgato HD60 S+ to record gameplay and stream it over Discord. So it was an appealing choice after seeing it in action. But I wanted to future-proof myself. So I decided to get the Elgato 4K60 S+. The appeal here is that it can act like the HD60 S+, but can handle 4K HDR. It also is capable of operating on its own via recording to an SD card. This makes it a very convenient choice if you want to record something without having a PC around. Also, I don't have a free PCIe slot for some of the other choices Elgato offers.

Well, I didn't really intend on this being 3 parts, but here we are. So if you haven't read the previous parts, you probably should. Here are some links:

• Part 1 - White Screen Brick Recovery
• Part 2 - Firmware Flashing

Following Part 2, I went from having a frozen white screen "brick" of an Action Replay DS cartridge to having a working cartridge, just like how things were in 2007. I now have full access to working hardware. And I am able to flash any kind of firmware I want onto a physical ARDS cartridge utilising a trick with CFW. So I think it's now time to go and finish off the remaining research on how the thing works.

In Part 1, a lot of the recovery steps taken were based on guesses and looking at bytes in a hex editor. While I'm sure a lot of that research and guessing was correct (as I was able to recover all of my old codes), it would be nice to simplify it all down and organise it. Documentation, I guess. So, where do we start?

Following Part 1, I felt like the research done was sufficient. And it really was. I was able to recover the data from my Action Replay DS by dumping the cartridge and taking a look at what's inside. I even wrote programs to aid in extracting the data. So what's next?

I just feel like we can do better than that. It didn't sit well with me that I was restricted by a means of not being able to test this with hardware, because I was missing some pieces of the puzzle. But I want this story to have a proper ending, so it's time to fix that cartridge and get it working again. Once it's working, testing it and getting accurate data for documentation and archival purposes sounds like a great next step. Also, I would like to figure out what actually went wrong with my cartridge which started this series of blog posts. So, let's jump in.