Marvel vs Capcom 2: Deconstructed

MvC2 Stage Capture Tutorial

Zach recently asked me if I could capture the stages in the best possible quality. Since the game's stages are 3D, they scale up as the resolution gets higher. This allows the person to capture the stages in whatever their maximum resolution may be. In this case, I scaled up the emulator to six times the native size. This produced really high quality images, which can be seen here.

Tools:
Demul DC Emulator - The emulator used to play MvC2.

Cheat Engine - A program that hacks MvC2's memory in real-time so as to allow the zoomed out angle that can be seen in the images.

Cheat Engine Table - This table contains known values for hacking MvC2's engine in real-time. Most of these values were found by jeddpossum. Its use in this case was the "Zoom" address that controlled the camera's zoom to the screen.

Fraps - Used to capture video.

VirtualDub - Used to go through the video file and export the frames as PNG files.

MvC2 - A specially coded ISO that was created by Eidrian that has the entire HUD removed. No link can be provided.

Procedure:
0) Install everything. The BIOS for the DC Emulator will have to be found elsewhere since they can't be linked here; likewise with the MvC2 disc image. Fraps: Set up a "Record Video" shortcut key that doesn't overlap with anything else.

1) The proper video plugin has to be set up (after the bios and such). Launch Demul and it will prompt you to set up the paths and plugins; I used the DXv3 plugin. In the folder that Demul was extracted into, I edited the "gpuDXv3.ini" file with Notepad and changed the resolution value to:

[resolution]
wWidth = 3840
wHeight = 2880
fWidth = 3840
fHeight = 2880
frequency = 60

This is six times the native resolution of 640x480; however this can be changed to anything. These are the values up to x6.

1. 640x480
2. 1280x960
3. 1920x1440
4. 2560x1920
5. 3200x2400
6. 3840x2880

2) Launch Demul with an MvC2 (US) ISO.

3) Open the Cheat Table in Cheat Engine and it'll prompt you to point at the program that Cheat Table is going to let you manipulate (there is a highlighted icon near the top left). Choose "Demul.exe" and it will ask if you want to keep the loaded values in the new process, choose "Yes".

4)  In Demul, go to VS mode, choose your characters and start a match. There is a hack to freeze the timer, however, you can just choose infinite time through the settings.

5) In Cheat Engine, right click the "Zoom" value and go to the Hot Key setup. There should be a hotkey set to "F" that will trigger the Zoom value to "4FFC2DC1". This is the hotkey that will trigger the camera to zoom in from far away.Note, the camera cannot be properly locked because there are other copies of it through the addresses. Therefore, the camera will keep snapping back and forth if it's locked.

6) In Demul, set the position of the characters, etc and execute the "Record Video" hotkey from Fraps and then press the hotkey that triggers the camera zoom in animation from Cheat Engine. Note, both of these hotkeys are universal so if the hotkey in Cheat Engine or Fraps is set to something that is used elsewhere, they'll be triggered.

7) Open VirtualDub, load the recorded video file into it and set the in/out points for the desired range. Go to File -> Export Image Sequence in Virtualdub and choose "PNG". This will output a series of PNG files for the selected range.

That's all that was done to get the MvC2 stage images.