Hourglass

Hourglass lets you run supported 32-bit Windows games in a mode where you have additional tools at your disposal, such as the ability to speed up or slow down or pause time or even revert the game to an earlier state to undo a mistake. It also creates a deterministic record of the buttons you press in the game that can be played back at normal speed while the game is being encoded to a high-quality AVI. It acts like a re-recording emulator for Windows, but it lets games run natively instead of emulating them.

Supported Games

It is currently still in the early stages and only supports certain simple single-player games that don't use mouse input. Here is an incomplete list of games known to work in Hourglass:

• Bunny Must Die
• Cave Story
• Eversion
• Hero Core
• Iji
• I Wanna Be The Guy
• La-Mulana
• Legend of Princess
• Lyle in Cube Sector (v1.04)
• MegaMari
• Ninja Senki
• Perfect Cherry Blossom
• Rescue: The Beagles
• Streets of Rage Remake
• Tumiki Fighters
• see CompatibilityList for other games and more details

Features

Here are some of the features Hourglass provides in these games: * Fast-Forward: Speeds up the game as much as it can. Good for skipping through cutscenes or reaching the end of a movie faster. * Pause/Unpause: Fully and instantly pause the game anywhere, without letting it know. * Frame Advance and Slow Motion: Lets you perform actions as precisely as you want. * Savestates: Save the game's state and restore it to that state later, if you want to erase a mistake or try making different choices. * Input recording and playback: Keeps track of what you do in the game, and lets you watch what the final result looked like as far as the game is concerned. Re-recording via savestates is supported as well. * AVI capture: Lets you save an AVI file of the gameplay using audio and video codecs of your choice. The AVI will play at the correct speed and without any frameskipping artifacts. You can use this feature to convert an input recording into video format.

Projects with Similar Features

Here are some other projects or programs that have features which Hourglass also provides (to an extent, within supported games): * Various re-recording emulators * .kkapture * DXWnd * GLDirect * Joy2Key * AppLocale

System Requirements

Hourglass works best in Windows XP. It works somewhat in Vista and Windows 7, but currently they are not supported well (especially 64-bit versions) so you should use Windows XP if at all possible. You also need to make sure your computer is capable of running whatever game you want to play. If the game doesn't work normally then it's probably not going to work inside Hourglass either. Hourglass itself has very low system requirements, although it can use considerable amounts of extra RAM in some games if you use the savestate or memory search features.