Topic: My frame rates may be off, so I need your guys' help

[TheouAegis]

This isn't technically concerned with gaming and this doesn't contribute anything to the Fan Stuffs category, so I'm sticking this request in General to be on the safe side.

As some of you know, I'm trying to simulate Dracula's Curse gameplay in GameMaker very, very slowly. This includes enemy movement (I'm actually being pretty sloppy right now with it, some things not getting simulated as accurately as I would like). Now, this nof course stems from some prejudice about what certain consoles can handle and how I assume a lot of programmers script AI's, but I'm noticing while watching certain enemy movements in Dracula's Curse that speeds are not very uniform or sensible. Of course, it should be noted that I'm running the game in FCEUX and using the emulator's built-in AVI recorder with no compression (full frames) and viewing the AVI in AnimationShop (by Jasc, guys that made Paintshop Pro). I'll give a few examples of what I'm talking about:

The floating eye that cries bloody tears in the Catacombs - I measured something like 17 pixels every 16 steps - an odd number - and it pauses when it cries, seemlingly storing whatever increment it was at until it's done crying. So if it's on step 8 when it stops to cry, it will resume on step 8 when it moves again.

Sword Skeleton - This one I've been working on a couple days now. It seems to move backward as long as it's less than 64 pixels away from Trevor. That's fine and all, but I've measured out 6 different patterns of steps. This may in fact by teh same issue as the floating eye's storing incremental steps. I haven't actually thornoughly checked against this just yet and it's been nagging me to some extent as a possibility. But as an example of movement patterns, I'd get something like
9/8
10/11
5/6
4/5
3/4
2/3
2/3
0/1
Every period would be 35 pixels over 41 steps. However, the duration of each increment varied. And some increments would be used for both left and right movement, while others so far as i can see have only been used for either left or right but not both (left=forward, right=backward). And each period starts fast (2 px/step or 1.1 px/step) and then decelerate (2/3 px/step or 1/2 px/step). And like in the example above, the deceleration is gradual. If it was instant, I would have checked if it was one cycle interrupted by sword attacks, but the skeleton always swings its sword after a a 2/3 or 1/2 increment (well, in one case there's a 0).

Basically what I'm getting at is some enemies have weird increments, or at least they seem weird to me. Moving at 1 pixel per 3 steps makes sense, but 17 pixels for 16 steps seems like a very odd ratio to me. And the sword skeleton is simply riddled with odd increments. I am wondering if this is a bug in FCEUX's execution, FCEUX's AVI recorder, a bug in Animation Shop, or a glitch on my laptop perhaps due to insufficient RAM. If anyone could verify these numbers for me, I would appreciate it. If you want to avoid playing through the game to find a particular enemy, use ReVAMP to place the enemy at the start of the game.

I'd appreciate the help.