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Alyosha
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MrWint wrote:
I'd love to also present such a version for this submission, but it's literally impossible due to BizHawk's limitations of only allowing one input per frame. My magic conversion tool tells me that on frame 32344 (EFL timing) this submission would require multiple inputs (a neutral and an A input), which is not representable in BizHawk's input format. A real console has no problems with this of course. I guess you could try to convert it to lsnes which doesn't have this restriction, but it's probably not worth the effort.
Eventually I'll make a SubGBHawk variant like I did for NES which will accept sub frame inputs. It just needs a little more thought given all the debouncing stuff and possibility to have button press interrupts.
Alyosha
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I tried to burn my lives but I only managed to get down to 7 in the time it would take to otherwise climb the rope. It would save time on hard mode, where I'd only have 3-4 lives, but you would have to have one less death abuse with player 2 at some point in the run. So I guess it's mainly a matter of taste, but saving time in this way is definitely possible. EDIT: actually even on easy mode there are points where player 1 is waiting long enough for player 2 that I could burn some lives. I could also give player 2 a couple extra gold without losing time to keep player one from getting another life. So it might save time there as well. But at any rate I don't like the idea.
Alyosha
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That only works for TSAes made in GBA mode to my knowledge. If you are making a new TAS in GBA mode then by all means use that script and maybe the pokemon people who have the hardware setup can run it and see which one works on hardware (if either.) The script just converts your movie to a file that the hardware can use, it doesn't verify anything on its own.
Alyosha
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jlun2 wrote:
Would it help if I ran that console verify script on both versions of the run and post results here?
What is that?
Alyosha
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You can't directly compare lag frames between gambatte and GBHawk. They deal with time when the screen is turned off differently. If you looked at cycle counts for the loading times / screen transitions they will almost certainly be identical. It's an unfortunate consequence of the fact that the gameboy can turn off the LCD completely and therefore lose the conventional idea of a video frame. The lag in stage 8 is more interesting though. You might want to look at some trace logs around those frames between the cores to see what exactly is going on. Also try GBHawk in the current dev build to see what you get, improvements have been made since 2.3.1. Also that accuracy test table is very outdated, and is missing some very important tests. With so many screen transitions it's probably preferrable to use gambatte since the encode will be more reflective of an actual gameboy, especially with audio, given that there is no RNG. Once there is a method of console verification available for original GB, it can always be revisited. Also as a bit of an aside, 'more accurate' doesn't really mean much, it's either right or its wrong.
Alyosha
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Thank you for the encode FractalFusion. I didn't know about (or maybe forgot) there was a score screen at the end. I don't really consider it part of the run, but if it's necessary whatever. I also didn't test how different endings would change the time if I burned one of the players lives, but that seems pointless to me anyway, as I consider the run over once the top of the tower is reached regardless of the ending cutscene.
Alyosha
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Okay! After a very long delay I finally got around to getting Game Gear linking working. I tested using Dr. Robotnik's Mean bean Machine and it seems to be working correctly. The GG linking isn't as well documented as gameboy, so some things aren't 100% nailed down yet. The most important thing is that there needs to be some latency between sending a byte and raising an NMI on the other console to read the byte. I have it set to 256 cycles currently, 128 is definitely too few and causes the game to crash. So this is something that requires some more research and refinement. So if you are interested in playing Game Gear linked games, please test things out and let me know what problems you run into.
Alyosha
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EZGames69 wrote:
Alyosha wrote:
You wouldn’t judge someone’s singing talent based on a digitally ‘fixed’ version of their singing
Not a good comparison. It’s more like being a good singer but the microphone you’re using has a loud static noise to it, and you judge the singing based on that.
No, it's not like that. The output a SNES provides for a SNES game is the correct output. Personally I would even consider the word 'fixed' a misnomer in this case, but whatever.
Alyosha
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Yes that is a big weakness of the current setup that I have thought about how to fix but haven’t come up with a satisfying solution for. I’ve had that happen to me too when downloading a dev build or something and forgetting to add firmware , and it is quite annoying.
Alyosha
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Seems like a pretty justifiable criticism to me. The first encode is what an actual snes would output, why should someone base their opinion on what not-a-snes would output? You wouldn’t judge someone’s singing talent based on a digitally ‘fixed’ version of their singing. But there are lots of aspects of the movie that someone may find entertaining , and perhaps the ‘fixed’ encode just removes the distracting parts, but the run itself is the first one, not the ‘fixed’ one.
Alyosha
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you can run GB games in GBC mode by picking it in 'console mode' under sync settings.
Alyosha
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It's cool to see how robust console verification has become for pokemon games now. Do you guys plan to push this in any new directions with other games or other pokemon gens TiKevin83?
Alyosha
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Can you give any more details aout what you are seeing? Does it work in gambatte?
Alyosha
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Even watching the encode that gets rid of the long loading screens, its just a car driving around occasionally punctuated by rather irritating 'execution' screens. I'm not familiar with the game, it just looks rather bland to me. It's not just this game though, the star tier in general seems to have lost it's luster. It seems like something we do just out of inertia / habit. I don't know, maybe it's just me.
Alyosha
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Hard to say, I won’t have much time in the next two weeks so only a little progress might get made during that time . I’d say there is a good chance of it being more or less done by June though
Alyosha
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I haven't had all tat much time to work on things lately, but I thought I'd mention what Vectrex progress has been made. the MC6809 is up and running and I can currently run through much of the vectrex BIOS code. It doesn't display anything or have any input yet, but I'll be incrementally working on that. Also I haven't forgotten about Game Gear linking, just haven't gotten around to finishing it up yet.
Alyosha
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hey cool find! Maybe you can find some other improvements and make a new submission. It always kind of bugs me when the puzzle games don't have fully optimal solutions.
Alyosha
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Already? Wow that's amazing! Hopefully this breaths some fresh life into SNES work. It feels like it got so close but never quite overcame issues of complexity and hardware timing. This is just a suggestion, but you might want to contact DwamgoAC and some of the other TASBot folks. I remember them having some really serious issues working with the snes a while back. Maybe they can offer some input in how to future proof this or give it more options to behave like a real snes.
Alyosha
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I've started working on a vectrex core. A lot of components already exist as parts of other cores so development shouldn't be that hard. the toughest part is the MC6809 cpu which is pretty involved for an 8 bit cpu but shouldn't be too much of a hurdle. Probably not a core with much utility but i wanted to try something a bit different.
Alyosha
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Unless another Asnivor pops up, I don't think you'll find much developer interest in older systems. However, if you are interested in such systems, I can help with core building within BizHawk. The VIC-20 for example is a pretty standard and simple design, and uses the 6502 CPU which we already have. If you aren't interested in the inner workings of BizHawk's infrastructure, I could even put together a blank core that is already hooked up, so you would basically just be responsible for putting together audio, video, and system layout stuff (which is admittedly the bulk of the work, but is really simple in terms of actual coding.) It's a great way to learn about console design and even basic coding. Porting existing emulator's is out of my capability though, so I can't help there.
Alyosha
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Did you try it? There are various supported Nanjing mappers.
Alyosha
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I could make a version that always runs a constant number of cycles, in fact that is what GBHawklink does by necessity. However I don't like how this makes input frames disconnected from video frames, so I'm willing to live with slight anomolies when the screen is off instead. As I've said in the past, I might make a constant cycle count version when everything is more mature and finalized, but for now it's not a priority.
Alyosha
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Do you have GB -> settings -> sync settings -> use existing save ram selected? The intent of this setting is to allow for play without having to worry about accidently modifying your working save ram file.
Alyosha
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I notice that is a kirby's dreamland thread. Yeah that game turns off the screen a lot, so it will appear to run fast. GBHawk isn't really build for RTA anyway so I'm not that worried about it.
Alyosha
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It’s currently non-functional. So far I have the ppu cou and apu converted to C++ and have removed the reflection that proved pretty annoying. But I haven’t stitched them together yet.