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Alyosha
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I consider encoding to be a secondary matter. I don’t think there should be any limit on frame rate.
Alyosha
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
Alyosha wrote:
EDIT: CUTEDEMO still has what appears to be some BG color latching behaviour that needs to be implemented in the 'zilog inside' scene. I would need to see it running on real hardware to make sure though.
Does it need to be a monocrome GB or is GBC also fine?
It has to be in GBC. That particular demo is GBC only. EDIT: Also I implemented HuC1 support if anyone wants to test out those games. I don't know how they are supposed to use the infrared port. I can add it in as a control if necessary.
Alyosha
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
BizHawk colecovision power on / reset... Galaxian has a hidden message after powering off and on a few times (https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/colecovision/585496-galaxian/cheats). I believe the hidden text should be "I LOVE YOU, JENEANE" considering it's offset is much deeper (0x4645 in ROM) than the previous one (0x0302 in ROM)
I looked at this a bit, but gamefaqs seems to be the only place where you being able to display the message is actually mentioned. Other sources just say that the message is in the ROM and can be seen with a hex editor. Are you sure this works on a real console?
Alyosha
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I made a few more timing fixes that fix some issues with a few of the more sensitive tech demos out there. Oh! and CUTEDEMO relied on latching behavior of x-scroll which is now corrected. Oh! also relied on sprite evaluation not happening in DMG when sprites are turned off. This is actually an easy to see hardware difference between it and CGB, where sprites are always evaluated. GBVideoPlayer is now working as well, which relies on careful timing between STAT interrupts and y-scroll latching. So it's pretty cool to see it working. It will crash at the end though since the ROM is not padded to a standard size. I'll make a fix for that eventually. At the same time I am being careful to make sure all the various test ROMs still work, so overall these are small but important accuracy improvements. As a bonus, the notorious dycptest2 test ROM now looks correct: So things are moving forward pretty well. EDIT: CUTEDEMO still has what appears to be some BG color latching behaviour that needs to be implemented in the 'zilog inside' scene. I would need to see it running on real hardware to make sure though.
Alyosha
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The end result here isn't that interesting in terms of bot potential, but I'm pretty surprised to see a couple desyncs in there. I can't recall another example of something on FCEUX desyncing. Too bad it's too rare to reproduce reliably, might be something important.
Alyosha
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Making renewed progress here now. I fixed the virtual pad and included tilt controls. Unlicensed games from Wisdom Tree are now supported. The GBVideoPlayer tech demo is only one timing bug away from working, though it now correctly loads and plays the video, just a bit garbled. I know what change needs to happen to fix it, just not 100% sure of the proper implementation yet.
Alyosha
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Thank you for the continued testing Glitcholog. It really helps make sure things didn't slip by me.
Alyosha
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Neat! Not as smooth looking as Blue where you just walk away to victory,but interesting none the less that such a complicated serious of events can now be console verified. Yes vote from me.
Alyosha
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Definite yes from me, cool improvements .
Alyosha
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I have rewritten interrupt handling for the z80 CPU core. This is a major rewrite that was necessary for the CPC core currently in development. Please test the heck out of it. I don't want there to be a bunch of regressions like last time. I tested all the relevant ZX spectrum test roms I could find. They all still pass, which means I didn't mess up anything too serious. But I would appreciate anyone who has a spare minute who can load up a GG/SMS or Coleco or Spectrum game and ensure it still works. Thanks!
Alyosha
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@MESHUGGAH: I don't see anything that those memory ranges can access. The only things that do weird stuff are the pokey and high score bios. If you know for sure something that should be accessible there let me know.
Alyosha
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I'll be back to making commits here sometime in the next couple days. First I have some z80 stuff to work out but I hope to start knocking out CGB test roms after that.
Alyosha
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So when does the game actually copy the save files back to disc? If it never happens because they are corrupted then I guess this is only a temporary corruption, which would be a nice coincidence. What happens if you hit reset in the emulator after the game returns to the title screen, is the corruption still there? I admit I haven't looked at the SRAM code in FDS in quite a long time so I'm not familiar exactly with what it's doing.
Alyosha
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Out of curiousity, what happens when you reset the console? $0790 is just ordinary RAM, so unless it's written back to disc somewhere it looks like the corruption should clear up upon reset. Pretty interesting either way, yes from me.
Alyosha
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I missed this earlier, but neat run, definitely a yes vote . Although no lag clips just reminds me how far off N64 TASing still has to go. But of a shame but oh well, still a fun watch.
Alyosha
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My opinion here is that as TASing encroaches on more modern games and systems, it simply won’t be a free ride anymore. If that puts it outside of TASVideos paradigm , then there just isn’t much that can be done about it. If people really want TASes of DRM protected games and can find a way to make them, they’ll just end up somewhere other then here. Same thing for TASes that require some physical medium. Most hobbies require money, and this one is getting there too (beyond the obvious pc + Internet part.) And I would say there is way more incentive today then ever to play by the rules and maybe even work with developers to get tas tools then to rely on pirates. If you want your hard work to be on something high profile like twitch you’re not going to start off by saying ‘this is all pirated and illegal.’ But as to the original question of whether cracked and pirated pc games should be allowed here, I would say no. I would prefer to see things like libTAS gain us some positive publicity instead. Maybe even gain some good faith from indie developers who would want to see their games get TASed.
Alyosha
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This has been fixed in the dev build.
Alyosha
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Not uninitialized RAM. Paperboy runs a loop from power on that basically measures how long it takes to get an NMI (or some other ppu condition I forget exactly.) FCEUX adds a frame at the start of every movie which is basically a dead frame. I don’t know why exactly since this is not console behavior. This is also why you have to typically delete one frame from a FCEUX movie if you convert it to BizHawk and try to sync it up. So FCEUX gets a very incorrect count hence strange house positions. This Probably effects at least some other games that we just aren’t aware of yet. Edit: if someone out there has a NES and paperboy, it would be cool to just repeatedly power up the game and see how many different House variations you can actually get .
Alyosha
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There are 2 examples I know of: [2599] A2600 Seaquest by morningpee in 01:39.80 [749] NES Paperboy by Randil in 11:30.78 These are emulator bugs. Last I checked the FCEUX one is still present. [2821] A2600 River Raid by Lord Tom in 1:22:47.90 is also basically one big emulation error but it at least looks passable. I’ll try to remember some more examples that I have happened upon in the course of working on BizHawk. EDIT: [3407] A7800 Scrapyard Dog by Noxxa in 11:04.14 contains obvious and fairly annoying graphical errors. I basically wrote A7800Hawk to fix this because it bothered me. [2585] A2600 Dodge 'Em by yep2yel & morningpee in 00:52.93 and [2226] A2600 Superman "pause glitch" by jlun2 in 00:11.42 need updated movie files and encodes but the runs themselves produce correct results. [814] SNES Star Fox "maximum score" by YtterbiJum in 19:47.37 the publication even says the game is not emulated correctly.
Alyosha
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Warp wrote:
I think the idea was to unpublish the few TASes that might still exist that are clearly and blatantly against the rules (such as not completing the game, or is known to be using faulty emulation). I have no idea if there exist any such TASes that are in a published (non-obsolete) state.
There are 2 examples I know of: [2599] A2600 Seaquest by morningpee in 01:39.80 [749] NES Paperboy by Randil in 11:30.78 These are emulator bugs. Last I checked the FCEUX one is still present.
Alyosha
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^ noted, I’ll add it to my TODO list, it will be a couple weeks though.
Alyosha
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I think this is an interesting thread. My fear is that a lot of the work already done will likely get lost and there will be a gap in institutional knowledge . At the same time I can see that tasvideos is poorly equipped to deal with such fluid environments. Maybe a separate website would be better suited to focusing all the work and getting it out for general distribution? Like TASLabs instead of TASVideos. At least you could forgoe all the formalities and document and categorize things as you please. Oh well just a thought I had while reading through the thread.
Alyosha
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This is an amazing advancement in TASing. I would not have guessed at the start of the year that a Shovel Knight TAS would be possible right now . Great TAS and great work to keylie and anyone else associated with libTAS for making it happen. Yes vote.
Alyosha
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Oops, I guess I shouldn’t have submitted it then, and it should have been rejected. My bad.
Alyosha
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No, the inputs are unique, I still had to find them. Otherwise it would work the same in both cases. But my point is that the uniqueness is not due to me being somehow better. The emulator was better.