TASVideos

Posted: 9/16/2018 2:14 PM

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Alyosha

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No. It’s the same glitch it both movies. The setup is only different due to emulation differences.

Posted: 9/16/2018 2:09 PM

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Alyosha

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That was a fun watch, yes vote . How long did it take to make out of curiousity?

Posted: 9/16/2018 1:52 PM

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It’s an IRQ timing related glitch. So emulated timings dictate how / when the glitch is possible. In other words, I didn’t ‘improve the gameplay’, I just found the glitch on a different emulator which is much more accurate, and it happened to be shorter .

Posted: 9/16/2018 12:54 PM

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feos wrote:

You mean it's impossible to improve the old SML2 run using VBA v24?

The button presses in the current run certainly wouldn’t work in VBA v24. Just Like the button presses in the original run doesn’t work in GBHawk / Gambatte. I don’t know if it’s impossible, since it’s just random button mashing until it works, but I didn’t know that the sequence of inputs that worked in GBHawk would be shorter ahead of time .

Posted: 9/16/2018 12:32 AM

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MOD EDIT: Posts originally moved from the discussion thread of #6023: TiKevin83's GBC Pokémon: Red/Green/Blue/Yellow Version in 1:36:42.94. -Mothrayas

</hr> Sorry for the late reply but I found this conversation interesting enough to post to. I’m glad the movie file got updated. This is state of the art stuff, and making sure things are correct to the furthest extent possible I think is pretty important. Just as food for thought, I’d like to point out that [3746] GB Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins "game end glitch" by MUGG, Masterjun & Alyosha in 00:46.08 is a ‘resync’ in exactly the same sense that this movie is. It is pure happenstance that it ended up being 9 frames shorter so that it superficially met the requirement of being an ‘improvement.’ But really it’s just slight timing differences in emulation. Also, the behavior that was missed in the original Pokémon run is very significant. Personally I think that not having it emulated puts it in ‘technical foul’ territory. Sure nobody knew at the time , but luckily Pokemon people had good R&D to move things forward .

Posted: 9/13/2018 1:01 AM
(Edited: 6/4/2022 5:05 PM)

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Alyosha

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This is some cool stuff, great work getting this to the level where it is accepted by the site . I’ll be really looking forward to what crazy tases come out of it.

Posted: 9/12/2018 12:12 AM

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Unfortunately it’s not easy to compare because Gambatte doesn’t use a big enough integer size to compare cycle count in a trace log. It’s fairly likely that they are both the same just with different frame lengths. I know that this is a big source of confusion between the cores but I’m not really willing to try to adapt GBHawk to have fixed length frames like Gambatte , as I don’t consider it worth the added hit to complexity. Also be aware that accurate gameboy emulation is an ongoing area of research. There are a couple of pending accuracy improvements to Gambatte and likely GBHawk when I have a chance to catch up. If you want to really know which is correct, probably TIKevin83 is the only one who can really know for sure since he has the console verification setup, but he is busy with Pokemon . @ezgames69: sorry I missed your post earlier but it seems like the same thing as jlun2 mentioned Edit: @jlun2: oh, and I’m not really able to check movie files and such anymore unless it’s from strictly free to distribute games (ex. Streemerz) so sorry I won’t be able to actually compare your movies.

Posted: 9/10/2018 12:38 PM

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A bit late but Cadash is gone!

Posted: 9/10/2018 9:58 AM

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@jlun2: frame count is inconsistent between the cores , so don’t worry about that too much. As for input lag frames I’ll look at it when I get a chance since I forget what I did. I’ll be back to working on BizHawk / GBHawk again in a couple weeks I think, hopefully not too much has piled up and my code isn’t all foreign to me now

Posted: 7/10/2018 11:00 AM

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Alyosha

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Cool! But I won’t be at my computer to implement it for several months, so if someone wants to implement it go ahead.

Posted: 7/8/2018 9:40 AM

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Great work Challenger! Easy yes vote. I tried to tas this myself a while back and this game is not so easy to deal with. The high level of optimization and understanding of the game is obvious here. Also that boss health glitch is silly.

Posted: 7/7/2018 1:35 PM

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Augusto wrote:

Hey the Atari 7800 Sirius graphics is breaked in current BizHawk.

Fixed now. (There wasn't enough emulated cart RAM)

Posted: 7/7/2018 1:06 PM

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Sonia wrote:

I've been wanting to report those for a while, but only got around to it now. Akumajou Special - Boku Dracula-kun (NES) The bottom of the screen shakes constantly at the dancing girls minigame. ... Lagrange Point (NES) Similar to Dracula-kun, the bottom of the battle screen shakes constantly. ... Megami Tensei II - Digital Devil Story (NES) In the battle screen, there's a graphic glitch below "AUTO". ... Necros no Yousai (PCE) Game crashes during the intro, making it unplayable. __________ None of the first 3 bugs exist in Mesen, and Necros no Yousai is playable in mednafen.

Ok I fixed the screen shaking stuff. Turns out VRC IRQ timing was slightly off (being triggered one cycle too early and being clocked at the same time it's enabled.) Actually the first one is more an issue with CPU emulation, it really should be re-cast to check for IRQ's at the correct time, but that's not happening any time soon. Please test any other VRC games that you are interested in to make sure there are no regressions.

Posted: 7/7/2018 12:15 PM
(Edited: 7/7/2018 2:20 PM)

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There's nothing I can do about the beeping if it's related to the skip bios option. It's a crude hack that may or may not work and have various side effects. I added the remaining memory domain for SGM. It's now split into High / low regions. EDIT: Tomarc: here is how the game picks a starting position:

8377: ED 5F        LD A, R                    AF:0093 BC:00FF DE:000A HL:024C IX:A3B7 IY:A289 SP:73B9 Cy:41437612 CNp-H-zSe
8379: E6 03        AND 03h                    AF:2621 BC:00FF DE:000A HL:024C IX:A3B7 IY:A289 SP:73B9 Cy:41437621 Cnp-h5zse
837B: FE 03        CP 03h                     AF:0210 BC:00FF DE:000A HL:024C IX:A3B7 IY:A289 SP:73B9 Cy:41437628 cnp-H-zse
837D: 20 01        JR NZ, +01h                AF:0293 BC:00FF DE:000A HL:024C IX:A3B7 IY:A289 SP:73B9 Cy:41437635 CNp-H-zSe
8380: 32 53 72     LD (7253h), A              AF:0293 BC:00FF DE:000A HL:024C IX:A3B7 IY:A289 SP:73B9 Cy:41437647 CNp-H-zSe

That R register is an internal counter that increments with each instruction fetch. I don't really see any way for this to be a value different then what it currently is. Extensive testing on ZXSpectrum seems to indicate that it is behaving correctly as well. So, I don't know how it could take any of the 3 values at power on.

Posted: 7/5/2018 8:51 PM

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The super game module is only relevent for games that are made for it (ex Zaxxon Super Game.) It is a fan made module, so no official coleco games will make use of it. But I did forget to add a memory domain for it when it's activated, I just did so now for the RAM. Also I fixed the super action controller crash. I don't hear any beeping in looping though. Can you make a recording of what you hear that doesn't sound right? I'll have to take another look at Tomarc since I totally forgot what happened with that one (even after re-reading the github issue.)

Posted: 7/5/2018 7:19 PM

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Alyosha

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Hurray for accuracy! I consider this a pretty big achievement. Great work to TIKevin83 and the pokemon community for putting in the work to make this happen, It's very impressive to behold. A few side notes: I left in the debug code in GBHawk that will tell you when the relevent glitch that effected this run pops up. It's actually not too uncommon. It actually happens twice right at the start of the run on the 'Game Freak' screen, but this is too early to effect the run in any meaningful way. Also this test rom: halt_if will only pass if the glitch is implemented. But this test was all the way back in 2015! I guess no one noticed. I do think that whatever rule is keeping this from being published should be revised to allow it. The existing run is demonstratably wrong, and this one is demonstratably correct. Why would you want to keep the wrong one? Yes vote!

Posted: 7/3/2018 1:07 PM

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Update: This project is dead. I don't have the time anymore to focus on it, and there are still plenty of bugs to fix in the other cores that use most of my attention. It probably would have been too slow anyway so no real loss. At least tilt controls in GBA got fixed as a kind of side effect!

Posted: 7/2/2018 11:47 AM

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Ok it's fixed. Not sure exactly what's causing it but I can clamp the samples to fix it, so I did. MIght need to be revisited at some point.

Posted: 7/1/2018 7:15 PM

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Alyosha

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MESHUGGAH wrote:

version: BizHawk 2.3 The power button... does nothing?

Yeah nothing is implemented there yet. Do you need it for something?

Posted: 7/1/2018 7:12 PM

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Alyosha

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I think I fixed it, please try the dev build. If not I'll need more specific repro steps.

Posted: 6/30/2018 11:51 AM

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EZGames69 wrote:

Temp encode: Did this on bizhawk 2.2.2 because 2.3 kept crashing on me.

THanks for the temp! (Also if the crashes are reproduible please report them so they can be fixed. I haven't had any crashes on my end.)

Posted: 6/30/2018 11:46 AM

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Alyosha

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MUGG wrote:

I think that half a second can be saved with laborious efforts (pull off the bug quicker in the end). But that shall wait for another day..

Good luck if you are planning on doing that some time. It was only by pure blind luck that I found the current setup. Also, I was unable to find any setup on GBC regardless of picking Gambatte or GBHawk. Probably due to HALT working slightly differently. @fsvgm777: Thanks for the temp!

Posted: 6/30/2018 11:44 AM

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Alyosha

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Great block of content! I was a bit confused by what the GBA was supposed to be doing, but it sounded cool!

Posted: 6/30/2018 11:40 AM

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Alyosha

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feos wrote:

One of the reasons it was accepted in the first place is that we trusted the author's research. And it appeared to be sloppy.

feos wrote:

Yeah, what link_7777 said. We did the due research.

(See here for second quote context.) Mistakes aren't a big deal, but it seems a bit unnecessary to throw the author under the bus after the fact. A simple 'we goofed' would have been sufficient.

Posted: 6/29/2018 11:36 PM

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Alyosha

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I am skeptical of the assertion that this game has only 6 unique levels of content. The block layout is governed by $00A1. (The background is $00A0.) Here is how the game uses this to load a level:

398:  A5 A1     LDA $A1         A:00 X:00 Y:00 SP:FB P:27 nvTbdIZC Cy:519250913
A39A:  C9 10     CMP #$10        A:06 X:00 Y:00 SP:FB P:25 nvTbdIzC Cy:519250916
A39C:  90 04     BCC $A3A2       A:06 X:00 Y:00 SP:FB P:A4 NvTbdIzc Cy:519250918
A3A2:  0A        ASL A           A:06 X:00 Y:00 SP:FB P:A4 NvTbdIzc Cy:519250921
A3A3:  AA        TAX             A:0C X:00 Y:00 SP:FB P:24 nvTbdIzc Cy:519250923
A3A4:  BD F8 A3  LDA $A3F8,X *   A:0C X:0C Y:00 SP:FB P:24 nvTbdIzc Cy:519250925
A3A7:  85 10     STA $10         A:A0 X:0C Y:00 SP:FB P:A4 NvTbdIzc Cy:519250930
A3A9:  BD F9 A3  LDA $A3F9,X *   A:A0 X:0C Y:00 SP:FB P:A4 NvTbdIzc Cy:519250933

You can see that the game compares $A1 to #$10, indicating that the game loops at 16 stages. Actually, if you are over 16, the game does this:

A39E:  29 0F     AND #$0F        A:10 X:00 Y:00 SP:FB P:27 nvTbdIZC Cy:519250920
A3A0:  09 08     ORA #$08        A:00 X:00 Y:00 SP:FB P:27 nvTbdIZC Cy:519250922

So the last 8 levels are the ones that are repeated. It promptly discards the value of $A1 after this point. I'm not aware of any other variable affecting level layout. And anyway, level 7 is pretty clearly not just a shifted version of the previous levels. EDIT: Also, there doesn't seem to be anything special about the initial 6 levels. You could say that every level is 'procedurally generated' content.