Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
natt wrote:
Alyosha wrote:
My opinion though is that at some point we really should be raising the standards of accuracy for NES submissions, especially with Mesen becoming available, otherwise we'll never advance console verification.
Would that mean no more FCEUX?
Yes. If Nestaco improves in accuracy and/or Mesen gets some TAS tools I think it would be time to deprecate FCEUX (and quicknes as well.)
That's just my opinion, but I do think we're getting to that point.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
dwangoAC wrote:
Today I stumbled on Nintaco (http://nintaco.com) which is a new cross-platform open source cycle-accurate NES and FDS emulator and I was really floored with how many features it has. The main interface looks fairly standard:
...
This leads to an obvious question - if it proves itself as a reliable emulator that's in many ways more feature rich than even FCEUX, what's the possibility of allowing the emulator and its movie files to be accepted on the site for submissions?I have to say, before I saw this I wasn't thinking to myself "What the world needs is another NES emulator" but now that I see what it purports to have support for I'm rather intrigued. What are your thoughts? Discuss. :)
Not cycle accurate yet, it fails some of the more difficult tests, but it defniitely has some cool features.
My opinion though is that at some point we really should be raising the standards of accuracy for NES submissions, especially with Mesen becoming available, otherwise we'll never advance console verification.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
I've been making some progress on NES audio lately. NESHawk now sounds correct in the APU_mixer tests (which previously sounded very poor) and I implemented correct behaviour to pass a few more of the test_apu_2 tests.
It doesn't really sound any different to me in actual gameplay, but the tests say its much closer to the real hardware, so maybe someone with a good ear might be able to tell the difference.
Currently only test_apu_2 tests 2 and 6 fail, but it's not clear that both of these should pass in the default ppu-cpu alignment. Tepples on NesDev had tested these previously and found that they randomly pass or fail on a real hardware, strongly indicating an alignment problem. Mesen passes both of these tests incidently, so this might be a good opportunity to test for emulation differences.
I've also fixed a number of buggy games recently, although probably no one is actually interested in playing them but hey they work at least.
There is still quite a bit left to do for test ROMs and mapper compatibility, but it's getting there.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
ruadath wrote:
adelikat wrote:
ruadath wrote:
When TASing Game Gear games, BizHawk 1.12.2 TAStudio throws a NullReferenceException and crashes (including BizHawk) every time an attempt to save the project file is made (although from what I can tell, the save does go through).
Please fix.
Works for me on 1.12.2 and latest master. Please provide more info
Just checked again. Apparently using the save method from the drop down menu works, but Ctrl+S causes a crash. Help?
Can you try again in 1.13?
I'm pretty sure I fixed that. The error was that Ctrl+S was trying to do two things, in TAStudio it was saving, but in EmuHawk it was trying to save save ram, which if non-existent caused the null reference exception.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
Seems to be working to me, although it took 5 minutes to get into the game...and then I walked backwards over the edge and died and it told me to insert side 2, I'm glad I had a NES growing up.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
It's getting there. Here is the sound after the third round of commits.
If I could get the buzzing sound worked out, I'd be happy with it.
For future work it might be worth it to just integrate the reSID library, since it's at least much closer to the real thing then the high level FFT + attenuation I'm using now, but I'm not interested enough to do it.
Link to video
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
Oh yeah, I guess I should spare people the pain of waiting through that horrible and long boot up sequence XD
(I forgot how tedious that is when you don't already have a savestate where you need it)
Link to video
NOTE: This is only a first draft, and should improve a bit by the final version, but don't expect it to sound like VICE (unless Saxxon comes back and codes it up)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
I've been working with SID filtering a bit. I have a first draft committed in master, so anyone interested can try it out in the dev build.
Things seem to be working at least somewhat well. Gianna Sisters wind sound is much better then in 1.12.2.
The rather basic FFT implementation I used though really isn't up to the task of emulating the filtering in a low level way (the way reSID does in VICE), but with a few more tweaks I should at least be able to get close.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
adelikat wrote:
I think this technique is cool as hell. Pausing to speed up load times, I love the counter-intuitive.
For me this isn't controversial at all. Also, I get the impression this is something that could be done to other SMS games as well?
Yes, any game that increments a counter outside of an interrupt loop potentially is vulnerable to this. MESSUHGAH originally pointed it out on Batman. If they had simply incremented the counter within the loop this would not occur at all (since NMI jumps to $0066 and IRQ jumps to $0038)
Also it's just good luck that we see this behavior at all. Emulators that start frames at vbkank (as even other bizhawk cores like NEShawk do) would execute the NMI but then immediately enter IRQ before anything goes awry.
Time to improve some SMS runs !
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
@MESHUGGAH: Seems plausible, but I'd still like hardware confirmation to determine that this is just a programming oversight and not something else emulator related.
jlun2 wrote:
Have you tried asking on reddit? I'm not sure which subreddit would work, but maybe https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/ ? This forum seems rather obscure in comparison.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
Yes it's finally submitted!
I've been looking forward to this run being done for a long time and it did not disappoint. Platform Perils was a really nice surprise.
This run is something I consider a real milestone in TASing, it's super optimized and fun to watch, give it a star for sure!
Glad I could help a little in getting over the hurdle of Croctopus Chase, I'm happy to leave that one behind me too.
Anyway, Congratulations Tompa on finally completing this masterpiece! I hope you feel a big sense of relief that all that hard work finally paid off!
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
The music test and the sound test are different things . Yes the sound test has correct colors.
I've tested all the other good emulators and they all have the same colors as in my above post for the music test, so I believe it to be correct, but I need actual hardware proof.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
Paddy wrote:
I have upgraded to 1.12.2 and Genesis game genie codes are working fine now. Also appear to be working on NES games too.
Still not working on SNES games though. Have tried several games and all codes have come from GameGenie.com direct. Games tried on are Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Mario All Stars, Animaniacs and Megaman X.
I looked into this briefly. It seems the memory watches (cheats) are not being transmitted from BizHawk to the bsnes core. So even though they are being created correctly they will not have any effect. Not sure if/when/how it will be fixed.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3602)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2749
Location: US
Hi all,
I have a request for anyone who happens to have a Game Gear and owns a copy of Shining Force Gaiden: The Final Conflict.
The music test screen has colors that appear to be incorrect on every emulator I check:
I looked around the internet a bit but I could not find any pictures of this screen from the game on an actual console. I also posted on SMS Power about it, as that seemed like the obvious place to ask, but got no response.
So if anyone can confirm if this behaviour is correct, or has any ideas on where else I should ask, please let me know so I can close the book on this one.
Thank you!
I looked around the internet a bit but I could not find any pictures of this screen from the game on an actual console. I also posted on SMS Power about it, as that seemed like the obvious place to ask, but got no response.
So if anyone can confirm if this behaviour is correct, or has any ideas on where else I should ask, please let me know so I can close the book on this one.
Thank you!