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Alyosha
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Well it's been almost 3 months since I could remove a game from this list, but now with a huge thanks to Challenger I can finally remove Prince of Persia, alright! It looks like I won't be reaching my goal of having this list down to 10 by year end, but 13 is not too bad. Hopefully I'll find the motivation to pick up Battletoads again soon or maybe Ninja Turtles.
Alyosha
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your mastery of Prince of Persia is very impressive. Glad something you found 6 years ago made it into a finished run, that lava glitch is really cool. The improvements in other stages are impressive as well, great work! Voting yes even though I can't follow what's actually happening at all :D
Alyosha
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Nice improvement! I was thinking of looking at this myself, but now there is no need. Good run and voting yes!
Alyosha
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Well that's the power of team work! http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/35366404470715125 The second half of the level is now done! The extra camera boost really paid off. Overall the level is now 3 seconds faster, not including another ~30 frames saved from not getting the DK barrel. I'm really glad I was able to find some new improvements after not looking at it for so long, but that's how things usually go for me I guess. I'm really happy with the state the level is in now, so if you are good with it Tompa I think it's time to move on and finally finish this run!
Alyosha
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I tested zelda and it does work for killing the rabbit enemies (basically just mashing the mic button.) I'll test Kid Icarus with a strength upgrade as le Necroyeur suggested later in the week. EDIT: tested kid icarus with a strength upgrade and still nothing happened, guess it needs subframe inputs after all for the mic.
Alyosha
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Yeah climbing like that is suboptimal for camera control in most places. Jumping when the camera is moving up gives it a boost, so you want to usually jump up walls. Also I'm not too worried about optimal turning really, as that is often not the trigger for the next jump anyway, so I have plenty of time to turn around. I've worked on the first part of the level a bit. I saved about 1 second so far and am about 20 seconds into the level. This is way more then I thought I'd be able to get, I guess after nearly a year since I worked on this I have a fresh perspective! Once I get past the second big climb (probably tomorrow) I'll post a WIP. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/35343900768203324 OK here is a WIP that gets up the second big climb (right before the checkpoint barrel.) I saved about 80 frames whiole maintaining camera control. This is good since now I have a couple options going into the next section. I can give the camera an extra boost up now and save some waiting later on. I'll have to see if this is worth it. Let me know what you think Tompa before I declare this section final and move on.
Alyosha
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Tompa wrote:
After too many hours of testing and researching this: I officially give up.
Ok leave it to me! http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/35323190531995807 Alright so for now I resynced my most recent WIP of 4-4 onto your 101% WIP as a baseline. So I guess my question is what areas do you think can be improved? I know you mentioned not getting the DK barrel, is there anything else? This WIP as it is is mere steps away from breaking, so I suspect it's pretty close to optimal, but if you have any ideas I'd be happy to try them out. Sorry you spent so much effort and frustration on this so far, I wish I could explain in words what is happening but I don't really know how.
Alyosha
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^ I guess it would be pretty easy to pump pseudo random noise into the microphone port to simulate breathing, but that's probably as far as I could get easily, which is enough I guess for at least those games to work. Anything beyond that though would probably be rather hard. I can add it to the list though, but won't be a high priority. v I think the microphone needs to have subframe inputs to work properly. I tested in FDS Kid Icarus in 1-2 item shop and nothing happend.
Alyosha
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^ If things happened to line up in exactly the same way, it would also crash. This is a pretty basic case of stack corruption:
c8310069959  A:06 X:25 Y:D7 S:27 P:nvUbdIzC                         $C500:BD 01 01  LDA $0101,X @ $0126 = #$24
c8310069970  A:24 X:25 Y:D7 S:24 P:nvUbdIzC                            $EE79:08        PHP
The function at $C500 uses values currently at $0126 and $0127. Unfortunately, just as its about to use them an NMI occurs. The Stack pointer happens to be at $27 at this point, so it gets overwritten with the return address for the NMI. So when the $C500 function takes back over, it reads an incorrect value ($C5 when it should be $06) and crashes shortly after. Oops! Whether or not the timing works out this way or not on BizHawk/console I don't know. It seems possible though.
Alyosha
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Great work Challenger! Once again I have to say how impressed I am by how quickly and thoroughly you worked through this game. Having worked through PoP2 I can say that this type of game is not as easy to optimize as it seems. Great research and great work! Voting Yes! Also having another game on an updated emulator is a valuable upgrade. I'll be looking forward to your next project!
Alyosha
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This run was really intense. Definitely one of the best runs on the genesis, second only to Archenfel's Lost Vikings run I think, it definitely deserves a star. Too bad that movement improvement was found too late, but that's the nature of TASing sometimes. Anyawy, good luck out there on the other side of that door Samsara! Thanks for a great run, voting yes!
Alyosha
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^ wow I didn't even know that option was there :O Yeah given that the APU now uses the nonlinear mixing formula from NESDEV I don't think those scaling bars really apply. Maybe I can look at putting it back in as an option, but I'm not promising anything in the near future.
Alyosha
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I think that this run probably stands a better chance then the example you cited there. A2600 emulation at the time of the current published run of this game was deeply flawed. It had several severe bugs that resulted in an emulator that did not well represent the A2600. Maybe add BrunoVisnadi as a co-author if you would like, but I hope you uncancel this run and give it a chance. The old run really should be replaced for relying on innacurate emulation.
Alyosha
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Nice work once again Arc and co. Yes Vote! What's next after Zelda II?
Alyosha
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I always do things iteratively, so this level suited my style very well, also having TAStudio to look at really helped as well, to see where your old inputs are compared to new ones, it's like another visualization of the level. Have you tried just going through the level once without being too worried about optimization? I learned a lot that way especially about how to manage the camera. I strongly recommend doing this. I can help if you get stuck at a tricky part.
Alyosha
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^nope! I haven't looked at any other sources, and I probably wouldn't unless I got stuck. As much as I hate re-inventing the wheel, I also have a very hard time following other people's code, and for simple systems like this one it's way less frustrating and more fun to just look at the documentation and do it myself. Plus the core is already like 50% done when I picked it up so it was convenient to just go with the current code structure. I'm almost completely done with graphics now and most games (that boot) look and play correctly. Next I'll have to tackle banking so I can get more games to test.
Alyosha
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Do you have both roms in the Firmware folder of Bizhawk? If so then maybe you have the wrong version. PM me if you continue to run into trouble.
Alyosha
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This link always links to the current dev build: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/zeromus/bizhawk-udexo/build/artifacts
Alyosha
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Yeah several tests were incorrectly identified as passing / not passing and only recently that list was cleaned up by feos. For nmi_sync/demo_ntsc only the first pixel of the middle line should be blinking.
Alyosha
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I like technical runs like these, and the low% is a neat challenge. Some of the restrictions admittedly seem a little arbitrary, but once the game gets broken as much as Super Metroid I guess you have to draw lines somewhere. The run overall was a bit slow for me, but I liked the submission text and made the video worth it, voting yes!
Alyosha
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I didnt use any cam hacks, only radar and ram watch. Actually I think it's important to not use a cam hack anyway, because you need to be able to make sure the camera is following the correct path and not getting broken independently of the kongs. If you load up my most recent WIP and try tinkering with it you will see that it takes very little to break the whole thing, its a delicate balance and I honestly only know empirically what's going on. What problems are you having with the radar? If it's not accurate enough I can work on improving it. Or I can try to make a WIP from your most recent file going through the level if that will help.
Alyosha
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I've been making slow and steady progress on Intellivision. Recent improvements inclide: -Collision Detection -Timing fixes -Scrolling and Border effects -Code optimization (back up to 60 fps) many games should be in a nominally playable state now. Some will still have graphical glitches and ones requiring banking won't load, but I think I'll be able to start on that stuff soon.
Alyosha
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Does anyone know how accurate Mesen truly is?
Very accurate. But just as a point of clarification mesen does not pass nmi_sync/demo_ntsc even though that link says it does. At this point there is enough information available that any current emulator should be able to achieve accuracy comparable to punes or mesen. But there is still room for improvement in multiple areas, and at any rate to get real 100% accurate emulation you would need a new emulator that works off master clock ticks, that way you can get some of the effects that rely on CPU-PPU alignment.
Alyosha
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@jlun2: I don't really know myself. Presumably a lot of the high level stuff comes from Dev Kits at some point. For older systems it is feasible to simply simulate the whole thing at a very low level and then just cook up a bunch of tests to get everything timed just right. For A2600 for example the scematics of the TIA are known so you can trace the circuitry directly of what's going on (well, I can't but some people can and have.) I think endrift and others are in the middle of this process with gameboy/gba so maybe they can give better answers.
Alyosha
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Thanks to natt for improving light gun emulation now VS Hogan's Alley works as well! I think that completes the list of Unisystem games now. There is one more game out there called raid on bungeling bay. I can't seem to find much about it except for some strange security features it has, so maybe that is one more loose end to tie up but I'm not worried about it for now.