Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Odd. I wonder what caused this. Will need to research.
Edit:
I just noticed that somehow my fixes to the save states were reverted in the tree.
I guess that makes half the what's new not even true.
It also means that the issues here seem to be prior to my fixes...
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Was the regular save state created with this version?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Just replay and wait 5 min?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Now that I have a full dev platform and build setup for this, can someone tell me how to recreate the post movie crash, so I can debug it?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
feos and I started patching PCSX-RR a bit. You can read why in the resync thread.
You can grab my latest build and see information on my wiki page.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Libraries embedded: zlib 1.2.7 with custom optimizations, libbz2 1.0.6, Lua 5.1.4, libpng version 1.2.10
What's New:
Memory leaks in save states removed.
Memory allocation overhead in save states removed.
File system overhead in save states removed.
Resource leaks in movie files removed.
Displaying Lua dialog when loading via command line fixed.
Allowing Lua movie functions when loading via command line fixed.
pcsx.exe, cdrTASiso.dll, and gpuTASsoft.dll no longer require external DLLs (zlib, libbz2, libpng, Lua, Dwarf2, libgcc).
PCSX build with better optimization.
pcsx.exe packed much much smaller.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I'm awaiting debugging info of which file/line causes the crash.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
feos wrote:
[16:29] <feos> I'm gonna make a chocolate monument of Nach and praise whatever reich he commands if this crap is finally solved
Looks like I'm going to have to call that in.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
jlun2 wrote:
Nach wrote:
jlun2, maybe this can help you:
<video>
Thanks!
In the future, if you need access to a video which is only on YouTube to help you make a run, please ask, I'm sure one of us can re-encode it and upload it elsewhere.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
natt wrote:
Oh rry? That suggests that implementing it in your game was highly desired
Yes.
natt wrote:
or required for official Nintendo certification.
No.
The official DMG, SGB, and CGB devkits however all included some libraries for developers to use, and default code which specifically had reset handling.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
natt wrote:
Nach wrote:
Scepheo wrote:
the Start button and the reset button?
On a side point, the Reset button may actually be programmable by the game. Link's Awakening uses Reset to Save.
It's kind of silly to call it that though. There's no physical button on the GameBoy labeled "reset", nor is there a particular hardware functionality being used to implement the key combination resets. It's pure software.
The key sequence is known as Reset in the Gameboy manual.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
jlun2 wrote:
I can't see the encode
jlun2: Would it help you if I can get you an encode of Thevlackdemonn2294's run that isn't hosted on YouTube?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
GhostSonic wrote:
<insane_coder> just put some safety pins in the controller ports, and take turns licking them
Context can be assumed but is not required.
Worst ways to commit suicide?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
--> feos has joined this channel
<Nach> Hi feos!
<Mothrayas> hi Nach!
<Nach> Mothrayas: Hi feos!
<feos> :D
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Scepheo wrote:
the Start button and the reset button?
On a side point, the Reset button may actually be programmable by the game. Link's Awakening uses Reset to Save.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Regarding saving, a common implementation is as follows:
X bytes Save Area 1
Y bytes Cecksum 1
X bytes Save Area 2
Y bytes Checksum 2
X bytes Save Area 3
Y bytes Checksum 3
X bytes Save Area 4
Y bytes Checksum 4
1 byte Save Index
The Save Index is composed of 8 bits, 2 bits per save, for a total of 4, each representing what is contained in each Save Area. The 2 bits allow for 4 possible states 0, 1, 2, 3.
0 Indicates there is no save there.
1 indicates the associated save is for Save Game 1.
2 indicates the associated save is for Save Game 2.
3 indicates the associated save is for Save Game 3.
A game out of the factory has the save index set to [0, 0, 0, 0]. Once Save Game 1 is saved the first time, it is written to Save Area 1 with its checksum. Upon completion, the Save Index receives [1, 0, 0, 0]. If power is interrupted in the process of writing to Save Area 1, or prior to the Save Index being written, the Save Index still contains [0, 0, 0, 0] and thus there is no save.
A save later of Save Game 1 will now look for the first free Save Area, being Save Area 2, and write there. Then it will update the index to: [0, 1, 0, 0]. If power is interrupted in the process of writing to Save Area 2, or prior to the Save Index being written, the Save Index still contains [1, 0, 0, 0] and thus the save did not occur, but the previous save is still there untouched.
If now one wanted to save Save Game 2, the index would be set to [2, 1, 0, 0], and subsequently [0, 1, 2, 0], and so on.
This system allows for exactly 3 Save Games, interruptions will not leave a Save Game in an invalid state, and the last successful Save Game is still accessible. The Checksum prevents other errors. A scan on the save selection screen will modify the Save Index to erase saves that have a Checksum mismatch.
You'll note from the classic games that have 3 Save Games, there's generally no way to break the Save Game in crazy ways. The most you can normally do is abuse what is in memory upon reset from actions that were taken while writing the save.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
feos wrote:
Shouldn't it go to Moons? The obsoleted movie had quite decent rates.
Personally, I'm all for rejecting this game/branch entirely, it's just a cheap knock off of its big brother, and sort of duplicates in a worse way better TASs.
However we have a vault, and it can live there as a testament to a record.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
If it's going to take a long time, then I don't see an issue with having an interim. We avoid back to back publications. If it means we're going to have a several month gap between, that's fine.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Gameboy games can be reset by pressing A+B+Start+Select. And actually, games don't need to adhere to that. Mega Man II for example disables (or perhaps doesn't implement) this restart sequence.
On Gameboy games, one can't claim it's some hardware action the game has no control over. How do you feel about abusing resets here?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
ALAKTORN wrote:
thanks for the clarification, you don’t sound sure of the fact that the mouse can achieve it though…
The mouse can if operated with extreme precision by a robot, but a human using the mouse can't.
The part that I'm unsure about is the precise amount of bits set by each operation. It's been a decade since I worked on SNES mouse emulation code.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
ALAKTORN wrote:
Nach wrote:
ALAKTORN wrote:
Nach wrote:
ALAKTORN wrote:
@Nach: well, you might be right on that, but that doesn’t change anything as I said in the phrase following the one you cited
Well guess what, the SNES Mouse was official, and the mouse movements inputs way more bits than the standard pad does.
that is the question I have been making the whole time… why do you think I’m against the publication of this movie?
all I wanted was clarification, if the mouse allows for the run to be playable on real hardware, that’s ok with me
I said a page ago this is possible on real hardware.
your definition of “possible” seemed to be different to mine, and now you’re actually making me wonder whether I understood right what you meant about the mouse…
The mouse (a first party controller) when plugged in sets 4 bits on, each button when clicked sets a bit, and IIRC, the movement with the mouse sends some combination of 16 bits, depending on direction and speed. You could get any combination to output from that, but for an actual human to do it is impossible, as no one has that kind of precision in their wrist, and their brain to hand coordination.
Now if you were to use a third party controller with lots of buttons, like the piano, or the phone, you could as a human press any combination you want, and you don't need expensive surgery either.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
ALAKTORN wrote:
Nach wrote:
ALAKTORN wrote:
@Nach: well, you might be right on that, but that doesn’t change anything as I said in the phrase following the one you cited
Well guess what, the SNES Mouse was official, and the mouse movements inputs way more bits than the standard pad does.
that is the question I have been making the whole time… why do you think I’m against the publication of this movie?
all I wanted was clarification, if the mouse allows for the run to be playable on real hardware, that’s ok with me
I said a page ago this is possible on real hardware.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
ALAKTORN wrote:
@Nach: well, you might be right on that, but that doesn’t change anything as I said in the phrase following the one you cited
Well guess what, the SNES Mouse was official, and the mouse movements inputs way more bits than the standard pad does.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
ALAKTORN wrote:
I highly doubt that most people would use unofficial hardware as the standard way to play
Then perhaps read this thread.
Back in 1993, Nintendo even released a controller buyers guide, so players can find the controller that best suited them, or had novelty features. It was quite simple really, people wanted more players, wireless, a joystick instead of a pad, turbo buttons, or whatever, and they went out and got those devices. When I was young, everyone had an NES or SNES, out of all my friends, I can only recall one of them who didn't go out and get a non-official controller.
I only used this for NES:
Or this for SNES:
And that was the norm.
Later, the X-Band was also immensely popular, as it allowed selected games to magically become multiplayer online. Nintendo advertised it too, despite not being from them, and also had a contest to win some for free.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Or this for SNES:
And that was the norm.
Later, the X-Band was also immensely popular, as it allowed selected games to magically become multiplayer online. Nintendo advertised it too, despite not being from them, and also had a contest to win some for free.