Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Simon Sternis wrote:
Here's the new strat pulled off!
As usual, ended with 40.98 and that was incredibly hard, I think I had a lot of luck in this run. I hope you to get as many luck as me and to cake it better!
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Atma wrote:
SRAM isn't a savestate. I don't believe that any movies that start from a savestate have actually been accepted, although I may be wrong.
Several movies that start from sram have been accepted, although I believe in most cases this is something that's been arranged prior to the submission.
Yeah, I was referring to SRAM start only, not savestate start.
moozooh wrote:
Most (all?) of these movies also had verification files that generated the needed SRAM, be it a published run or a separate movie.
Right. This would need to be provided for Star Fox 64 (should be trivial to do for a TAS, it's just all the medals you need, right?)
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
MUGG wrote:
After seeing that Pokemon Yellow run and now this one...
Wouldn't it be a good idea to add a "save corruption" category/tag?
It would also solve the obsoletion debate...
As for the run itself, I lost count of how many resets were used. :P
Good run!
Exactly, I was thinking the same thing myself.
Save corruption is something that I suspect a lot of games are vulnerable to. It basically comes down to whether the game has a checksumming algorithm (that can't be defeated, unlike Chrono Trigger's) or uses atomic transactions (does any game do this?). It's cool when it can be exploited, but you're really exploiting undefined behavior rather than bugs. (Not to mention that, given Snes9x's inaccurate timing, I bet a lot of these would work out differently on the console.)
Since so many games are potentially vulnerable to save corruption, this site could become SaveCorruptionVideos.org if we consider save corruption to obsolete actual gameplay bugs. So IMO a general guideline of "separate categories for save corruption" would be best.
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Comicalflop wrote:
Submissions need to be recorded from a power on with cleared SRAM; under no circumstance can submissions be recorded from a savestate, as per the rules. Mupen doesn't support start from SRAM options.
Well, there's the Chrono Trigger New Game + run. I personally think it'd be reasonable in theory to start from a saved game for the sole purpose of unlocking the hardest difficulty (assuming harder difficulty = more entertaining, as is usually the case). But yes, your point about Mupen not supporting a "play movie from SRAM" feature stands.
However, there's no reason why the route chosen should be all-red-exits, besides, of course, the exit into Venom.
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
No Animalities, Babalities, or regular Fatalities, and only one Friendship?
Sorry, I didn't find this very entertaining. Maybe if the run description had specified in detail what the glitches were, it would be easier to follow.
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Someone at Capcom really likes doors.
You pretty well turned it from a mostly-adventure game into a pure adventure game by skipping all the fights, so you definitely earn some style points for that. The doors (and staircases, and ladders...) make the watchability factor suffer though...
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
symbolic X wrote:
How hard was it to translate the ROM's hex into letters where the answers are easier to read? example: (value: "Word" -> hex: ????)
I think what he means is that the ROM strings are actually ASCII, so they're trivial to decode (you can use unix "strings"). This is really rare for SNES era games... usually you only expect ASCII from Rare games and other English speaking devs.
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Does it throw invalid opcodes to the processor which then proceeds to actually still do work in an undefined way rather than triple faulting?
There was no such thing as a fault in the 6502 and its derivatives. The processors in those days were very primitive by today's standards!
Kejardon wrote:
Pulling items off of an empty stack has a tendency to crash ZSNES horribly bad (at least, the older versions of it I generally use). I have no idea what hardware actually will do when something like that happens.
Pretty sure that the S register just wraps around. I'm surprised that ZSNES would crash on stack overflow actually.
Kejardon wrote:
Exactly the right idea. From what I hear, emulation authors generally don't spend a lot of time on trying to properly emulate hardware glitches to begin with.
Unless you're bsnes ;)
SNES era games were notorious about relying on hardware glitches and other Things You Should Not Do, since lots of game developers were more electrical engineers than programmers, and Nintendo's manuals weren't that great. (At the risk of posting very old news, I thought I'd mention that the official SNES developer's manual has been available online for a while now. Lots of good information for the curious.)
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
FractalFusion wrote:
I uploaded a full version to megavideo (important: read the instructions below):
http://www.megavideo.com/?v=XX2T9LCZ
Instructions:
Click the red button. An ad may pop up and your window may switch. Just keep track of where it came from. Now where the red arrow was, a green button will eventually appear. Click the green button.
Some trivia: This TAS destroys as many non-bosses as bosses (14 each).
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
mmbossman wrote:
Johannes wrote:
Frames in SM64 represent variable timeunits, and hexing works fine.
SM64 also happens to be one of the few N64 games that hexes properly, not to mention CBFD was one of the last N64 games released, when developers were squeezing as much out of the console as possible. This means there's a lot more stuff going on in it to affect sync stability (when compared to SM64).
Also, emulators tend to be better tested on SM64. So while if the emulator was perfect CBFD might be able to be hexed, in practice the emu devs spent more time on getting SM64 to work right.
Joined: 2/12/2008
Posts: 67
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Perhaps the AVI for this game should ignore the cutscenes - or maybe have two AVIs published, one that has the cutscenes and one that doesn't. Ocarina of Time is kind of an anomaly on this site, I think, because Zelda is interesting TAS material, with lots of skips, glitches, and tricks to keep the viewer entertained - but when the game is compressed into such a short time frame, the cutscenes really overpower everything.
Not that I think this won't be published - but if it weren't it would seem a shame to forbid publishing a game because of something that can easily be cut out of a movie, and which a speedrunner largely has no control over. We frequently cut out credits from movies on this site: why not cutscenes too?
