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Alyosha
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This is incredible. The level of ingenuity, creativity, and technical prowess on display here is just plain impressive.
Alyosha
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@Mothrayas: Except the only 'real points' here are precisely about appearence. What differentiates 'you have to burn the rope' from level 2 of 'math blaster'? Both are platforming mixed with educational elements, one reading and another addition. If anything the math blaster stage is more of a 'serious' game since at least you can fail. EDIT: oops, bobo the king posted in between, edittted for clarity.
Alyosha
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I'm really not seeing the need for this definition of a 'serious' game. Let's take an even simpler example. Why is [2891] DS You Have to Burn the Rope DS by NitroGenesis in 00:25.87 a serious game (where incidently you cannot fail) and not a cleverly disguised reading comprhension test? The answer now would seem to be 'because it's not designed like one,' but maybe it's just a really clever disguise? :O
Alyosha
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The carrot attacks are fixed, her movement is what is being manipulated. All bosses have behavior that varies mainly based on your position relative to them. In this case we want the pattern that brings her toward the roof in time to defeat her by throwing her into it.
Alyosha
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zoboner wrote:
Cool game and nice run. voting yes. Why your movie file give SMS, then than it's an GG game ? Bizhawk don't doing the difference when you play SMS or GG ? I'm sure this question is dumb, but I prefer know why !
This is on my to-do list of things to fix in the SMS core. The game is being played in GG mode (you can see in the movie header that IsGameGear is set to true) but it just isn't setting the system ID to Game Gear.
Alyosha
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For anyone interested, the solution appears to be located at $3082, $3084 in RAM. I haven't worked out what value goes to which person. The solution appears to be calculated around frame 836 in the movie.
Alyosha
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Bobo the King wrote:
I bring it up because Final Fantasy Legend has a spell (I think it's FLARE or P-BLAST?) that is utterly impossible to obtain using the Game Boy's RNG. I've never tried getting it using GBC or SGB, but it is, technically, an element of the game that is locked out by the RNG. If anyone would like, I can run a few traces and show how the RNG table is compiled and compare them across the three platforms.
Please do! I would find this fascinating.
Alyosha
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Yeah, I just don't agree that there should be a blanket ban on games with those design asthetics. I don't see a need for it and don't see it as desirable. The existing rules regarding non-games seem sufficient to me to cover non-game educational content.
Post subject: Re: #5759: qflame's SNES Math Blaster Episode 1: In Search of Spot in 07:53.15
Alyosha
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Mothrayas wrote:
Can you explain how either game features education as a primary game element and purpose?
Carmen Sandiego is basically an aggrevated multiple choice test about reading comprehension, hard to get more school house education then that. Education isn't just math. Actually, many games require you to be able to read in order to understand and play. Reading and reading skills are certainly school subjects. As a current example, take [3590] SMS King's Quest: Quest for the Crown by BZero & Challenger in 03:07.46 . Played casually, this is basically little more then a big reading comprehension test. The only reason it's not classified as an educational game is because nobody called it that. If an edutainment company had published the exact same game and called it educational, would it suddenly become unpublishable?
Alyosha
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Actually I think Math Blaster is a good and fun game (I remember playing it when I was little.) I was more referring to the rule itself, in that I don't think it makes sense. If I had created an otherwise identical game called 'Waldo Blaster' where instead of doing addition you just have to identify and shoot Waldo (and do equivalent things in the other stages) and I had published that in the 1980s instead of Math Blaster, that game would publishable here, since it's a game with clear gameplay and a goal. My point is I don't think the fact you have to do math instead should be what stops it from being published.
Alyosha
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I think this rule should be changed to allow this run to be published. I can't think of a good reason why 'do basic math' should not be publishable. We already have 'click a predetermined spot on the screen' [2792] NES The Great Waldo Search by MESHUGGAH in 00:51.83 and this is a better game then that.
Alyosha
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Lot's of cool new features there! Those omni-directional goombas were funny. XD The fire flower looked cool! I did find the slight perspective changes when Mario changes directions pretty jarring though. Also the segmented flagpole looks kind of wrong. Other then that, awesome stuff!
Alyosha
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That was fast. This is another run where I wouldn't have thought over 1 second could be saved, impressive work. Voting yes!
Alyosha
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Cool! This is a much needed topic, thanks for making it. I have a question regarding this rule:
Play games that are emulated well. Emulation of several platforms such as Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation is still far from perfect, and some games work worse than others. This may be grey area on such systems, but we generally aim to publish videos that look like they could be played back on the original video game system. Movies of games that are not emulated well (have graphical or functional glitches that do not exist on the real console) should not be submitted.
My question is, what can be done about runs that accepted and published, yet break this rule by being emulated quite poorly, if they cannot be improved in gameplay? I have in mind several A2600 runs: [2228] A2600 Bobby is Going Home by Lollorcaust in 01:16.13 [2585] A2600 Dodge 'Em by yep2yel & morningpee in 00:52.93 [2226] A2600 Superman "pause glitch" by jlun2 in 00:11.42 There is very likely no way to improve gameplay in these (certainly not Superman or Bobbie is going home, Dodge'em might have a chance.) Yet, it seems there should be a means to replace them with runs that are accurate given how obviously poor the emulation is just by watching the encodes, even if they are the same length (or possibly longer.) So, assuming that no further improvements are possible: Is it acceptable to submit a new run that is identical in gameplay to an existing run where the only improvement is accurate emulation?
Alyosha
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/43978832652265684 Here is an improvement of about 10 frames due to evading traffic as fast as possible. I didn't include whatever the one frame improvement was that ReadySteadyYeti found, so I guess that will have to be put into this one for a final submission.
Alyosha
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At some point we really should formally deprecate old BizHawk versions. Pretty much every core, both ported and in house, has been substanitally improved since 1.11.6. Specifically for 1.11.6 for A2600, that verion of the core is very seriously buggy.
Alyosha
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Movie Description wrote:
In this run, Alyosha improves the predecessor movie by about 10 seconds in gameplay sections, due to tighter optimization and better planning.
This is a two minute improvement over the predecessor movie linked there. It is a 10 second improvement over cheesestringxx's previous rejected submission (in gameplay.)
Alyosha
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zoboner wrote:
Work and research, but it risk to be long, so it's not for tomorrow. I take this job and I'm curious to know how this game run concerning fights. What a pity that nfq don't given more informations on this run, but not a problem, I restart and I'll get all who'll be necessary to make this TAS !
Awesome! Good Luck with that ambitious undertaking.
Challenger wrote:
But, the lag of this game is randomly?
Yeah I don't know. I was not able to sync kumquat's run at all in BizHawk, despite the overall time it takes to do stuff seeming to be correct. This tells me that lag is way different between the two. Even just changing some minor things in BizHawk does have seeming random impact on lag (although the net result is usually the exact same number of lag frames, just in different locations.) My approach so far is just to take the minimum number of actions possible which makes lag easier to track.
Alyosha
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Challenger wrote:
Although I don't understand much about sub-pixels, and with the recent improvement that I found, I'll help to improve Kenseiden! One of my favorite games. Probably the last game (dega movies) that's enough for me to improve.
Cool, are you still working on Wonder Boy at all?
zoboner wrote:
I'll can be interested by Phantasy Star .
Are you going to be working on it zoboner? Or doing research? ______ Tails' Sky Patrol was quite well optimized. But, so far I managed to save 3 frames in each of the first 2 levels, so I'm at least making progress. There's a slim chance I'll have it and a revamped version of George Foreman back on the workbench by year end.
Alyosha
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@zoboner thanks for the LUA work . I see this is accepted now and I probably won’t be trying to improve it right away, but I would encourage you to try yourself. Since you seemed to work out RNG pretty easily I’m sure you’ll find improving this pretty easy. EDIT: Actually, nevermind, I found a better manipulation on the first opponenet, so I'll just cancel this one and submit a clean, improved version when it's ready.
Alyosha
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Awesome! Nice find.
Alyosha
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Wow, there's a lot of impressive work happening here. I hope it will eventually get translated into something that works on console. Good Luck!
Alyosha
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Thanks for the temp encode challenger. (My net sucks right now and it takes forever to upload stuff, so it's appreciated.) I think next I wil ltry to tackle Tails' Sky Patrol. I'm feeling pretty motivated at the moment so hopefully I can make some progress.
Alyosha
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Dimon12321 wrote:
BTW, could you make the 2nd knockdown on Drago without walking into him? It took only 1 combo to do that.
Nope, you'll get countered if you don't walk into him.
Alyosha
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Ok, so once again this behaviour is a consequence of where we choose to process input. What's happening here is that the NMI generated by the pause button is delaying processing of the first IRQ from the scanline interrupt. What's supposed to happen on the first interrupt is the game changes the value that the scanline counter is reloaded to. The intended sequence is:
HINT (at HINT, the counter is reloaded to the value in register 10, currently 0)
IRQ1 (to set register 10 to 173, at the end of the frame.)
HINT (since the counter was reloaded with 0, we get another IRQ)
IRQ2 (do frame stuff, we won't get another IRQ until SL=175)
But, since we get just enough of a delay from NMI, instead what happens is:
NMI
HINT
IRQ1 starts, but doesn't update the counter yet!
HINT (the counter gets reloaded to 0 a second time!)
IRQ1 ends
IRQ2 starts (this is the second IRQ that processes frame stuff.)
HINT (another HINT , but NOW the counter is reloaded to 173)
IRQ2 ends
IRQ3 (the glitchy one, which happens because of the extra counter reload)
So, that's pretty much it. Once again, if we had chosen to process input at VBlank, like most other emulators (and most other BizHawk cores) we would not see this glitch. It's also not something you'd likely ever see on console. You basically have a ~300 CPU cycle window to hit this glitch! :)