Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
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.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
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.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
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.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
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.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
@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.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
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.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
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! :)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
I updated the OP a bit. King's Quest and Rocky seem like they'll be wrapped up soon.
I'm working on George Foreman right now. Depending on my motivation I might work on another one after that, but I'm not sure which one yet.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
Do you have a movie file? I can make sure nothing is going awry in the emulation.
Seems like this one would also be good to test on console as a pretty obivous case.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
Nice! I would never have guessed from looking at the original that ~2 seconds would end up being saved here.
Voting yes, nice research on the ending screen too.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
My improvementes were trivial enough to not need co-authorship. Feel free to re-submit as sole author (well with BZero as well I guess who is responsible for the main route still, but I'm not sure even that is really necessary.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
Cool! Save those frames. I'll go ahead and cancel this one. I'll move on and start looking at one of the other easier looking Dega runs since I seem to have some motivation right now.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
Audio: Fixed, thanks for the report.
Savestate: They were never meant to share savestates, so I implemented the same logic NESHawk / QuickNES uses to seperate their states. Should be fixed now.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
MUGG wrote:
I noticed emu.setregister() and emu.totalexecutedcycles() aren't supported in Gambatte,
so I was wondering if there will be support for these in GBHawk?
Yes, eventually there will be.
Right now I am working on the sprite test. I hope to be passing it by year end, it seems doable.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
Mothrayas wrote:
ThunderAxe31 wrote:
Edit: oh and also, why switching from SGB to GB?
Because BizHawk's SGB support is incomplete and extremely buggy.
Generally speaking, no SGB movie has been submitted/published ever since VBA-rr got deprecated, in favor of plain GB runs. (In fact, the most recently published SGB movie is my previous Mega Man V TAS.) See also e.g. Pokémon.
I'm not seeing this kind of corruption in either of the sgb cores in 2.2.1, what steps are needed to reproduce this?
0040 is the VBlank interrupt address. It looks like it's occurring in the middle of some other operation. I wouldn't be surprised if this has something to do with the bug.
EDIT: One other thing I noticed about this level is that in several places sprites pass through the status bar area.There is a LY=LYC interrupt that occurs at the edge of the status bar that checks for when drawing is finished, and sprites passing through this area can delay it by several cycles. This effect is not emulated by any emulator yet. If the glitch is due to some obscure cycle timing issue, it may not yet be possible to reproduce it on emulator during normal play.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
wow I really didn't think any actual gameplay frames could be save here, nice work!
This is really one of those games that would benefit from subframe inputs. By cramming as many pauses as possible into a single frame you could reduce load times to almost nothing.
That's a long way off, so for now voting yes!
Also I think you can remove me from the author list. I didn't even discover the pause glitch that was MESHUGGAH.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
PJ wrote:
I tried baiting one of the two soldiers to fire a bullet and then race the bullet to the other side of the barrier, but I have not been able to make it in time. I cannot confirm if that would work or not.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! This is a pretty huge discovery, and would be even bigger if it worked on the 2nd barrier.
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/43648137360728408
Your guess is correct!
By taking bullet damage on the same frame as passing through the barrier, you are able to skip it.
In this movie I poked the second guard onto the barrier just in case I needed him for somehting, but it's probably just as well to kill him.
EDIT: Here is a much cleaner and simpler demonstration of the skip:
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/43648327823251606
The unduck and hook throw are precise, but should be doable real time I think.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
Woah crazy find!
I might look into this one, would be cool to have an updated TAS with it.
So, I took nelifox's run and I did NOTHING except edit out the part where he blows up the generator to turn off the first barreir.
Then I replayed the run as is, and ended up on the other side of the barrier! 0_0
I haven't looked at a trace log or anything yet to sort out what happened, but if it's this easy maybe I'll try the second barrier too.
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/43646321347282670
EDIT: the bazooka shot and pressing down to release the hook are irrelevent. All you have to do is swing at that point and you'll make it through. Seems like it's just a metter of lag from the two enemies and possibly the elevator.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3618)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2754
Location: US
With some help from gekkio I fixed naughtyemu. I also got caught up on a couple newer tests just recently released.
Progress is reasonably steady but emulator performance is starting to take a hit. I might take some time and go over the code again and look for obvious speed improvements. This hasn't really benefitted me at all in the past, but maybe I'll find something this time, I'm really hoping to stay at 4x speed at least.
Generally speaking, no SGB movie has been submitted/published ever since VBA-rr got deprecated, in favor of plain GB runs. (In fact, the most recently published SGB movie is my previous Mega Man V TAS.) See also e.g. Pokémon.