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As someone else said, there was lag in some places when a bunch of enemies or projectiles were on-screen. However, I think you did a really good job of going through the game quickly and taking damage to save time in certain places.
What happened with the final boss? Did it resurrect after you turned into a dragon, or turn into a second form, or what?
EDIT:
Oh, yeah, I voted yes.
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Here's another save state, this one with bombchus in the Shadow Temple right after getting the boots. There's been talk of using bombchu boosts similar to bomb boosts, so you guys can test those.
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You're using the v1.2 rom, but the movie is recorded with v1.0. I get the exact same error if I try playing it with the v1.2.
BTW, v1.1 has country code 325, if anyone is having a similar problem and it gives that number.
EDIT:
Here's a save state after getting the Hover Boots using the early Shadow Temple trick, for anyone who wants to do any further testing.
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AngerFist wrote:
So what this mean is, you have to be extremely lucky (in a speedrun) to pull this trick, knowing you did it through pressing the buttons at a certain frame..
Well, it could just be that my timing is horrible. I kept on dropping the bomb either too early or too late a lot, as far as I could tell. With adequate practice, it is definitely possible in real time.
Baxter wrote:
I think it means that the trick is also possible without a CC.
That's what I was testing, I hope.
Baxter wrote:
The only problem I'm having is the fact that there is no snapshot included, so I can't watch the movie.
Oops. I thought it was included as part of the movie file. Would it be a file with the extension .st? If so, I've updated the link with a zip file containing both the movie and the snapshot. It doesn't look like the snapshot compressed too well, though (it's 1.6 MB now).
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CoolBumpty wrote:
The V1.0 is just the version of the game that was initially released. Later on different versions fixed some bugs, and changed Ganondorf's blood into green goo, but the first version is as official as any other version, in my opinion.
I know. I meant to ask if it was decided that the TAS would be done with the V1.0 rom.
About the bomb glitch: Was Kazooie somehow dropping the bomb before he/she jumped? I'm trying to test it out as Adult Link. As far as I can tell, though, the blast propels me forward, not up.
EDIT:
It works! Here's a movie file recreating the trick. I got it to work based on Kazooie's description of what he did on the SDA forum. I wasn't exactly sure what "hammering" the B button meant, so I just pressed it on alternating frames several times.
I'm sorry for the lack of smoothness during the seam walking, but I've never done that before and it was horribly easy to fall off. I guess I also should have gotten the Din's Fire magic before attempting this.
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Wow, this is amazing. If the Spin Attack glitch needs Crooked Cart, though, would it be possible to actually beat the Shadow Temple as Young Link? Or would you just go in there for the boots?
One thing I don't quite understand from those videos--and I think it appeared in TSA's 4:57 run, too--was why Bongo Bongo (and possibly other bosses in the 4:57) stayed down for unnaturally long times. Did it have something to do with the certain attacks that were used against them, or was I just imagining that it was longer than usual?
EDIT:
I just thought of some more questions ;). Most importantly, has it been decided which version of the rom will be used for the TAS? The V1.0 one has been mentioned a few times, but is it "official"?
Secondly, did anything ever come out of that debug rom that TSA mentioned?
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Twisted Eye wrote:
I was thinking of a Cameroon vs. Argentina 4P playaround
I don't think that's possible. The only teams you can choose in the versus mode are USA, France, W. Germany, England, and Italy, and you can't have more than two players in the tournament mode.
Twisted Eye wrote:
but those times where you would go a few dozen seconds without scoring but just passing kinda dragged the movie down.
Do you mean in the first half or the second half? I know that happened a lot in the second half.
JXQ wrote:
I loved the part when you headed the ball down the field the wrong way in the second half only to clobber one of the German players with it halfway down the field.
I don't think I actually meant to do that. I was just clearing the ball away from the goalkeeper, and the German just happened to be in the right (wrong for him?) place.
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Well, I played around with the movie some more, and I finally finished it. The second half consists of fewer goals than the first half (only 9 more), since I couldn't come up with many creative ideas. Actually, I scored most of them on accident and then reproduced them. Two of them are repeats of a sort: Number 30 is very similar to number 29 in that I get the ball to go into the goal while it's doing the preparatory part of the super kick. This causes some weird behavior, since the camera follows an invisible ball for a little while as though it's still moving around the field. The other repetitious goal is number 32. I run and then do a super kick to finish off the match, which is basically what I did for the very first goal.
Since I don't score as much in the second half, I made it a sort of unofficial goal to try to get the opponents' health down enough so that I could tackle them and hopefully knock them out. I managed to do this to the center player. He goes down permanently with around 10 seconds left. I also got the health of three other players down to numbers that allowed me to tackle them, but I didn't knock any of them out. I was one HP away from knocking out one of the defenders, but I decided to go for the last goal instead.
My favorite goal from the second half is the one in which a super kick bounces off the bar, hits the diving goalkeeper, and bounces off him into the goal. I also managed to slide tackle an opposing player after he got a rebound inside the box, and the ball bounced into the goal. I had attempted to do something like that in the first half, but it didn't work out. Based on the sound for that goal, I think it was considered an own goal. A similar thing happens if you slide tackle an opposing player and the ball goes out; the computer apparently considers the other player to have touched the ball last, so your team gets it. You can see a demonstration of that in the second half as well.
Here's the link to the movie. Remember to set the second controller to Zapper in order to get it to play back correctly.
I might do another for fun movie of this game. If I do, I will probably play as Cameroon against Argentina (the slowest and fastest teams, respectively). The scoring probably won't be as one-sided in that one.
Feel free to tell me your impressions of the movie.
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I'm also re-yesing.
One thing I forgot to ask in my last post: There were times when your character seemed to physically pass through opponents' attacks, like Dhalsim's fireball (that's what it is, right?). How did you do that?
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That was a very nice movie, Shakespeare. I especially liked those combos you did on Sagat.
One thing that I'm unclear about is why you did so many attacks that missed. Was it some sort of manipulation of the computer?
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There's a (slight?) problem: The game apparently doesn't end. That's what Wikipedia and this review say. Based on my recent playing, it seems true. You can use warps, but you never get a "Congratulations! You won!" message and the levels seem the same after a while. Makes you wonder about the point of the warps...
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Gigafrost wrote:
Basically, a simple little puzzler we were given in college (for .1% overall extra credit in the class, hahaha) was to make a program that prints itself out.
That's called a quine. Here's a page that has examples in various languages.
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According to some threads on the DOSBox forums, save states will indeed be pretty large. They would apparently need to include the status of files to which the game could be writing in addition to the register states and other basic things. From the posts I've read, it sounds possible, but it also seems that people aren't too enthusiastic about working on this feature. I guess that makes sense, but :(.
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CoolBumpty wrote:
It's to get to the spirit temple as young link before going into Dodongo Cavern
I see. It definitely sounds like it would be pretty cool if someone could get that to work. What's the trick to getting over the river of sand without the hookshot, though?
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It worked! I was able to eliminate one lemming faster by assigning it the bashing job earlier. That didn't affect the frame count, though. Rather, the blocker assignments allowed me to get the four lemmings I needed to save from the left side into a very small space right by the structure, so they reached the exit 57 frames earlier. Here's a link to the updated file, including a save state to skip directly to level 10.
EDIT:
I found a way to improve level 7 by 36 frames. You'll notice that I assign a builder by the gate. Its purpose is to delay a lemming from covering as much ground so that it will land on the ledge by the exit instead of falling into the pit. It lands earlier than the builder that was building over the pit, thereby saving the frames. The file is still the same.
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qqwref wrote:
Now wait a minute, we're not starting from the computer power up. That would be like starting to record a NES emulator when you turn the TV on. You start when whatever program you're emulating starts - just have the emulator assume that the program has just been started on the computer (after having been installed, of course).
Okay, I see.
qqwref wrote:
If everything you need is missing, you're not really very far, eh?
Lol, that why I included the quotes.
qqwref wrote:
I think I've seen a slowdown-capable program for DOS somewhere, but that was all it did.
You mean Mo'Slo? I've heard of that, but never used it. DOSBox actually has slowdown capabilities. You can set how many CPU cycles it emulates per second or per millisecond in the configuration file. There are also hotkeys to increase and decrease the amount while running it.
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adelikat wrote:
Some of my favorite parts are when you were able to kill off all the uncessary lemmings without the "armageddon" tool. Finding creative ways to do this in future levels without wasting time is going to improve the quality of the run greatly.
I try to do that before resorting to the nuke button. The jobs they provided in some levels don't allow it, though. For example, I tried to bash through the crystal on the left end of level 5, but it's unbashable. I was also thinking of building a ladder and having the extra lemmings fall to their death in level 10, but the gate that they come out of prevented the builder from getting high enough.
adelikat wrote:
Also there will inevitably be moments where you have to wait, how about using the extra "tools" that you get to have the "disposable" lemmings so silly or neat looking things or just to find cruel ways to kill them off.
I'll try.
adelikat wrote:
In terms of speed, I didn't see anything in those levels that could be improved, keep up the good work!
Okay, thanks. I just thought of something in level 10, though. I might be able to get the lemmings on the left of the structure closer to it by using blockers before the climbers start falling. This would depend entirely on how long it takes for all of them to be released. If it works, they might be able to get to the exit more quickly. And I thought I had finished the level...
EDIT:
I just did a quick check, and I might be able to assign one blocker before having to assign the floaters. I'll test if this is faster after my large block of classes today.
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Well, DOS does have support for programs in the background, right? Aren't they called RTLs or something?
According to Wikipedia, they're called TSRs. Also according to Wikipedia,
MS-DOS was not designed to be a multi-user or multitasking operating system
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
And do you REALLY want to see Mega Man for PC?
Of course. It was one of the few games that I had under MS-DOS (I now have both of them ;)). Admittedly, the graphics are horrible and beating the bosses is pretty trivial in both games, but I wonder if there are as many glitches as in the console versions.
Phil wrote:
There's DOSbox.
I hope DOSBox is going to be one of the first re-recordable PC emulators. It "just" needs save states and the re-recording features.
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qqwref wrote:
- circumvent the executable's native speed (allowing timed events to slow down, possibly deliberately slowing down processes by a scalar)
Forgive my ignorance, but how would this be different from any other emulator? Isn't it just a matter of having some hotkeys that increase or reduce the number of emulated cycles per second?
qqwref wrote:
- change the executable's size at will (make it windowed instead of fullscreen or vice versa)
I think that this would largely depend on the nature of the OS being emulated. For example, I don't remember DOS having support for what we would call multitasking. You were either running a program or not, which meant that it was either taking up the whole screen or none of it. I assume it would be similar for other command-line OSes.
qqwref wrote:
- add your hotkeys to the executable's hotkeys (because you need the keyboard to control the emulator and the executable)
I'm pretty sure this would depend on the game you're trying to play. The simplest platformers probably have some variation of the arrow keys, one key for jumping, and one for attacking. On the other hand, I've heard of some flight simulators and FPSers that use up a large amount of the keyboard.
qqwref wrote:
- make an arbitrary savestate (this may be insanely huge, on the order of 10 MB, but whatever)
Yeah, this would probably be the biggest problem because of the memory and register states that would have to be saved. Furthermore, that just made me think of some other problems that could come up:
The (directory structures?) would have to be the same on both computers if someone wanted to run another's movie. For example, it might desync if one person had the game files in C:\Directory1\ and another person had them in C:\Directory2\.
Recording from "power on" could be annoying depending on how long it took the emulated computer to start up.
I really have no idea how the timing would work, so this might not be a problem at all. Anyway, desyncs might arise if the emulator lags on one computer but not on another.
In any case, I definitely think this will happen sometime in the future, and I can't wait. There are some PC games that I want to TAS or see TASed (Mega Man PC, anyone?).
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After a long break, and probably the hardest work I've yet done on this project, here is a WIP through level 10. (expired link removed)
Regarding level 10: I was able to assign a floater and a blocker to the first lemming and switch back fast enough to assign a floater to the second. I also had enough time to assign the second one a bashing job before it started climbing again. In order to do that, however, I had to assign a floater to the third lemming at an unoptimal time, since it would have otherwise died from the fall. Finally, I saved 156 frames by assigning multiple bashing jobs instead of letting one lemming do all the work.
As always, any hints or comments are welcome.
EDIT:
Oh, yeah, I forgot to say this. I think that I'll post updates every time I finish 5 more levels from now on, instead of every level. I'll also include save states to the new material, so that people don't have to watch the old stuff over and over again.
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Nach wrote:
In several places, I notice you start attacking before you can hit the enemy, and the first attack misses. Is this luck manipulation or just not enough precision?
Can you tell me the level or frame numbers when this happens? I've just watched the movie, and I can't find it.
Nach wrote:
I also noticed in one place you take a big jump to a platform, see that you can't make it, and land on a lower platform then jump higher.
I'm pretty sure I know what part you're talking about. It's in level 2-2. That action was intentional. I jumped so far to the right in order to get the first skeleton to appear. If I would have just landed on the lower platform from the start, it wouldn't have appeared until after I had jumped again.
FreshFeeling wrote:
I'm pretty sure there are varying jump heights.
There are.
EDIT:
After checking the memory values during the boss fights and determining which address held the health information, I found out that I missed one hit on the skull boss and that very many of my hits on the bird boss did horribly small amounts of damage. Due to this sloppiness, I'm canceling this run. I'll work on figuring out where the values for the normal enemy health are stored, so that I can check how much damage I did and check if I missed any attempted hits.