Where a game has multiple difficulty levels, it is preferred to play on the hardest difficulty level (for more interesting gameplay) unless the only difference between difficulty levels is enemy/boss hit points, in which case the easiest difficulty levels are preferred in the interest of speed. If the difference in difficulty is inapplicable for your run, for example, you trigger the end game sequence right from the start, then selecting the hardest mode is unnecessary.
There also was #1654: Xipo's NES Ninja Gaiden 2 in 09:14.05 that was rejected despite of being faster.
Here, people didn't prefer the J version of the game, which is easier, even though the run itself is very well done. So I can't quite obsolete the current run by this one.
We can't publish this as a separate branch either, because the actual difference is hardly noticeable for a viewer. There is a movie tagged "hard mode", but it's not about difficulty, it's a second quest.
So I'll reject this submission and will hope the author goes on and improves the U version as well.
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I don't think that this hack carries something new in itself other than pure speed. Levels weren't designed to take maximum advantage of it anyway. Looks just like some fast forwarded Megaman TAS, but with less enemies. Voted No on entertainment and on the hack itself.
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18:57 Mothrayas hi feos, fi adelikat
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jlun2 wrote:
Well, there are 7 movies listed that uses the easiest difficulty. I wonder if any of those cases could be applied here in one way or another.
Yeah, none of them obsoletes the harder difficulty run which is exactly the matter here. If people prefer speed over all the rest (once they didn't), it will be accepted. If they prefer the difficulty (and the U version), I"ll have to reject it.
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Do you think you're done improving it and I can replace the submission file?
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Obtaining those dlls doesn't change anything.
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Looks like it's going to spawn a tight discussion about what gameplay features automatically make this run faster. It's just before, we only were speaking about dialogs or mid-room lag on that matter, since it's the cheapest way and must not be accounted as an improvement. Now, the run kind of deliberately picks the easier version and benefits by time. But does it match the tech level of the current movie? I mean, since the latter uses the harder difficulty, it showcases more tech value unless it misses some improvement possible in the U version.
I was in somewhat similar situation with this movie:
[1930] NES Zen: Intergalactic Ninja by feos in 11:34.21
The previous one used the medium difficulty, and if I switched to hard, my improvements would become uncountable, due to losses in different places. So I picked the same difficulty to know for sure what I improved and what I didn't improve.
However, this run was accepted as a tech and entertainment improvement over the predecessor:
[945] Genesis Gunstar Heroes "2 players" by arkiandruski in 35:28.92
despite of being slower in real time for using the hardest difficulty.
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Spikestuff wrote:
Hello, Dolan
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>_>
No idea why I did that. I guess I missed the title screen part.
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FRAME WAR
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I was referring to his fear of games being sped up. Dendy does the opposite. But yeah, to be consistent, one would need to allow all 3 regions to the user, and the user might pick NTSC for PAL games. Not that it's so much of a problem it must be solved the hardcode way :D
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Changes nothing. If I check "Wait for subprocess creation", it does run, but doesn't playback the movie. Need the log?
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The Japanese 1.00 version of this game, エリィのアクション, matches the original hash for this movie, but crashes for me before running under hourglass. Can anyone else try running this version, instead of U?
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Can you upload it to Mediafire or something like that?
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adelikat wrote:
As for a UI way, we could do that for an upcoming release, the reason I didn't want that until now, is because I don't like the idea of people being able to run PAL games in NTSC mode (and more precisely I"m tired of people submitting supposed SMB records via this technique!)
It's the opposite. PAL games in NTSC become faster, NTSC games in Dendy become slower (50 fps).
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Awesome, voted yes.
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To get a better idea of what kind of impact this would have, I decided to look at a number of NES games and see which access uninitialized RAM.
I modified Bizhawk slightly to monitor the RAM usage. If the game read from a RAM address before it has written to it, I recorded that. I also recorded what addresses were written to.
I took a list of NES games that the site has movies for, ran them for 600 frames each in that modified Bizhawk, and then outputted the data collected. I then turned the data into images to make it easier to digest the information.
Here is the image set (warning: large/long images)
Each 8x8 pixel block represents a RAM address, starting at 0x0000 at the top left, and ending at 0x07FF at the bottom right. The colors mean the following:
Black - RAM was not read from or written to (still uninitialized)
Green - RAM was written to first
Red - RAM was read from before it was initialized, and still hasn't been written to (still uninitialized)
Orange - RAM was read from before it was initialized, but has since been written to
Keep in mind that this data is from only 600 frames of the game, and with no input. The results may change if input is given or the analysis is run for longer.
You can tell from the images that a large number of games access uninitialized memory, but I'm not sure what they are doing with it. As other people have said, some games start up in a different way depending on the initial state of the RAM. Being able to control this initial state might be beneficial to movie authors, but I'll leave that up to other users who know more about each game to determine. This data was simply to get an idea of how many games might be impacted by this new policy.
Also, if anyone is interested in seeing my changes to Bizhawk or the raw data I made the pictures from I'll be happy to post it.
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Oh, yeah, spotted that one out when watching first time.
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Warp wrote:
I fail to see how setting RAM values even before the game has started constitutes speedrunning.
The difference between setting RAM values because they theoretically might be like that by chance, and setting them explicitly via external means while the game is running, is artificial at best. One is not any more "speedrunning" than the other, not even if we were to loosen up the definition and allow achieving some goal (other than getting to the end of the game) as fast as possible.
I would go so far as to say that "the console RAM must be set to all zeros (or whatever) before starting the run" is on par with "the run must start from powerup". (And, if it were up to me, also "resetting is not allowed.")
At least I want to see the game played with superhuman accuracy. Why would I want to see a different program being run?
You know what? It's way too similar to the attitude regular gamers sometimes have towards TASing. "Why overcome human skills in the first place? It's only interesting to see how a real human can handle that!" "Why overcome human skills to this exact extent? You must stick to only certain kinds of entertainment!"
And now it's this. "Okay, you are allowed to overcome certain aspects of human skills. But not that much, you intriguer!"
Warp, the ground that is now being discovered is expanding the very "overcome human skills to play a game" concept. If we are physically able to do trick A with assist of our tools (omnideveloped), then it is always exciting to try trick B, that we only could think of (arbitrary code on console), and then looking for some trick C that is not even known, but will open insane possibilities - that's what makes us evolve as a community!
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I think what exists is an empty object. You assign the value to it by saving something.
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adelikat wrote:
feos wrote:
That's where you will need test ROMs and quite some stats.
Well, that essentially achieves the same results as Derakon is suggesting. Because it has to be likely enough that a human could verify it to be possible or else we will never be able to verify it being possible.
It's not the same. He wants a proof it is frequent enough. I want a documentation that will directly help improving emulators in the needed way, and tell people it is possible at all (as in, even 1 chance in 123456 million years is possible "at all"). So stats are only needed to prove it to people so that we could start actually abusing the hell it of it with no more proofs. What hegyak says.
To Derakon:
If it expands the "laboratory" too much for you, what about setting such "over the line TAS content" in the Demo tier? It is unique, no one did it before, it requires deep programming knowledge, it is interesting what will it end up with - all what people do demos for!
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Derakon wrote:
For example, we could say that if you need to have more than 32 bits have precise values, then your movie is too demanding. After all, assuming random bit states that's a 1 in 4 billion chance -- if it took you 1 second to attempt each run, you'd be running, on average, for 136 years before you'd get a version that synced.
On the other hand, a run that only required 8 bits to be specific values would need, on average, 256 attempts, which isn't unreasonable.
To introduce something into TASing, we don't need to prove that something is likely enough to happen. We only need to prove it is possible at all. That's where you will need test ROMs and quite some stats.
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