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I think if a graphical glitch or a broken sound tone/tune is apparent for several seconds, or distributed around the run in an obvious way (say, you can't accidentally miss it if you're watching normally), and it generally sticks out, then a different, non-glitched mode is required, and console verification would need a resynced movie instead.
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I didn't enjoy it at all. The worst parts are the constant jumping sample and the slow speed. If you look closely, there's quite some stuff scattered around the levels that is meant to slow you down, but most of the time it feels like an autosroller. It gets old very quickly, and none of the gameplay differences in various levels was able to help with that impression. Voted No.
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So back to Gameboy.
I finally read the linked thread about problems in GBx games in later modes. They don't seem to even discuss all those "subtledifferences" only old DMG experts can spot. They talk about games that either don't run at all, or have obvious glitches in audio or graphics.
Some games weren't explicitly designed for GBC or GBA modes, even though those platforms try to enhance them explicitly, by having certain colors for certain games coded in the boot ROM. Previously, the rules didn't evenmean to stick to "platform the game was released for". And the latest revision doesn't address games with slightly enhanced graphics in GBC. But Mothrayas said that disallowing GB-in-GBC was an oversight, not an intention.
People that support GB-in-GBC are those who currently contribute to GBx emulator coding, to GBx console verification, and to GBx TASing. If that doesn't make the demand legitimate, I don't know what does. In addition to those, staff members also agreed (here and on discord) that unless there are obvious problems with newer modes, console verification is a good enough reason to allow those modes.
Suggested rule.
If glitches that are caused by newer mode hinder gameplay, we don't want that mode.
If glitches that are caused by newer mode are obvious to unarmed eye/ear in normal viewing conditions, we don't want that mode.
If glitches that are caused by newer mode can't be easily noticed and don't hinder gameplay, the newer mode is allowed for the sake of console verification.
If newer mode doesn't cause any glitches at all, it's allowed.
Categorization seems to need that publications of DMG games are labeled as GB, but how do we automate that in the parser?
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Screenshot suggestion?
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False alarm. Restored.
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Nach wrote:
You're opening up the door to quite a lot with this statement. Capcom has released their CPS-1 library multiple times with different versions of MAME. Their NES library with different NES emulators. I've seen Acclaim, Accolade, and Midway sell some of their SNES games bundled with Snes9x 1.43 - illegally at that, or Mednafen. I'm sure there's plenty more that I haven't seen.
We could also limit this to just VC, at least for now.
First of all, we can't even know if they used any of the emulators available on the internet, or made their own. Since randomly substituting games in the VC layer doesn't always result in a playable game, those could be either barebones emulators targeting only specific games, or not even emulators in the usual sense, but running some game programs on actual hardware. Nintendo said about VC SMB that “emulation program in question was created by Nintendo internally”, and I couldn't find evidence disproving that.
Second, I feel strongly against requiring people to fiddle with officially shipped game images. We've only ever allowed it in cases when the game would've been simply unTASable otherwise, and now outright require it unless the extracted image itself doesn't work? That breaks the authentic connection between the game image and the environment it was made for (using an existing game image as a foundation in this case, also belonging to that copyright holder). It's the same as requiring that the game gets patched. And most importantly, this "patch" may directly affect how the game was meant to be played on that platform.
Third, if we require extracting those games, we should ensure that it comes from the actual VC release, and that it was extracted cleanly, without additional edits. This will have to be verified by the judge, by reproducing the extraction process and comparing the results to what was used in the movie, or by comparing what was used in the movie to some "known good" database. Does such a database exist, like we have redump for example?
Finally, are we sure extracting games in this manner is perfectly legal?
Nach wrote:
This also gets into a gray area. Who is the publisher in various areas? Many Asian countries don't respect copyright law of other countries. In Iran or China you can walk into a store and purchase a DVD or flash drive from a respectable Iranian or Chinese company loaded up with many video games and popular emulators, and it's legal there. They're using various versions of FBA, MAME, Snes9x, mGBA, DeSmuME, Mupen64, PCSX, and more. Billions of people have access to these, and between that and those importing off of AliExpress, quite probably most people on the planet that have experienced the most popular games have done so via these emulators.
We don't want emulators to be illegally used in such bundles of course, and we don't want bootleg bundles. But we can't suspect VC releases in any of that so far.
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Here's the table I got, with framerate made to match nico's 30fps (gameplay mechanics aligned nicely):
https://files.tasvideos.org/common/SubmissionFiles/6866S/diff.png
Times in the nicovideo run where it's faster than you (level starts):
15:11.067
18:43.767
23:55.233
38:40.067
40:17.033
43:47.167
47:01.267
50:40.367
51:52.500
54:10.333
Can you elaborate why your run is slower there?
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Yeah it's always better to take your time and do everything properly (I'm totally not referencing tmnt4 here, lol).
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Nach wrote:
Why is it wrong when we publish a run which uses an emulator bug from one of our emulators?
And before you jump to answer that, bear in mind that some companies are reselling their old console games as PC games, making use of some of our emulators, bugs and all.
Should we be publishing the results of relying on emulator bugs?
I don't see a problem with TASing the officially released bundle, with or without bugs within that bundle. It's how it's been released by the publisher, so people are playing it that way and experiencing those same bugs. They could've fixed those bugs, but they haven't. Exactly how we TAS original games with bugs that devs could've fixed.
Bugs in unofficial emulators are not okay, because those don't belong to the release people are meant to be playing, on the original system without any extra layers.
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Nach wrote:
It's not that we know better. I'm sure Nintendo is aware of most of these bugs as well, and they just don't care about preserving the original game play. It's about the fact we are able to differentiate between the game itself, and other software. We know when a bug is part of the game itself or not.
Once again you're making it sound like publishing 2 different runs that look differently, on 2 different platforms, is completely impossible, unacceptable, bad for the site, and obviously wrong.
Also:
feos wrote:
Why exactly banning one of the options (the one where the resulting gameplay looks different enough) makes things better?
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I do not agree on limiting creativity on a legitimate environment the game has been officially released for. If they've introduced different bugs when preparing that release, why should we decide "no it's not a legitimate environment, don't trust the official publisher, we know better"? Why exactly banning one of the options (the one where the resulting gameplay looks different enough) makes things better?
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Nach wrote:
Yes, it's an official release. But it's an official derivative release in a buggier form. If we can extract and play it in its original platform, I think that's what we should do.
That same "unique gameplay" might even be possible in emulators that we non-Nintendo employees make, but we reject those because it's not true to the original. Sure these new Wii emulators are officially sanctioned by Nintendo's greed, but they're still not true to the original game. We're intelligent enough to differentiate a pure game release, and a game release that's really supposed to be for a different platform.
Your point is that the new release is not a part of the game anymore. Which is quite arbitrary to decide for the publisher of that game, based on which of their publications we like or not.
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If it's an extracted N64 image, we publish it as an N64. If it's a Wii image, we publish it as Wii. It remains consistent with what the game was meant for, there's no confusion and no false claims. If you run a VC release on Wii via some kind of a tasbot, it will look the same as in the TAS. Banning official releases is a much harder sell if you ask me. If it was released with glitches in its virtual machine, then that is the legitimate technique to abuse in speedruns, especially if it results in different gameplay. "We don't want unique gameplay because official release contains bugs" is the opposite of http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html#Why
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I guess it's more related to this rule then:
http://tasvideos.org/MovieRules.html#UseTheCorrectVersion
Version exclusive glitches or anything else that makes the VC release special, would be okay. Identical gameplay would obviously be too similar to have both versions.
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Nach wrote:
So we plan for many games to just duplicate publish the exact same thing because we can relabel it Wii? Unless there's some significant in-game distinction, I don't see the point in us allowing this.
It's explained in the rule I linked.
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Nach wrote:
That seems awful to me. We're going to obsolete original games on their original platform because there's a poor emulator that makes it run faster?
No one is saying that they compete for the same platform. VC is Wii, and if TASed in Dolphin it's published as a Wii movie, with whatever is special about that new bundle. An extracted game though, if TASed on its original platform emulator (the rules use N64 as an example), is published as an N64 movie.
Nach wrote:
Those features, not that I know of. But SGB games have other improvements like better sound via the SNES. I think we may have had a run or two which did that, but I could be mistaken. Donkey Kong on an SGB has the game adjusting the color throughout, and AFAIK, does this better than a CGB, and has better sound, it baffles me the game was submitted using CGB.
So if the hardware and software background behind default SGB colors is essentially the same as CGB, are there SGB specific problems comparable to CGB with the same (or different) games?
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Nach wrote:
We're doing that now?
We're not banning VC relases, and I'm pretty sure we shouldn't. So the logical result is Post #472277Nach wrote:
It includes similar logic to what the CGB includes to auto color games, but it also has extensive controls to edit the palette while the game is running. SGB even allows you to draw on the screen, like your own map, or hide the boss you're fighting, or other stuff.
Have any SGB TASes on the site made use of this SGB-only functionality, current or obsoleted? I mean manually editing colors or drawing on the screen.
Nach wrote:
If the game itself was designed for SGB it usually looks good. Although we had a discussion several years back where we noticed some SGB games were designed for the television aspect ratio, and other SGB games were designed for the DMG aspect ratio. It seems some companies/studios/teams preferred things one way, and others another. So playing it on the correct system you'd get perfect squares and circles and the other would give you rectangles and ovals.
This isn't addresses in the rules, and it feels uneasy to try to guess developer's intent.
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That sounds a bit like VC releases of old consoles being TASed in Dolphin. Nintendo shipped an emulator inside the VC game bundle, and we're free to abuse bugs in that emulator, as it's part of the game now. And if we extract that game and run it on the original console emulator, it's fine too (unless it's the same as the original, non-extracted game).
Also now I have to ask if SGB also has any oddities in how it interprets things and assigns colors.
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Nach wrote:
The CGB firmware includes a list of somewhat popular DMG games to auto set their palette.
It's Nintendo who's made that boot ROM, right? Sounds like they officially support those games in the "simple color mode", even if it's not 100% bugless.
Nach wrote:
In some games though, if you don't manually select anything, it will indeed not look sensible. And as I said before, since it auto colors sprites different from background, in games where it was intended to blend together, that blend is now broken.
Does this happen with explicitly supported GB games too?
ThunderAxe31 wrote:
For these reasons, I'd like to pick this chance to reiterate my proposal: since the GBinGBC mode may make some games potentially uglier to look than GB, I think it should be allowed only for Moons & Stars.
I just think it doesn't make anything simpler or better.
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I have a different question. For GB games that are supposedly not supported explicitly by GBC, it still somehow assigns colors in a meaningful way, it's not an utterly random mess. How is this determined on the hardware level? It's not full-color like actual GBC games are, but still looks sensible. Are there also GB games that have completely wrong colors assigned in the GBC mode?
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McHazard wrote:
Yeah, I was holding out hope that this problem would go away once the dev team better understood when STOP is bugged. But whatever it is, not working on console is pretty conclusive. :/
That doesn't mean this branch is doomed, because I DID find a way to avoid executing a STOP at all. If I activate the glitch while standing at course 5, Wario's Y position will be the start of a 3-byte instruction, which reaches just far enough to get past the STOP. Unfortunately that instruction is [LD SP,1054], which is a pretty awful one to have to work around. It also seems to be the only option, at least as far as standing at different courses goes.
I haven't figured out a setup that'll fix SP on top of activating the debug mode, but I've got a few ideas. This isn't over yet.
Are you working on it right now, and should I wait with backwards-obsoletion?
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Watched both and I think the clipping makes this movie worse. The current run is kinda slow paced and shaky, but it's still a great game for this "primitive" platform, there's a lot of variety in gameplay, and it's easy to follow. With clipping that loops level layouts, it either seemingly never progresses or just breaks everything beyond recognition, turning all the complex gameplay into "zip zip zip win", pretty much "zip right for justice".
There's definitely content to miss if this obsoletes the current run, even if it's borderline. This run, clearly Vault IMO. Voted No.
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If there's no known way to glitch this to game end, on new gambatte or gbhawk (those are good now, right?), then indeed we'll have to backwards-obsolete this branch.
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CasualPokePlayer wrote:
imo the argument that the factory flashed FFs to carts is probably bullshit. Considering that you have to assemble the carts before you could do that and the process of writing FFs to SRAM is not exactly efficient to do at that point. It's fairly likely SRAM was just whatever "pattern" is left behind when it isn't powered (said patterns that Alyosha is referring to).
It's also impossible to undeniably proof that whatever SRAM state one claims to be coming directly from the factory is actually straight from the factory (or has never been messed with since then, or has had no serious bitrot).
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