http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4083
Location: The Netherlands
I think something's not completely right when there are 0 rerecords.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Joined: 5/13/2009
Posts: 700
Location: suffern, ny
i found a tas of this game that someone had done on youtube a while back, thought it always hit, it was a little repetative.
you might want to look up that run
[19:16] <scrimpy> silly portuguese
[19:16] <scrimpy> it's like spanish, only less cool
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
Not very impressive; lots of missed shots, etc.
How familiar are you with the concepts of frame advance and rerecording? It doesn't appear that either has been used here.
Not very impressive; lots of missed shots, etc.
How familiar are you with the concepts of frame advance and rerecording? It doesn't appear that either has been used here.
Absolutly none
I think I'm gonna do another game. Does any one know of an easy game that I can learn the basics for?
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
I think a game with gameplay this simple might be a good way to get a feel for frame advance and re-recording, actually.
To summarise very briefly: frame advance implies advancing the game one frame at a time (pausing the game, holding down the desired input for the frame, and pressing the frame advance key, usually \), and re-recording involves use of save states whereupon loading a save state causes the movie you're recording to keep only the input up to the point where the state was saved, allowing you to perform segments again with an arbitrary amount of precision.
There are some pages on the main website which would help you get a feel for things; here is a good place to start.
It helps if you have an objective in mind; if you want to get a feel for things with this game, try creating a movie of the first stage with every shot you fire hitting an enemy, preferably as soon as possible; this would be approaching the level of precision we aim for around here.
Good luck!
EDIT: If you have further non-game-specific questions, I'd ask them over at the Newbie Corner. It's friendlier for helping out the newcomers than in a game thread.
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I did a short movie of this game some time ago, just for fun. I accidentally lost most of the progress due to sloppy save state handling, but I still have a WIP up to stage 10, here.
There are two other Galaga threads in the forum, so a forum editor might want to mend all these together.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
I did some testing in this game to see how far it went.
I created a game genie code to have infinite double ship:
ZAPAAX
PAYEPA
Then I created a 10 hour long movie consisting of left, right, turbo shooting in loop. And I kept replaying it "from now". I think I did about 30 hours of emulation.
The results:
- after level 200 the game gets rid of the badge system and just displays "stage 201".
- after 1 million points the score resets and a little ship is added under your score. this adds up to 6 ships.
- after 7 million points the ships are gone and the words "Hero 7" are shown.
- After "Hero 9" it becomes "Hero A". It keeps going on past "Hero Z" and it starts displaying several graphics. I think it's just going on the game's graphics table indefinitely.
- After the level 999 it shows level 000.
- The farthest I got to was level 5000+
I could have gotten farther if I knew some LUA to let it play indefinitely. Dealing with 48 mb movie files was very slow.
[img width=256 height=224]http://i.imgur.com/jhdOA.png[/img]
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Dwedit wrote:
Are you sure? Galaga doesn't have a Z in the pattern table.
Yeah, some of the letters were actually some other garbage graphic. But it kept going in the correct alphabet order, so I assume the developers used the unused letters to store other types of graphics.
local Cycles= 80
local Left, LeftA= {left=true}, {left=true, A=true}
local Right, RightA= {right=true}, {right=true, A=true}
while true do
for i= 1, Cycles do
joypad.set(1,Left)
emu.frameadvance()
joypad.set(1,LeftA)
emu.frameadvance()
end
for i= 1, Cycles do
joypad.set(1,Right)
emu.frameadvance()
joypad.set(1,RightA)
emu.frameadvance()
end
end
I just casually thought this up. I forget which buttons shoot in Galaga, though.
Apply your double ships code, then run this script. Tell me how it goes.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Thank you very much! I will let it running during the night.
edit: Nice code, I'll adjust it as needed. Thanks!
edit#2: It works nicely. Let's wait for the results.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Ok, I let the script run for 2 days at 6400% speed.
Tonight it resulted in a (partial) conclusion:
1 - There are infinite levels (999 looped infinitely).
2 - There is a maximum score. The high score stopped at 999.980 Hero something. I'll post the screenshot later. I don't know what exactly is the max score because I don't know what million this graphic represents. I could look in the game's graphic table and count or write a script to count the score correctly, but that would require running the whole thing again. Anyway, this could possibly be one of the longest games from its time. I think it emulated 300 hours before reaching the maximum score.
Wow, that's pretty interesting! I always wondered if this game had an end. So what would be the goal of a TAS of this game? Maximum score would take a LONG time, and it can't be completed.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
I think the goal of a TAS of this game can be just what is being done. Ok, that's not a tool assisted speedrun, it's a tool assisted research to find exactly how the game ends. TAR.
Here is the promissed screenshot of the maximum score in galaga. Let's call it "hero bird". "hero toucan".
It might be possible to do 999.990, I don't know the way the scoring works.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
