Yoshi's Story Any% TAS

  • EMULATOR -- Mupen 64 rerecording v2 record reset
When playing back this movie, be sure to go into the Mupen Save folder, and delete the ROM's .EEP file (aka Mupen's version of RAM) or else you will get a desynch. From what I now, this version of mupen may cause crashes on Linux, since the reset command doesn't work. Of note: This version of mupen resets the emulator itself, rather than just the ROM. If you see Mupen shut down and reload, be calm.
  • ROM – Yoshi's Story
  • COUNTRY -- USA
  • CRC -- E8D83723
PLUGINS --
  • video: Glide64 v0.7 ME SP8
  • sound: Jabo's DirectSound 1.6
  • input: TAS Input Plugin 0.6
  • RSP : RSP emulation Plugin
Note for encoders: I don't think synch is affected from using different plugins. I believe there's a version of Glide Napalm that emulates Yoshi Story perfectly, so all encodes should be used with the most recent version of that.
CONTROLLERS --
1: Present
2: Disconnected
3: Disconnected
4: Disconnected

Goals

  • Aims for fastest time
  • Abuses programming errors in the game
  • Genre: Platformer
  • Uses a Game Restart Sequence
  • Eat lots of fruit fast
  • BE HAPPY!
Comments will come later. I'll add in the tricks + glitches, explain the acceleration, and give level-by-level explanations.

Baxter: This movie sat in the workbench for long enough. There is a known improvement, but inclusion of these improvements seems to take its time. Improvements to this submission can be made in a new submission.
The response on this movie has been very positive, and the quality of the run seems good; accepting.
sgrunt: After many failed attempts at encoding this, it looks like Lex and Ilari have succeeded. Therefore, publishing shortly.

Joined: 3/18/2011
Posts: 35
Location: Ohio
I can't get this video to play either... I'm going to wait for an encode.
Editor, Experienced player (852)
Joined: 8/12/2008
Posts: 845
Location: Québec, Canada
Did you save any frame with the new route, Comicalflop?
Joined: 12/6/2008
Posts: 1193
I hate these reset TASes. I can never get them to synch and I think I'm in the majority there. Imo these TASes shouldn't be made until there is a more reliable version of mupen. How good this run is? I can't tell...
Skilled player (1402)
Joined: 5/31/2004
Posts: 1821
Synced fine for me. Awaiting to see a 100% all melon run! (...and waiting for an update from Comicalflop on that improvement.)
Joined: 12/6/2008
Posts: 1193
I actually got it to sync so I guess I'll take it all back. Since it desynced after the reset I guess I just assumed it would be as horrible as the Perfect Dark TAS were basiclly nobody could sync it. My bad.
Editor, Experienced player (730)
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
I still haven't had time yet to go over and test that improvement.
Homepage ☣ Retired
Joined: 10/11/2010
Posts: 19
Has anyone done a (non-official) encode of the run before improvements? Sorry for being impatient, but this one looks really awesome :D
Joined: 5/2/2010
Posts: 41
Location: the Netherlands
I second that request!
Player (120)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
I third it :P I actually tried making one the other day but couldn't get the movie to sync past the first level. Mupen and I are not friends and never have been. But seriously, I'm surprised our ravenous horde of encoders hasn't gotten *anything* out there yet. This is almost like TASvideos back in the day where an encode before publishing was unheard of :) Kids these days have it so easy. Why, in my day we had to blah blah blah and furthermore give me an encode and get off my lawn.
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Joined: 8/23/2008
Posts: 417
I would guess the encoders don't want to spend time on this submission when a new one will probably show up soon and waste that effort. Sad, but hardly unreasonable.
I will not use self-reference in my signature.
Joined: 2/1/2011
Posts: 6
Not unreasonable, but people are generally unreasonable. I fourth the encode request.
Joined: 5/12/2010
Posts: 38
I can get Yoshi's Story to work in PJ64 using those same plugins, but it reports that from beginning the start screen to just before choosing the lucky fruit, fps drops from 60 to 30. The listed version of Mupen does NOT like that. :( This might account for the desyncing everyone who can't get it to run is getting.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I got the run to work in Mupen with the versions you outlined with no trouble. I was also able to record short avi clips after I worked around the black avi bug Mupen has in Vista by disabling visual themes and desktop composition in the compatibility settings. However, if the file hits 4GB (which it did with Lagarith and Huffyuv), it fails and MPC sees it as noise (and plays audio noise) and VirtualDub crashes with an out-of-bounds error immediately. I assume this is something 32-bit related. This is a Mupen AVI recording bug. It should just make more segments like Fraps does. I can record the first few levels or something if someone would like. I could also Fraps it but that's a pretty bad idea with fixed-framerate applications, though that may just be with applications whose logic framerate is different from their video framerate (like Worms Armageddon; 50 fps @ 60Hz (or whatever refresh rate the video driver tells it)). Anyway, I have owned this game in Japanese since I got my N64. Back then, I had no idea what to do since I don't know Japanese. I was used to SMW and SMW2-YI, so I would run through the levels endlessly until the level mysteriously ended. At some point, I figured out that it was getting the fruits that was beating the levels. Also, I was mystified that beating one level beat that whole zone. It didn't make sense. I recently played Yoshi's Story again and got almost to the end; to the last area. This experience makes me appreciate the awesomeness of this TAS. I had no idea before I saw the SDA run a couple weeks ago that you could get a powerup that turns all the enemies into watermelons. The movement in this TAS is clever. I especially like the jump glitch (or funny mechanic) you abused so much in the cloud level. Edit: Actually, the problem might be with the resetting. It's reinitializing the video. With Fraps running, this crashes Glide64. It may have a similar issue with Mupen's avi recording feature. I now have a Fraps recording of the first level.
Joined: 12/17/2009
Posts: 28
i cant get past the "nintendo presents" screen, it just goes to black. other games work fine on the mupen provided, and yoshi story works fine on pj64. i have tried different video plugins
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I Frapsed the first level. Glide crashed after the emulator reset (part of the input) while Fraps was recording. I'm currently encoding said Fraps recording of the first level. I haven't worked through my logged conversation with Grunt to learn about removing duplicate frames or anything like that, so don't expect anything fancy. I'll post when it's done. I may work on a full encode after that, but I still couldn't get any versions of Glide Napalm to run without crashing immediately. This means the texture errors inherent to the older version of Glide would still be present in the full encode. Mupen really is a pain! I guess it's better than nothing though.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I made a temporary unofficial encode. Dailymotion transcoded it to make it look worse and decided to desync the audio slightly. The audio is synced in my local video. I couldn't get any version of Glide Napalm to run without crashing, so the minor texture errors inherent to the working Glide version posted by Comicalflop are still present. However, despite all the BS, hopefully this video will let more people see this great run. :) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xifhme_comicalflop-s-yoshi-s-story-tas-in-11-00-23_videogames By the way, to get the AVI dump from Mupen without Mupen corrupting it at 4GB, after each emulator reset, I pressed Pause (the keyboard key), stopped AVI recording, and started it again with a new filename (part1, part2, etc.).
Player (120)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
Yay, thank you! That was pretty awesome. Much better than the first stage by itself, heh. Looking forward to improvements to this and a 100% levels and melons run :P
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
ALAKTORN
He/Him
Player (99)
Joined: 10/19/2009
Posts: 2527
Location: Italy
LOL @ Yoshi's pose at the final boss run looks great
Joined: 12/17/2009
Posts: 28
TYVVVVVM for encode :D great run PLOX PUBLISH! very strange... the main menu for yoshi story reads "STOP" vertically XD
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Lex wrote:
However, if the file hits 4GB (which it did with Lagarith and Huffyuv), it fails and MPC sees it as noise (and plays audio noise) and VirtualDub crashes with an out-of-bounds error immediately. I assume this is something 32-bit related. This is a Mupen AVI recording bug.
AFAIK 4GB is an internal limit in the AVI format. There is a way to circumvent it, like mencoder does when you create an AVI file larger than that, but I don't know how official that "hack" is. As for VirtualDub, I bet it's a 32-bit binary, so unless it has explicit support for files larger than 4 GB and handling more data than that (which has to be taken into account in special ways in the program's source code), it just won't be able to handle them. OTOH, if you are just making a test encode, why not use a codec that compresses the video more?
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I've saved huge (>9GB) working Lagarith AVI files with VirtualDub before. I'm also using the 64-bit version of VirtualDub anyway. It's Mupen's fault for not having support for huge AVI files and not segmenting the AVI automatically. There's a version which is hacked to segment automatically, but it's not the same as the version which is hacked to support resetting in input movies. Segmenting the AVI manually works.
mklip2001
He/Him
Editor
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2224
Location: Georgia, USA
Thank you, Lex, for all the encoding work! I finally got to check out the Dailymotion encode. I must admit, I could hardly follow what was going on. The game is very fast-paced, and it seems over way too quickly. I'm not particularly familiar with this game (I know Yoshi's Island a lot more), but I'd still say this was entertaining. Yes vote.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Joined: 10/11/2010
Posts: 19
The game looks straightforward* if you're going for any 30 fruit, but beating the levels this quickly, and using some rather obvious bugs, is great fun to watch and must've been a really spectacular effort. *I did play it as a kid, this adds some bias Yes to publishing, looking forward to even more glitching and perhaps an all-melon run as well.
Joined: 4/29/2005
Posts: 1212
Now there just needs to be a 100% run for this game. :3
Joined: 5/2/2009
Posts: 656
Kitsune wrote:
Now there just needs to be a 100% run for this game. :3
this
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