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.


Former player
Joined: 3/31/2005
Posts: 192
Location: Argentina
Can anyone upload it to YouTube, please? Dailymotion looks like a stuttering slideshow for me.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
YouTube has a 10-minute limit. It's not DailyMotion's fault. It's yours.
GabCM
He/Him
Joined: 5/5/2009
Posts: 901
Location: QC, Canada
Lex wrote:
YouTube has a 10-minute limit.
It's no longer the case for a lot of people. I have no time limit, for free and without any action from me. I can try encoding this one.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Mister Epic, if you can get any version of Glide Napalm to work while recording, please tell me what you did!
Former player
Joined: 3/31/2005
Posts: 192
Location: Argentina
Lex wrote:
YouTube has a 10-minute limit. It's not DailyMotion's fault. It's yours.
Nope. YouTube's limit was upped to 15 minutes several months ago. Some members don't even have a limit, depending on how long they've been members IIRC. So, yeah. This TAS could certainly be uploaded to YouTube. Also, how is it my fault that my PC won't play Dailymotion videos properly?
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I uploaded it to YouTube on 2011-04-26 and once it was done uploading and processing, the resulting page told me the video was too long. It was below 15 minutes. I'm just stating a fact. It's your fault because you must be running stuff in the background. DailyMotion uses Flash just like all those other web video players. If it's lagging, your machine is having a hard time rendering Flash.
Editor
Joined: 3/10/2010
Posts: 899
Location: Sweden
It could be that DM hasn't started using StageVideo yet, it is only like half a year old.
Former player
Joined: 3/31/2005
Posts: 192
Location: Argentina
Lex wrote:
I uploaded it to YouTube on 2011-04-26 and once it was done uploading and processing, the resulting page told me the video was too long. It was below 15 minutes. I'm just stating a fact.
That's odd. I wonder what happened. I've watched videos over 20 minutes long on YouTube before. I wonder how it really works. Also, nope. I had nothing else running in the background at the time. And I tried to watch the movie twice, on two different days, using two different browsers (IE and Firefox). So it can't be my fault. My PC's fault, maybe, but certainly not my fault. Tried watching the movie on the emulator too, but all I get is a frozen black screen after the "1998 (c) Nintendo" screen fades out. Running out of options here... EDIT: Extracting the video file using KeepVid did the trick. It was fun watching Yoshi zoom around eating fruit so fast that, at times, the fruit meter couldn't keep up. Here's looking forward to an all levels, all-melon/hearts run (maybe in Trial Mode?).
Joined: 5/28/2007
Posts: 45
Great run, looked really optimised and inspired me to buy a copy of the game to get my nostalgia on :). I was surprised that, in Shy Guy Limbo, you didn't eat some of the earlier fruit in bubbles, and instead went further into the level to end with the banana. I can't really remember much about the game, so did that decision have something to do with the special thing you got at the end of the level (don't even know what it was, it's 4 in the morning :( ), or was it legitimately faster to skip the bubbled fruit? Also, does anyone have any idea why the yoshi on the PAL game cart is sometimes pink and sometimes green? I'm thinking Australian carts have a green one, UK carts have a pink one. Great work. Cheers, Franklint
Editor, Experienced player (734)
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
For shy guy Limbo, the last heart is necessary to go to Boo Castle in page 6. So what I did was calculated which 29 fruit in both the first and second area would be the fastest to collect without any slowdown. The japanese run on youtube gets the mini heart in the first area (which wastes some time) and collects a few of the bubbled fruits (which also wastes a little bit of time. I calculated that there was one bubble in the 2nd area that was worth getting, and figured that all the extra fruit in the 2nd area that the japanese player skipped would be faster than the fruit he had to stop and get in the 1st area.
Homepage ☣ Retired
Experienced player (504)
Joined: 1/12/2007
Posts: 682
Also, does anyone have any idea why the yoshi on the PAL game cart is sometimes pink and sometimes green? I'm thinking Australian carts have a green one, UK carts have a pink one. Yep, this is true. In fact, Australia was the only place that got a green yoshi on their carts. No idea why that was.
Joined: 5/28/2007
Posts: 45
Swordless Link wrote:
Yep, this is true. In fact, Australia was the only place that got a green yoshi on their carts. No idea why that was.
Oh cool, thanks for the info man. It's probably because we're the best country in the world ;). Cheers, Franklint
Skilled player (1652)
Joined: 11/15/2004
Posts: 2202
Location: Killjoy
Alright, this has no been on the bench for too long. I'd like to see something happen with this submission, reject, cancel, or accept with known improvement(s).
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Editor, Experienced player (734)
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
I still haven't had time to test if Hero's suggested improvement is faster or not (Being put on "full-time job hunt" doesn't help matters.) My gut instinct says that the extra things you need to do out of order will accumulate to more than 6 seconds, which would make it slower since the whole point is removing the last 6 second page turn.
Homepage ☣ Retired
Skilled player (1652)
Joined: 11/15/2004
Posts: 2202
Location: Killjoy
Comicalflop wrote:
I still haven't had time to test if Hero's suggested improvement is faster or not (Being put on "full-time job hunt" doesn't help matters.) My gut instinct says that the extra things you need to do out of order will accumulate to more than 6 seconds, which would make it slower since the whole point is removing the last 6 second page turn.
That is good enough for me. List it as a 'possible' improvement. Its up to Baxter if that explanation is good enough, however.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Editor, Experienced player (860)
Joined: 8/12/2008
Posts: 845
Location: Québec, Canada
Since this got accepted, I will re-try to encode, but it has already re-desynched for me. :'(
GabCM
He/Him
Joined: 5/5/2009
Posts: 901
Location: QC, Canada
I'd like to encode and publish this, but I've got an issue. I got the right ROM, and I got the emulator from the submission's text. I have the plugins and I've configured them exactly like in this thread. I've tried running this in Windows XP 32-Bit and in Windows 7 64-Bit, and no matter what, it won't get past the Nintendo logo. I mean, it appears, I hear the Yoshis, but after it disappears, nothing else happens. Any way to get through this?
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Mister Epic, I just dumped the whole run using the latest version of Glide Napalm. I was able to get it to run after figuring out some more stuff. I recorded all the parts separately using Mupen's AVI dump feature, just like before. I am currently 7-zipping it all with my modified AviSynth script which puts it all together and adds a logo (of any size up to the video's size, centered without resizing) and subtitles. It would be great if you'd just replace the logo file and encode it. However, it's ~5.5GB and I don't know where I can upload it. Note: I didn't use the weird things suggested in that thread you linked. I dumped my own way, which worked without desyncs, crashes, graphical glitches, or quality loss. I'm uploading my dump to the space I have. When it's done, there'll be a 5.37GB 7z file containing the Yoshi's Story dump. When it's done uploading (which it's not yet, but will be in about 15 hours from the time of this edit), you'll be able to find it at http://lex.clansfx.co.uk/requested/lexcomicalflopystasdump.7z Edit: I sent MisterEpic an exact copy of my entire mupen64 directory and it works for him. I've cancelled the upload in the out-stricken paragraph above in favor of MisterEpic doing his own dump instead of having to download mine. :)
sgrunt
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
Lex wrote:
I dumped my own way, which worked without desyncs, crashes, graphical glitches, or quality loss.
MisterEpic seems to have given up on this. Perhaps you can provide details as to how you were dumping the run and see if that works for others?
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
MisterEpic has only given up because the run desyncs for him, but that really boggles my mind for the following reason. MisterEpic and I verified (via MD5) that we have the exact same ROM. He ran the same mupen64 from my mupen64 directory posted above (and mupen64 uses ini/cfg files for configuration, not the registry). We both downloaded the same input file from the submission post. On my machine, the TAS plays back without desyncing. On his machine, the TAS desyncs at some point early on (apparently; don't know the details beyond that). MisterEpic, are you certain that it was a desync? Comicalflop does some camera-movement fiddling while he's waiting to be allowed to enter the level on the level selection screen. When I first played the TAS back, I thought that was the beginning of a desync. So, even before the dumping process, the TAS doesn't sync for him. :( I used mupen's internal AVI dump feature, pausing to restart the dumping after every reset so that segments never broke 4GB.
GabCM
He/Him
Joined: 5/5/2009
Posts: 901
Location: QC, Canada
So yeah, so here are details about my desync (by the way, I've tried on my Windows 7 x64 PC and my Windows XP x86 VM). After the first reset, Yoshi goes to the 2nd stage in the cave world (or something like that) and then it just jumps around without advancing at all while throwing its tongue into random places, until it jumps into a giant monster, and it dies. I've deleted the EEP before AND/OR during the movie playback, before the first reset.
sgrunt
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
Try this as a Plugins/Glide64.ini (it's based off of Lex's directory, where initially I saw the same desync you saw, and it's the only thing I've changed): http://pastebin.com/rPu8gLiC
Editor, Experienced player (860)
Joined: 8/12/2008
Posts: 845
Location: Québec, Canada
Mister Epic wrote:
So yeah, so here are details about my desync (by the way, I've tried on my Windows 7 x64 PC and my Windows XP x86 VM). After the first reset, Yoshi goes to the 2nd stage in the cave world (or something like that) and then it just jumps around without advancing at all while throwing its tongue into random places, until it jumps into a giant monster, and it dies. I've deleted the EEP before AND/OR during the movie playback, before the first reset.
For the record, it desynchs for me at the exact same place. I'll try the Glide64.ini provided by Grunt too, when I'll get home.
SXL
Joined: 2/7/2005
Posts: 571
Perhaps you guys have different video cards that are not supported the same way by the plugin ?
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
Editor, Experienced player (734)
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
Would it just be easier for everyone involved if I redo the entire run using the normal Mupen?
Homepage ☣ Retired