Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
I too think it could be possible to make a Cheetamen II like exception for this game until better PSX emulation comes along. But just like Torn I am not staff here so I don't have any real power to make the decision final.
I got good news and bad news again...
Good news: We managed to fix the emulator rather than fixing the ISO, which means 100% legit ISO (Which, as of Hyperbug, would have been super duper hard to fix, because of checksums everywhere)
Bad news: The TAS is completely Desynced... So I'll be working on resyncing it (And maybe improving some parts!) during the next few weeks (basically reTASing it with a base)
I'm also gonna reupload the WIPs as they are gonna get resynced... Some things might change, and hopefully for the fastest.
Yessssssssssssssss! Awesome! Thanks to Hyperbug if it was him, or who else got it fixed, this is fantastic news.
So, you said your run desynced on the new emulator, so I assume mine and matt's any% will do the same? If by some miracle it does sync, maybe the site mods would take pity on us and publish our TAS, even if it unfortunately if it is rather largely outdated strat-wise now...
I remember reading an article about the lengths that the developers of this game went to in terms of piracy protection, so I find it quite excellent that it was possible to modify the emulator to successfully run the game. Based on that article I had quite the feeling that it would be absolute hell to hack/modify the game successfully enough.
:( Would've been nice to have it there for historical purposes, i.e. have the 'this run obsoletes this run by ___', but if you don't want to bother going down that route then obviously I won't, as if I'd try to do it it'd only be with your permission.
Good to hear that you want to redo the any% soon, good luck with it :)
Edit: lapogne36 wrote:
On WIP 2, at 0:15 , it is possible to jump directly to the ending NPC (I did it once with savestates and frame advance).
Really? When I tried this extensively a while ago I found that there was an invisible wall that I couldn't surpass, even though the height seemed fine. Or possibly instead I felt that the hover at the end of a glide is limited to the maximum height at the start of the glide?
Could you possibly try again and show us?
Huh, cool, thanks for the video... :P
Seeing that jumping when not in a charge is better is surprising to me, I would've thought that covering more distance in the same time would mean that spyro is at a greater height when he reaches the edge, but apparently games don't like to conform to normal laws of physics!
Huh, cool, thanks for the video... :P
Seeing that jumping when not in a charge is better is surprising to me, I would've thought that covering more distance in the same time would mean that spyro is at a greater height when he reaches the edge, but apparently games don't like to conform to normal laws of physics!
This is explained by the fact that you get slightly more height from jumping normally, so you can hover higher on sort distances ;)
But I'm not here to talk about that skip... I'm here to tell you guys news about the fixing of the Anti-Piracy problem!
Hyperbug did it! He managed to fix PSXjin so it runs Spyro 3 without triggering the Anti-Piracy protection! I also tested that new version thoroughly: I did a full 117% playthrough and both defeated the sorceress in Midnight mountain and in the super Bonus Round! I also checked the atlas after the credits and I wasn't missing anything (What made me need to get rid of the Protection was the fact that the game removed an egg in Sheila's when I was doing Byrd's)
I don't know if Hyperbug did anything to make the new fix of the emulator official yet (I did not find anything on both this forum and the PSXjin site), but I'm looking forward to it.
Both any% and 117% can be completed now.
THOUGH...
The game is now playing completely differently... By that I mean, there are slight differences everywhere, making my movie completely desynced. Lag frames are at completely different places and loading seem to be slightly longer on the new version. Which means I'm gonna need to go through the process of resyncing or reTASing everything.
I'm mostly gonna be doing the second (reTASing) as I know of a lot of places were far from being optimal (Every turnaround before Molten Crater, Sunny Villa Skateboarding, Everything with Sheila...)
Every video you guys are gonna see from now is gonna be updated WIPs (Older ones will still be available on my channel). You will also be able to find level by level comparison videos between old TAS and new TAS.
Full 117% TAS is slowly coming, get ready for the show! (You have a couple of months to get ready :°)
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
Please ask Hyperbug to send the code to someone with commit rights to the PSXjin repository, or to get commit rights himself so that he can upload it. It would be cool (and maybe even necessary for the judges if you choose to submit the movie here) to see how he fixed the problem.
Great news! Very happy to hear you're redoing the beginning rather than just resyncing it. Restarting a TAS so much is demotivating, but so worth it when the finished product is better because of developed knowledge of the emulator and game :)
Hey. I've finally posted details and a patch to fix PSXjin and stop the anticracks from triggering! You can find it at https://code.google.com/p/psxjin/issues/detail?id=39 .
I've also posted some fixes for a couple of other games. Hopefully we can get all these into an official PSXjin build!
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6454
Location: The land down under.
hyperbug wrote:
Hey. I've finally posted details and a patch to fix PSXjin and stop the anticracks from triggering! You can find it at https://code.google.com/p/psxjin/issues/detail?id=39 .
I've also posted some fixes for a couple of other games. Hopefully we can get all these into an official PSXjin build!
Last line:
"Thanks to Nitrofski (twitch.tv/nitrofski) for assisting in testing the patch!"
Yea it's impossible to believe you.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Hey. I've finally posted details and a patch to fix PSXjin and stop the anticracks from triggering! You can find it at https://code.google.com/p/psxjin/issues/detail?id=39 .
I've also posted some fixes for a couple of other games. Hopefully we can get all these into an official PSXjin build!
Last line:
"Thanks to Nitrofski (twitch.tv/nitrofski) for assisting in testing the patch!"
Yea it's impossible to believe you.
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at :) Can you elaborate?
It has been some time since I completed the first WIP of the reTAS, but now I'm proud to show you guys the second WIP that has just been uploaded some minutes ago. If you are interrested in my thoughts about the WIP, just read the video description :)
Link to video
Yet again, comments are always welcome. I hope you like it!
WIP is amazing! I loved cloud spires superglide and sgt. byrd eggs, and no glaring errors stuck out. Look forward to seeing more :)
P.s. Glad you found that little backwards skip in cloud spires too :D (avoiding moneybags)
I have never played this game so I can't comment the route or anything, but this WIP was very entertaining and the level of trajectories' optimisation seems really high!
Keep up the good work!
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
It looks fantastic, and I'm glad we can get this game TAS'ed now!
Speaking of the copy protection, does anyone know if a patch exists that permits the game to work on a modchipped PSX? I've read that all available patches fail in some way.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6454
Location: The land down under.
Nitrofski wrote:
Good News is:
A cool guy, Hyperbug, was doing some Spyro 2 game hack stuff and he heard of my problem (He was in my chat at that moment). He offered his help to try to modify the ISO (So basically hack the game) so the Anti-Piracy protection won't trigger.
Progress so far are encouraging. He managed to find, using a slightly modified version of PSXjin to have memory breakpoints and all that, the addresses that, if modified to the same value, prevent the EoL egg from Sheila's Alp from being removed.
Now I have a question related to that...
Since it will not be an "original" ISO of the game (Slightly hacked...) but it doesn't alter the intended gameplay, I wonder if the TASVideos community will accept the final TAS as a Valid TAS.
Official replies as well as opinion replies are welcomed :)
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Oh! Geez, I missed that. Thanks.
edit: I read a bit more and apparently the patch isn't complete because of the checksums being everywhere, so fixing the emulator was the better option. So I guess no patch exists after all.
As always the WIP is really nice.
However how do you turn to the left or right ? Because in Spyro 2 (and I assume it works the same way in Spyro 3), it is faster to use the left (or right) and down buttons than only the left (or right) button to turn, and I am not sure that you use this "trick" in the WIP (but maybe I am wrong).
