If neither Super Game Boy enhancements nor Game Boy Color's full-color graphics are supported, Game Boy mode should be used.
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That's a nice discussion and all, but running in the wrong mode is a violation of the current rules.
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Does it answer your question though?
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feos wrote:
Does it answer your question though?
It does not explain how a judge allowed this to be published this way.
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Nach wrote:
It does not explain how a judge allowed this to be published this way.
What do you think of the idea then? I think it would be a good reason to allow that mode.
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feos wrote:
Nach wrote:
It does not explain how a judge allowed this to be published this way.
What do you think of the idea then? I think it would be a good reason to allow that mode.
I don't think it's a good reason to allow this mode.
Further it's miscategorizing the platform a game exists on. Also various DMG games have broken/missing sound on CGB. I don't see this to be a correct direction to be moving things.
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Also various DMG games have broken/missing sound on CGB.
Can you provide some examples?
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A very small number of older games may not function properly on the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, or Game Boy Advance SP. Common symptoms include scrambled images, missing graphics, or sound problems.
They do not provide a comprehensive list.
They made the Gameboy Color have backwards compatibility so it can launch with a large set of available games, this does not mean it runs them all accurately. The backwards compatibility is supposed to work most of the time, but the DMG/SGB games were not designed for this.
I've heard that the reason for the various black cartridge rereleases was to put out "fixed" versions of those games because they had various issues on a Gameboy Color. I've specifically heard the Arcade Classics games had sound issues, and certain gameplay changed slightly.
Even for the games that seem to run fine, it doesn't mean it's true to the original, and may have subtle differences.
Edit:
See this thread here, they discuss various issues they know about with certain games on the various Gameboy variants: https://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?151903-Problem-gameboy-games-on-Advance
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Also various DMG games have broken/missing sound on CGB.
Can you provide some examples?
There are some cases of this (but it isn't exactly common, and are more the exception rather than the rule, and they would stem from the DMG having square wave channels and the GBC having pulse wave channels... which on that note the GBA emulates the GBC's pulse wave hardware with its own hardware so lol).
Although, I guess somewhat to the support of Nach, there's also games that straight up do not work on the CGB. Well, two games, and it stems from them relying on a hardware bug with the DMG, which was fixed on the CGB, so they just crash on the CGB/AGB.
Even then, these are more exceptions, sometimes running DMG games on the CGB could make them worse, but generally I think running them on the CGB makes them better imo. The limited colorization can often make a game much more visually appealing. "Best mode" can essentially just become subjective at this point.
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As far as I'm concerned, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance etc. are all official platforms and I fail to see the problem with making use of them in scenarios like this. The only reason this could be in contention is if there are demonstrable and/or visible issues with the game's functioning on GBC and/or GBA.
Nach wrote:
They do not provide a comprehensive list.
They made the Gameboy Color have backwards compatibility so it can launch with a large set of available games, this does not mean it runs them all accurately. The backwards compatibility is supposed to work most of the time, but the DMG/SGB games were not designed for this.
I've heard that the reason for the various black cartridge rereleases was to put out "fixed" versions of those games because they had various issues on a Gameboy Color. I've specifically heard the Arcade Classics games had sound issues, and certain gameplay changed slightly.
Even for the games that seem to run fine, it doesn't mean it's true to the original, and may have subtle differences.
Edit:
See this thread here, they discuss various issues they know about with certain games on the various Gameboy variants: https://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?151903-Problem-gameboy-games-on-Advance
Most examples refer to game being obviously broken in GBA, fail to boot, etc. Obviously, if there are major emulation issues that prevent a game from being ran, we can't even consider running it in GBA mode. For other games, we can still see if there are demonstrable visible or audible issues and reject them on that basis - that doesn't mean we should need to abandon the concept entirely.
If there are no demonstrable emulation issues, preventing console verification (itself a pinnacle aspect of emulation accuracy) because it might hypothetically be very slightly different seems absurd. We're running the game on official hardware, that's designed to support it, it works, and the game looks to function as it would on the hardware it was originally designed for.
Regarding labeling, I agree games that are originally for GB should be labeled as GB. This isn't even running on GBC, the settings have the core pretend it's a GBA running a GB game. But this is an entirely different problem, one that can both be easily resolved manually, and the movie file parser can be patched to resolve movies like this being read as GBC instead of GB.
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Mothrayas wrote:
As far as I'm concerned, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance etc. are all official platforms and I fail to see the problem with making use of them in scenarios like this. The only reason this could be in contention is if there are demonstrable and/or visible issues with the game's functioning on GBC and/or GBA.
They're all official platforms yes, but the games were not necessarily designed with a later platform in mind. A later platform might introduce a bug not present in the original. Would exploiting that bug be legal?
Do you think it's fair to run a DOS game design for an 80s PC on a modern PC? The platform is just as official.
What about using something like this: https://www.analogue.co/pocket
It also has support for HDMI out and USB in, so it can be good for capturing on hardware designed for the games.
Mothrayas wrote:
Most examples refer to game being obviously broken in GBA, fail to boot, etc. Obviously, if there are major emulation issues that prevent a game from being ran, we can't even consider running it in GBA mode. For other games, we can still see if there are demonstrable visible or audible issues and reject them on that basis - that doesn't mean we should need to abandon the concept entirely.
The examples aren't really relevant. The point is that the various systems do not play the games identically to the original platform they were designed for. Some of the issues are obvious because of the extent is messes up the game, but then there's subtle ones also.
Mothrayas wrote:
If there are no demonstrable emulation issues, preventing console verification (itself a pinnacle aspect of emulation accuracy) because it might hypothetically be very slightly different seems absurd. We're running the game on official hardware, that's designed to support it, it works, and the game looks to function as it would on the hardware it was originally designed for.
You're looking at this from the perspective that the console was designed to support these games (which it does most of the time). I'm looking at it from the perspective as to what the game itself was designed for. The later console tries to make it function like the original, but it may stray from that.
As is, I'm already seeing some flickering issues with some graphics in certain encodes, and I'm left wondering if certain TAS feats I'm seeing are now actually possible on the original, or if it's due to a slight difference for the CGB that is allowing it. I watched Donkey Kong earlier, and I saw some jumps which I've tried dozens of times and could never make them nearly as far, and suddenly it's looking like Mario is able to jump farther. Maybe those moves are possible under certain circumstances and I didn't try hard enough, but my first thought was it's a system difference. I don't know if we want to put out movies where you have to start questioning its legitimacy because of the console used.
Mothrayas wrote:
Regarding labeling, I agree games that are originally for GB should be labeled as GB. This isn't even running on GBC, the settings have the core pretend it's a GBA running a GB game. But this is an entirely different problem, one that can both be easily resolved manually, and the movie file parser can be patched to resolve movies like this being read as GBC instead of GB.
I agree on this point and something we should handle, because searching for some stuff earlier I couldn't even find what I want. I thought this game somehow vanished at first.
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Nobody in any RTA speedrunning community would question the legitimacy of tricks in a run that plays back on the Game Boy Player as it's the standard for most GB/GBC RTA speedrunning, and in actuality Donkey Kong '94's console verification helped prove some prior tricks to be the result of emulation inaccuracy.
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TiKevin83 wrote:
Nobody in any RTA speedrunning community would question the legitimacy of tricks in a run that plays back on the Game Boy Player as it's the standard for most GB/GBC RTA speedrunning
So?
TiKevin83 wrote:
and in actuality Donkey Kong '94's console verification helped prove some prior tricks to be the result of emulation inaccuracy.
Maybe it proves the Game Boy Player isn't true to the original and the DMG/SGB emulator was accurate?
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I guess this eventually has to be asked, what about revision differences? You might find maybe in a rare case a game is broken on one revision but fine on another. Or perhaps some "subtle" difference is in there. They do exist, after all (and again, rare).
Should we start having modes emulating specific console revisions? Should TASes be forced to be locked out of revisions not present at the time? Should TASes be forced into the original revisions of these consoles at all times, or the latest revision of the console it supports?
It's dumb really. Of course for obvious cases you could have an argument for rejection, but this really isn't a good reason for most games, it's only edge cases where you end up getting broken DMG/CGB games.
Also, DMG emulation not really at the state CGB (and CGB in GBA) emulation is at, since most focus has been on the CGB (in GBA). And SGB... god the core is really old and hasn't been updated for a long while (it really needs to be updated sometime lol)
Also the exact case Tike is pointing out wasn't "DMG/SGB emulation being more accurate," it was just an emulation inaccuracy, plain and simple.
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CasualPokePlayer wrote:
Also, DMG emulation not really at the state CGB (and CGB in GBA) emulation is at, since most focus has been on the CGB (in GBA).
Why are you saying this?
My understanding from Sinamas was that he runs his hardware tests on both a DMG and a CGB.
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Because alongside GBHawk, the other GB emulator in BizHawk is Gambatte-Speedrun, a fork of sinamas' Gambatte that fixes a lot of tests that he isn't aware of because he doesn't respond to PRs or interact with the broader GB emulation community.
I think that rule can just be removed. I don't see any benefit to forcing people to play in black and white when an official hardware that supports colorization is available. Even the default red and green palettes in GBC markedly improve the visual clarity in most games. Things aren't exactly the same, but close enough. GBA isn't really the same as GBC either, oh well, hardware is messy and their are lots of revisions. The easy console verification pipeline makes that worth it too.
Nach wrote:
Why are you saying this?
My understanding from Sinamas was that he runs his hardware tests on both a DMG and a CGB.
Also some of those tests aren't even compatible with all CGB revisions. It's too bad really, things would be so much easier if there were less revisions.
Nobody in any RTA speedrunning community would question the legitimacy of tricks in a run that plays back on the Game Boy Player as it's the standard for most GB/GBC RTA speedrunning, and in actuality Donkey Kong '94's console verification helped prove some prior tricks to be the result of emulation inaccuracy.
The RTA speedrunning community, especially at speedrun.com, sometimes have rather incomprehensibly lax rules when it comes to what can be run where.
Perhaps the most prominent example that I'm very familiar with is Ocarina of Time: At speedrun.com, as long as it has been an officially released version of the game for an officially supported platform, it's A-ok. Moreover, it doesn't matter which version of the game you are running on which platform, they are all competing on the exact same leaderboard.
This has a quite long history. Many years ago, perhaps a bit controversially, running OoT on the iQue console was considered completely valid, and categorized on the exact same leaderboard as the N64 runs. The issue? The iQue is a bit faster than the N64 which means there are less lag frames (or something to that effect), which allowed a bit faster runs. Thus OoT speedrunners who only owned a N64 had to compete against those who had purchased an iQue (which is not as easily available as the N64, because the iQue was only released in China). In other words, there was a bit of a pay-to-win situation here.
A bit more recently, and a lot more prominently, the OoT running on the Wii Virtual Console was also not only accepted, but accepted on the exact same leaderboard as the original N64 runs. This is, IMO, even more controversial because Virtual Console does not emulate the N64 absolutely perfectly, allowing for glitches that aren't possible on the latter (most prominently the item delay glitch, which saves like 2 or so minutes on the (current) "Defeat Ganon" category, which was for many years the main "any%" category, only works on the Wii Virtual Console, and doesn't work on the N64.)
Here at tasvideos even if the Wii Virtual Console version were to be accepted, it would be considered a completely separate version from the N64 version, especially because of the emulation inaccuracies. Not so at speedrun.com, for reasons that I cannot really comprehend.
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That all is a reasonable take. Many communities do split boards by system as in N64 vs Wii VC vs WiiU VC, so there's no single standard for how to handle platform quirks. The relevant part of the problem is that TASVideos rules do more rigidly prevent the publication of both a TAS of a game on GB mode and one on GBC mode, so as of now a rule enforcing TASing system of release would leave people with no publishable category for console verifications.
Agreed, it's pretty clear it should have been removed 2 years ago when Pokemon Blue was accepted with this setting.
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It would be much easier to discuss this if we had examples of games obviously glitching out on GBC, to easily understand how broken it may be.
Indeed I would hate to see a run that has some memory corruption glitches leading to major skip glitches, caused solely by running a GB game on GBC/GBA. Even if that syncs on console, relying on GBC-specific glitches in strictly GB games compromises the environment, and therefore legitimacy.
Here's a post talking about this subject in details. The most obvious example is using a BIOS from the wrong region. Or running the game in the wrong region altogether. We don't want our heavy-glitching to rely on that kinda thing.
It's also problematic to even check if the glitch works on GB as well as GBC: some runs may not sync, and some corruption techniques may not carry over easily. Do we want to require that the author makes 2 runs for every heavy-glitching scenario, proving it works in both modes? Do we want the judges to do this verification every time?
Now one might say that we could ban this mode for heavy glitches, and only allow it for slight ones, like glitched graphics.
But how do we ensure heavy glitches aren't used in a given run? That sounds like something impossible to really check, because there could be glitches we don't even know about, not obvious, but affecting important stuff. Also limiting something in the rules to "slight glitches only" feels kinda arbitrary.
Or maybe someone could say, the only glitches that are possible in this mode are insignificant and unimportant? I'm not a GB expert for such a call. As I said, it would be much better if we had examples of glitches that obviously break things.
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feos wrote:
It would be much easier to discuss this if we had examples of games obviously glitching out on GBC, to easily understand how broken it may be.
You can see some of that in the link I posted earlier.
I myself noticed in a Zelda encode flickering that shouldn't be there. But that's the more noticeable sort of thing.
The CPU computation in a CGB is supposed to be the same as a DMG, the place where they differ is in the sound and video generation components. For a game that doesn't try to read that back, it should in theory play exactly the same, minus audio or visual differences. However if the game does read it back, or use it as part of timing, which in turn feeds into an RNG or for other computations, the game play is different. I've heard stories how bosses suddenly became much easier or harder. This is where the differences can be subtle.
There's another element also that in a way seems like cheating. The DMG only had 4 colors or so to choose from. Some games would hide enemies or breakable areas in the background/wall/floor, and you wouldn't notice it unless they attacked you, or you attacked it, as they blended together. When a CGB plays a DMG game, it automatically uses more than 4 colors, and purposely uses different colors for what is truly background and what is a sprite. Suddenly all those enemies or breakable areas (sprites) that were hiding suddenly stand out (from the background), and what it supposed to be a surprise is readily obvious. You can see enemies in advance that are supposed to ambush, you can know where to strike without any guess work. It dumbs down various games in certain areas.
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Since one of these glitched graphic examples came from me, I'll just explain why it looks weird. This is really just a quirk with how colorization works. With the default green and red, the GBC colors the background map green and sprites red. So if you're seeing a mix-mash of these colors, it's really the game swapping around sprites with the background (which is a fairly clever way to get around sprite limitations and is sometimes used to avoid the flickering issue due to going over sprite limits). Hell, this is completely avoidable if you just set the palette to greyscale (or some other palette choice that colors the background map and sprites the same) during the bootrom (which is what I've chosen to do for my Prehistorik Man TAS, just due to the graphical fuckery).
Nach wrote:
I myself noticed in a Zelda encode flickering that shouldn't be there. But that's the more noticeable sort of thing.
Which Zelda encode are you specifically talking about? The only DMG Zelda game I'm aware of is Link's Awakening (not DX), and all TASes published/submitted used DMG mode, so I'm guessing some random TAS on Youtube?
But how do we ensure heavy glitches aren't used in a given run? That sounds like something impossible to really check, because there could be glitches we don't even know about, not obvious, but affecting important stuff. Also limiting something in the rules to "slight glitches only" feels kinda arbitrary.
Or maybe someone could say, the only glitches that are possible in this mode are insignificant and unimportant? I'm not a GB expert for such a call. As I said, it would be much better if we had examples of glitches that obviously break things.
