Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
I’m not seeing how that would work. Any frame can be the first one. The system doesn’t track which cheats are new and need to be applied for the first time.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
Loading a state where the cheat isn't set yet? Then you'd frame advance without the cheat taking effect. (It's the poke afterwards that shouldn't need to be called.)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
This is a weakness of the current implementation of the cheat system.
Currently, a cheat doesn't actually freeze an address in writable memory. Instead, it just pokes it at the start of a frame. This address can still change over the course of a frame though. So, in order for things like RAM watch to make sense, you have to reset it to the desired value after the frame as well.
And you can't simply make all pokes permanent. You may want a one time poke in hex editor for example.
This situation is evident in the core side as well, where pokes generally just end up as one time writes.
Theoretically, you can pass a variable along with a poke to tell a core whether its a freeze (cheat) or just a one time poke. In fact, as a proof of concept I just did so on my personal build for NESHawk. Then the value truly is frozen, and there would be no need for a second call. This is a tractable problem for in house cores.
But, for anything non-native, it's basically hopeless. Rewriting the desired value is the only way to do it.
EDIT: I should also note that the implementation I did for NESHawk is only applicable to the system bus. Fairly substantial restructuring would be required for it to be more generally applicable to other memory domains.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
About this TAS's ratings: This is the only TAS I can recall that made me feel physically irritated while trying to watch it. Something about how the art style combines with the movement just made it painful for my brain. So I really am not at all surprised if it gets low entertainment ratings, even if technically impressive.
Gens and emulators: When I first started TASing I thought emulators were already perfect. I was introduced to the concept of emulators from SMW ACE, so I guess I just assumed the same capability existed for other systems. It was quite shocking to see how bad things actually were. While at first I wasn't much bothered by it, as time went on my opinion hardened on the issue of accuracy, to the point where if something had no chance of working on console, then I basically consider it pointless to even make. Why bother making something wrong? It just seems like wasted effort. I know this is an untenable position from the sites perspective. Honestly though, we really shouldn't be having genesis audio issues now, there are several very high accuracy genesis emulators to learn from. So, I don't see the harm in pointing out why things aren't quite right in the movie description.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
FractalFusion wrote:
Hello Alyosha. The first half of the run looks nice. Though I'm not sure if this is faster (touching the secret square removes the walls):
In the second half, it looks like there are some places to improve (especially using deathwarps). Can input easily be hex-edited into the run?
I also appreciate that you ended the run on the good (2P) ending, which I had never seen before until now. There is a 2P RTA at speedrun.com (one of the runners is the_kov) but that run kills off one of the players on the last level in an attempt to save time.
Ha! I didn't even know about that.
Yeah I have no doubt that there are numerous improvements throughout the run, I did not research it super thoroughly. I have run out of motivation for it really (I guess I just don't have the motivation to do actual TASing anymore) but I'm happy I got at least a complete WIP.
Anyone is free to use this WIP, it is pretty easy to edit, since there is no RNG, but be aware that it is not entirely sync friendly. Data is processed in slightly different ways on different frames as there is a sort of global timer. If you save an inconvenient number of frames in one level, later levels can desync (although in relatively simple to fix ways, it's not fatal) so just be aware of that.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/51425525087708191
Alright here is a complete game 2P WIP. I believe the first half of the game to be pretty optimized. I admittedly ran out of steam on the second half so there are probably more frames to save there.
EDIT: The run also syncs on Mesen, so it's very likely it would also work on console, as one would expect from a relatively simple RNG free game.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
That's crazy. If anyone throws a trace logger at this to figure out exactly what's going on, I would be very interested to see exactly what convoluted series of events leads to this byte shift. Yes vote.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
arkazal wrote:
Been a little while since a new release... I'm hopeful for an N64 core update :)
Are there any N64 emulators still in development, anyway? It seems like N64 gets the least amount of love v__v
mupen64plus has actually seen a lot of activity lately. Microcode emulation for some of the later N64 games was greatly improved not too long ago. This doesn't fix mupen's underlying accuracy flaws, but playability is certainly still improving. Also CEN64 still sees commits, but activity on it has waned.
Most every core in Bizhawk needs updating, both in house and external. I'm not sure there is any particular time frame to do it, and it's not tied to a release schedule. Just keep an eye out I guess.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
upthorn wrote:
I understand that APIHawk was meant to accomplish this, but it isn't well maintained or documented. I'm hoping to de-rust it, write documentation for it, and port the gens Sonic tool suite to it after I finish my current TAS project.
Cool! Good luck with that and I look forward to seeing what you are able to accomplish.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
It’s very disappointing that TASing emulation hasn’t kept pace with the incredible progress of emulation as a whole. I guess it’s to be expected since just making an emulator itself must be much more rewarding then all the laborious work of adding robust TAS tools.
I certainly wish there was an lsnes equivalent for genesis, but who would do it? If it hasn’t been done by now I think it’s unlikely in the future. Heck, I was hoping for a TAS capable CEN64 by now, but no such luck.
I know BizHawk isn’t a workable solution for everyone , but out of curiousuty what is keeping cam hacks from working ?
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
I'm not familiar enough with the game to find this interesting, but I seriously want to see someone try to run this on console, that would be impressive.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/51269910871841142
Here is a new WIP which includes the first 2 levels of part 2 (in the castle.)
I went back and redid many of the earlier levels, saving a few frames here ad there and resyncing as needed.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
the_kov wrote:
Hey, this is fantastic! I was just talking with my community about trying to learn to TAS using Cowlitz 2nd Adventure, and I am even more excited to try it since someone else is already working on one.
I'll be starting a 1P TAS but having the 2P to compare to will be great while learning what I'm doing.
Cool!
Honestly I think 1 player is going to be more interesting. Two player has some close calls here and there, but overall the levels are a bit too simple and the strategies a bit trivial.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
Bizhawk doesn't like that the movie starts from SRAM apparently.
If I ignore that and create a movie anyway, I get this:
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/51115175536913401
I don't know how hard it would be to extract the SRAM itself from the movie so it will actually run, but hope tat somehow helps.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
I just made a pretty big commit to GBHawk to improve accuracy fairly significantly. A bunch of tests from Wilbert Pol (which are variants of Gekkio's tests but also a lot of cool original stuff) now work for GB. CGB is a bit behind still, but I hope to catch up a bit as I sort things out and clean everything up.
There is a little work left to do for sprite evaluation, but it's now much more accurate. Also everything is much more fine tuned as the overall maturity of the core goes up.
If anyone finds any regressions please let me know.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
feos wrote:
I've been gathering info on the details, and here's the actual situation we're facing.
Authenticity of the environment
We also require our emulators to stay true to the original consoles they emulate. This feels implied, because consoles have locked and known once and for all specs, with exception for cases when some quirk was undocumented or documented wrongly. We don't allow emulator settings that don't correspond to something the original consoles had.
It's important to note than in cases when a console behaves non-deterministically, we don't require emulators to inherit this aspect, quite the opposite: we enforce determinism even if it didn't exist on the actual console! With that one exception, we don't allow to emulate a hacked console, including its hardware and software it's been officially shipped with.
I think part of the problem here is in dealing with different ideas of 'authenticity.' We don't really require emulators to be true to hardware, 'passably plausible' would be more accurate of what we require. This usually comes down to easy to identify and understand metrics. We don't overclock a NES CPU for example, this is something that is easy to understand and easy to check. Beyond that it if looks and sounds right it's given a pass. I haven't ever heard anyone say 'Hey that emulator is doing DMA instantaneously, that's not authentic!' I don't think this gives much of a platform to build off of for 'authenticity' in PC games, where the dynamic nature of hardware is just part of the landscape.
My two cents would be to leave it up to the TASer and just make a judgement call as cases come up, probably based in large part on audience enjoyment.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/50978662357332331
here is a cleaned up WIP expanded to 15 levels. Apparently the game only checks collision every other frame, so you can duck/unduck under certain enemies and save some time.
While some of the routes are pretty tight in terms of timing, there are unfortunately quite a few times where an enemy or the other player is holding up progress. Overall it looks pretty smooth though.
EDIT: also anyone can jump in and contribute if they want. It's a simple and not too serious game with just enough optimization choices to make it interesting.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
I'm curious, what else is known about he roadkill spawning glitch? Are any memory addresses associated with it known?
Is it possible other entities in the game (enemies or bosses) could have spawns favorably manipulated if the glitch is better understood?
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player
(3536)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2733
Location: US
I can agree that sending fake and precise times to a game that is supposed to be reading real time is not an ideal solution, but it's better then nothing, and we surely already accept worse nonsense then that from emulators.
Also yes vote for this TAS, it was a fun fast watch.
In the second half, it looks like there are some places to improve (especially using deathwarps). Can input easily be hex-edited into the run? I also appreciate that you ended the run on the good (2P) ending, which I had never seen before until now. There is a 2P RTA at speedrun.com (one of the runners is the_kov) but that run kills off one of the players on the last level in an attempt to save time.