Posts for Alyosha


Post subject: Amazing Tater
Alyosha
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I watched the encode of the currently published run out of curiousity and it looks like there is room for improvement in this run as well. 1-4 for example can be done in 32 moves by pushing the big block first. Not sure I'll try to make a full game run here, I might just look it over from time to time when I don't feel like doing anything else, but thought I'd mention it in case any one else is interested in this game.
Alyosha
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/47224474954827281 I managed to get the new pokemon yellow run to sync on GBHawk as well. This was a very good and very productive test of GBHawk. With the blue run and yellow run now working, as well as the new Halt test rom, I can be very confident of basic design and implementation of GBHawk moving forward. The next challenges will be emulation of double speed mode timings and the remainder of the IRQ timing quirks like those needed to make Pinball Fantaises work.
Alyosha
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Very impressive. How long did it take to make though?
Alyosha
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Woah, sounds like you all have a lot of cool content in the works, good luck team TASBot!
Alyosha
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Nach wrote:
Test now, please let me know what happens.
Seems fixed now. It's now marked as read after I clicked on it and no more errors. Thank you!
Alyosha
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Nach wrote:
What's the link to your private message?
http://tasvideos.org/forum/privmsg.php?folder=inbox&mode=read&p=98859
Alyosha
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I don't know how I did it, but somehow one of my pm's is marked as unread even though I read it, and now when I click on it I get this message:
Could not update private message read status for user

DEBUG MODE

SQL Error : 1690 BIGINT UNSIGNED value is out of range in '(`nesvideos_forum`.`users`.`user_unread_privmsg` - 1)'

UPDATE users SET user_unread_privmsg = user_unread_privmsg - 1 WHERE user_id = 8061

Line : 384
File : privmsg.php

Backtrace:
  includes/functions.php[743]: ErrorPrintBacktrace()
  privmsg.php[384]: message_die(202, {string(53)}, string(0) ""
, 384, {string(45)}, {string(91)})
I can't delete it either because it will give me an error message if I try to do that too:
Could not update user pm counters

DEBUG MODE

SQL Error : 1690 BIGINT UNSIGNED value is out of range in '(`nesvideos_forum`.`users`.`user_unread_privmsg` - 1)'

UPDATE users SET user_unread_privmsg = user_unread_privmsg - 1 WHERE user_id IN (8061)

Line : 960
File : privmsg.php

Backtrace:
  includes/functions.php[743]: ErrorPrintBacktrace()
  privmsg.php[960]: message_die(202, string(33) "Could not update user pm counters"
, string(0) ""
, 960, {string(45)}, {string(106)})
Any ideas how I can fix this? Other pm's work fine so it's not a big deal I guess, just kind of a nuisance.
Alyosha
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Ah, yeah I should have thought of states when I was doing it as well. I added the new variables to the state now so let me know if it's fixed (remember that you'll have to delete the greenzone file in the .tasproj or else it will automatically crash from not matching state size.) Also I found a whole bunch of test roms here: https://github.com/AntonioND/gbc-hw-tests So looks like I have a lot of work to do! I'll look at the other commits after I sort everything out here and can look at exactly what is happening. EDIT: I finally found the bug in mode 3 timing during windowing and now I am syncing up with Gambatte. Problem solved! The new test roms also revealed a couple other minor bugs so things have been really productive all around. Incidently, the test halt_if relies on the same halt bug that is needed in pokemon yellow, so this information was out there (although obscured) 3 years ago! Kind of funny how information is just strewn about out there.
Alyosha
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Yes I just converted the VBM. Then I had to adjust the start point a bit for loading (and BIOS of course.) After that the gameplay was identical except for the very end where I adjusted the input by random guess and check until I got the glitch. I briefly tested SML1 and it does look like it would sync with only adjusting for load times (I made it through the first few levels anyway.) Well, the movie as it is published now is definitely not accuracte, since the current inputs do not even come close to hitting correct timing, so in that sense yes VBA is bugged, but the new movie still needs to be confirmed on console somehow to be sure.
Alyosha
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Uh oh , I was really hoping it would just get to the end without issue. Yeah please do try Gambatte and see what happens, I’ll look at it this week and see if I can anything funny going on. EDIT: I manually resynced the gambatte version to see if things diverge anywhere, it turns out they diverge at 177475 (GBHawk) or 178390 (gambatte). This is right when you are using cut to clear a path after doing a bunch of shopping. Once again the point of divergence is mode 3 timing. I seriously need a test rom to figure out what's going on there. Of course I don't know for sure if what gambate is doing is correct either, I'll need to wait and see what TiKevin83 comes up with.
Alyosha
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Nice work re-doing this so quickly. That second boss fight looks so smooth now! Yes vote!
Alyosha
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Ah, thank you that script did help in finding proper frames. With it I was able to get a game end glitch: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/47098069959194767 It works in both gambatte and GBHawk, so it's pretty likely it also works on console. Unfortunately, this is only in DMG mode. I haven't found even a close hit in GBC in GBA mode (the one where console verification is easy to check.) Maybe it's possible to directly check on a regular GB but I don't know, seems pretty likely though.
Alyosha
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MUGG wrote:
I verified the pause glitch also works on Bizhawk (gambatte core). $A201 onward are executed on rare occasion when doing the bug, and depending on the values of those addresses, various things can happen, as was the case in VBA. I didn't manage to do the credit warp by editing memory to C4 C3 05 ... C0 though. I only did manage to leave the level early by C4 BC 05 ... C0. This could be because of the glitch being stubborn or because of emulation differences, I don't know. I tried with five different scenarios and it barely works. I remember the bug was more compliant in VBA.
MUGG, do you still have a bk2 of this? I'm interested in seeing if this can be made to work now that there is a fairly robust console verification pipeline available.
Alyosha
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TiKevin83 wrote:
I should also mention I'm getting a lot of audio problems with GBHawk right now, it seems to speed up and slow down a lot which in turn makes the pitch sway wildly.
That's because during loading when the screen is disabled multiple audio frames are squeezed into one input frame. When made into a video encode and played back it should sound fine since multiple video frames will be used as needed to account for the length of the audio sample.
Alyosha
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I'll fix the screen color (I just set it to black when I first wrote it and didn't update it at all.) It's slower then Gambatte primarily since it's written in C#. It's probably as fast as it's going to be. My goals are accuracy and maintainability, not speed, although I do try to optimizae where I can. I realize this is a pain especially for longer TASes. Honestly as long as you know it works on console you might as well stick with Gambatte, especially if gifvex continues to be able to keep it updated. Maybe somewhere down the road GBHawk will really start to pull ahead in terms of accuracy, but I don't think we're there yet. Still cool to have Pokemon Yellow syncing though, let's go for a full run!
Alyosha
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I just committed some improvements to GBHawk that allow the game Airaki to work. This is a game by Furrtek, which is known for their anti-emulator checks in their games. This game did 2 things. First, it checked that reading from the Cart was disabled while DMA is in progress and DMA address is from ROM space. Second, it checked if the timer divider register is being used to clock the length in SQ1 in the audio. (You can prevent clocks by constantly resetting the DIV register.) These are both well known behaviours, but aren't commonly implemented in emulators I guess, at least at the time the game was made, Sameboy for exmple runs it just fine.
Alyosha
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Gambatte has gotten a pretty important improvement today with a newly discovered glitch in Halt behaviour being accurately emulated. This glitch is relatively uncommon but it's impact can be fairly large, since it basically causes a second Halt to occur. So if anyone out there is working on a GB or GBC run in Gambatte, I would strongly encourage you to check out the dev build and see if it effects your run. The recent Pokemon Yellow run desynced on console due to this glitch in an otherwise unremarkable section of normal bike riding, so it is an important accuracy fix to be sure.
Alyosha
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feos wrote:
TASTUDIO USERS PLEASE TEST AGAIN I tried to fix stuttering leftovers, please give it thorough testing once again! Also fixed accidental removal of state for last edited frame. Link to interim build is in the OP.
I was having some trouble with stuttering that seems to be fixed now, it occured when going to back to the start of a movie when the current frame was several tens of thousands of frames later. I'm guessing these commits fixed it so thank you feos.
Alyosha
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/47030679356753062 Here is 3-10 in 422 steps (4 better then Nitrodon's improvement to 426.) That's probably about all the effort I'm going to put into this game. If GBHawk becomes acceptable in the next BizHawk release I'll likely just submit what I have.
Alyosha
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I've been struggling through trying to implement new information found by gifvex. So far I can pass a new test ROM that is supposed to verify this behaviour, but ultimately I don't match the expected console behaviour in Pokemon yellow for some reason. I did re-organize the CPU to poll the INT line on the correct cycle though, so that's good since it needed to be done eventually anyway. Unfortunately though this didn't actually solve any problems, oh well. So if anyone notices any regressions in the latest dev builds do let me know.
Alyosha
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Nice run! It's god to see another run brought up to speed with RTA. Yes vote.
Alyosha
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/46919445429283957 1 move saved in 3-9. (I also improved the intro menuing.) I looked over the other levels but couldn't find anything, so it's on to 3-10. If anyone else decides to try to run a solver, I would be quite interested in the results for some of the higher move count levels, although some of them do seem to have only one 'fast' solution path.
Alyosha
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4 to go. Glad to be done with psychic world that was a grind.
Alyosha
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Mothrayas wrote:
I'm not getting the movie file to sync, using BizHawk 2.2.2 and the same ROM MD5 as in the movie header. The movie file has no sync settings. Is there anything in there I may be missing?
SMS -> Display Type -> NTSC I supposed to fix that for 2.2.2 but never got around to it.
Alyosha
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mklip2001 wrote:
Any chance at an encode? I really like this game, but I haven't been able to get emulators set up. No hurry though.
Sorry but my net right now is too slow to upload this long of an encode. Although, it's visually almost identical to the original, so there isn't much point really.