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Lot's of cool new features there! Those omni-directional goombas were funny. XD The fire flower looked cool!
I did find the slight perspective changes when Mario changes directions pretty jarring though. Also the segmented flagpole looks kind of wrong.
Other then that, awesome stuff!
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Cool! This is a much needed topic, thanks for making it.
I have a question regarding this rule:
Play games that are emulated well.
Emulation of several platforms such as Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation is still far from perfect, and some games work worse than others. This may be grey area on such systems, but we generally aim to publish videos that look like they could be played back on the original video game system. Movies of games that are not emulated well (have graphical or functional glitches that do not exist on the real console) should not be submitted.
My question is, what can be done about runs that accepted and published, yet break this rule by being emulated quite poorly, if they cannot be improved in gameplay? I have in mind several A2600 runs:
[2228] A2600 Bobby is Going Home by Lollorcaust in 01:16.13[2585] A2600 Dodge 'Em by yep2yel & morningpee in 00:52.93[2226] A2600 Superman "pause glitch" by jlun2 in 00:11.42
There is very likely no way to improve gameplay in these (certainly not Superman or Bobbie is going home, Dodge'em might have a chance.) Yet, it seems there should be a means to replace them with runs that are accurate given how obviously poor the emulation is just by watching the encodes, even if they are the same length (or possibly longer.)
So, assuming that no further improvements are possible: Is it acceptable to submit a new run that is identical in gameplay to an existing run where the only improvement is accurate emulation?
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/43978832652265684
Here is an improvement of about 10 frames due to evading traffic as fast as possible. I didn't include whatever the one frame improvement was that ReadySteadyYeti found, so I guess that will have to be put into this one for a final submission.
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At some point we really should formally deprecate old BizHawk versions. Pretty much every core, both ported and in house, has been substanitally improved since 1.11.6.
Specifically for 1.11.6 for A2600, that verion of the core is very seriously buggy.
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Movie Description wrote:
In this run, Alyosha improves the predecessor movie by about 10 seconds in gameplay sections, due to tighter optimization and better planning.
This is a two minute improvement over the predecessor movie linked there.
It is a 10 second improvement over cheesestringxx's previous rejected submission (in gameplay.)
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zoboner wrote:
Work and research, but it risk to be long, so it's not for tomorrow.
I take this job and I'm curious to know how this game run concerning fights.
What a pity that nfq don't given more informations on this run, but not a problem, I restart and I'll get all who'll be necessary to make this TAS !
Awesome! Good Luck with that ambitious undertaking.
Challenger wrote:
But, the lag of this game is randomly?
Yeah I don't know. I was not able to sync kumquat's run at all in BizHawk, despite the overall time it takes to do stuff seeming to be correct. This tells me that lag is way different between the two. Even just changing some minor things in BizHawk does have seeming random impact on lag (although the net result is usually the exact same number of lag frames, just in different locations.) My approach so far is just to take the minimum number of actions possible which makes lag easier to track.
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Challenger wrote:
Although I don't understand much about sub-pixels, and with the recent improvement that I found, I'll help to improve Kenseiden! One of my favorite games.Probably the last game (dega movies) that's enough for me to improve.
Cool, are you still working on Wonder Boy at all?
zoboner wrote:
I'll can be interested by Phantasy Star .
Are you going to be working on it zoboner? Or doing research?
______
Tails' Sky Patrol was quite well optimized. But, so far I managed to save 3 frames in each of the first 2 levels, so I'm at least making progress. There's a slim chance I'll have it and a revamped version of George Foreman back on the workbench by year end.
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@zoboner thanks for the LUA work . I see this is accepted now and I probably won’t be trying to improve it right away, but I would encourage you to try yourself. Since you seemed to work out RNG pretty easily I’m sure you’ll find improving this pretty easy.
EDIT: Actually, nevermind, I found a better manipulation on the first opponenet, so I'll just cancel this one and submit a clean, improved version when it's ready.
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Thanks for the temp encode challenger. (My net sucks right now and it takes forever to upload stuff, so it's appreciated.)
I think next I wil ltry to tackle Tails' Sky Patrol. I'm feeling pretty motivated at the moment so hopefully I can make some progress.
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Ok, so once again this behaviour is a consequence of where we choose to process input.
What's happening here is that the NMI generated by the pause button is delaying processing of the first IRQ from the scanline interrupt.
What's supposed to happen on the first interrupt is the game changes the value that the scanline counter is reloaded to.
The intended sequence is:
HINT (at HINT, the counter is reloaded to the value in register 10, currently 0)
IRQ1 (to set register 10 to 173, at the end of the frame.)
HINT (since the counter was reloaded with 0, we get another IRQ)
IRQ2 (do frame stuff, we won't get another IRQ until SL=175)
But, since we get just enough of a delay from NMI, instead what happens is:
NMI
HINT
IRQ1 starts, but doesn't update the counter yet!
HINT (the counter gets reloaded to 0 a second time!)
IRQ1 ends
IRQ2 starts (this is the second IRQ that processes frame stuff.)
HINT (another HINT , but NOW the counter is reloaded to 173)
IRQ2 ends
IRQ3 (the glitchy one, which happens because of the extra counter reload)
So, that's pretty much it. Once again, if we had chosen to process input at VBlank, like most other emulators (and most other BizHawk cores) we would not see this glitch.
It's also not something you'd likely ever see on console. You basically have a ~300 CPU cycle window to hit this glitch! :)
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I updated the OP a bit. King's Quest and Rocky seem like they'll be wrapped up soon.
I'm working on George Foreman right now. Depending on my motivation I might work on another one after that, but I'm not sure which one yet.
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Do you have a movie file? I can make sure nothing is going awry in the emulation.
Seems like this one would also be good to test on console as a pretty obivous case.
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Nice! I would never have guessed from looking at the original that ~2 seconds would end up being saved here.
Voting yes, nice research on the ending screen too.
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My improvementes were trivial enough to not need co-authorship. Feel free to re-submit as sole author (well with BZero as well I guess who is responsible for the main route still, but I'm not sure even that is really necessary.)
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Cool! Save those frames. I'll go ahead and cancel this one. I'll move on and start looking at one of the other easier looking Dega runs since I seem to have some motivation right now.
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Audio: Fixed, thanks for the report.
Savestate: They were never meant to share savestates, so I implemented the same logic NESHawk / QuickNES uses to seperate their states. Should be fixed now.
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MUGG wrote:
I noticed emu.setregister() and emu.totalexecutedcycles() aren't supported in Gambatte,
so I was wondering if there will be support for these in GBHawk?
Yes, eventually there will be.
Right now I am working on the sprite test. I hope to be passing it by year end, it seems doable.
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Mothrayas wrote:
ThunderAxe31 wrote:
Edit: oh and also, why switching from SGB to GB?
Because BizHawk's SGB support is incomplete and extremely buggy.
Generally speaking, no SGB movie has been submitted/published ever since VBA-rr got deprecated, in favor of plain GB runs. (In fact, the most recently published SGB movie is my previous Mega Man V TAS.) See also e.g. Pokémon.
I'm not seeing this kind of corruption in either of the sgb cores in 2.2.1, what steps are needed to reproduce this?
0040 is the VBlank interrupt address. It looks like it's occurring in the middle of some other operation. I wouldn't be surprised if this has something to do with the bug.
EDIT: One other thing I noticed about this level is that in several places sprites pass through the status bar area.There is a LY=LYC interrupt that occurs at the edge of the status bar that checks for when drawing is finished, and sprites passing through this area can delay it by several cycles. This effect is not emulated by any emulator yet. If the glitch is due to some obscure cycle timing issue, it may not yet be possible to reproduce it on emulator during normal play.
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wow I really didn't think any actual gameplay frames could be save here, nice work!
This is really one of those games that would benefit from subframe inputs. By cramming as many pauses as possible into a single frame you could reduce load times to almost nothing.
That's a long way off, so for now voting yes!
Also I think you can remove me from the author list. I didn't even discover the pause glitch that was MESHUGGAH.
Generally speaking, no SGB movie has been submitted/published ever since VBA-rr got deprecated, in favor of plain GB runs. (In fact, the most recently published SGB movie is my previous Mega Man V TAS.) See also e.g. Pokémon.