TASVideos

Posted: 11/11/2017 2:15 PM

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Alyosha

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Posting an update since I'm back to working on this. I've cleaned up MBC1 emulation and added multi-cart support for Bomberman collection and Mortal Kombat I & II. Next step will be finally tackling audio which is the last step before the core is nominally functional. Going forward, GameBoy emulation will be disabled from Gambatte and and switched to GBHawk. Color GameBoy emulation will continue to be provided by Gambatte. This should allow time for bug fixes and improvements to the core before I add CGB support to GBHawk and remove Gambatte altogether. Also I have removed BIOS support from Gambatte since I don't think it's worth the time to sort out the bugs. I expect I'll be able to start making Dev builds within the next month.

Posted: 11/8/2017 6:55 PM

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Alyosha

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feos wrote:

Kangaroo (1983) (Atari) [!].a26 from Good2600 v3.14 (Missing 16) doesn't leave the core busy loop. CRC32: 1D961D5A MD5: 35AE38B0DCA275C89C565355CCEBD7AC SHA-1: 982B8016B393A9AA7DD110295A53C4612ECF2141

This was one of those games that had banks swapped internally. Added to the internal list with the others like Congo Bongo fixes it. The failure actually occured at the function that tries to differentiate between NTSC and PAL. Probably I should do something so silent crashes like these are avoided. EDIT: Done. Now the core will throw an error when a frame seems endless instead of just looping forever.

Posted: 11/8/2017 1:42 PM

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Alyosha

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PikachuMan wrote:

loading 2-player Game Boy tasproj file crashes the emulator. In fact. 2.2.1 might be unstable when it comes to Game Boy TASing with TAStudio.

Indeed. Ok I'll set aside other stuff and prioritize finishing GBHawk. Obviously my attempts to add BIOS support to Gambatte resulted in too many bugs to be useful. It's about time anyway, Gekkio has done so much new research that Gambatte now looks really outdated.

Posted: 11/6/2017 8:06 PM

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Alyosha

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The movie time is longer though, due to more accurate emulation

I see this line in the publication (and looking up I also see it in the judgement.) This is not the case. The movie is longer because StarvinStruthers was able to end input sooner without costing an in game timer tick. I on the other hand had to hold the fire button until much later. Emulation accuracy is not at issue here, it is purely game mechanics. This might seem counter-intuitive, and well, it is, so maybe the assumption was that it must be due to emulation differences. But no, this game is just weird.

Posted: 11/6/2017 5:05 PM

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Alyosha

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smellyfeetyouhave wrote:

One 100% reliable way to trigger a crash is:
>Enable bios in Gamebatte >Load a game and create a savestate (bios enabled) >Quit Bizhawk >Restart Bizhawk >Load the game up again >Load the state
This should result in a crash. The settings all match so it's not a setting mis-match. Another 100% reliable way is:
>Load the game with bios disabled >Savestate >Enable bios >Reboot core >Load the state
This one has a setting mis-match (loading a non-bios savestate with the bios setting enabled) so it may be a different crash. Maybe one of those crashes will be able to get you a lead.

Thanks for the repro steps. I suspect these errors are different from the original one though. Still an error none the less.

Unhandled Exception: System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

Hmmm, that sounds bad. I'm surprised this wasn't reported earlier. I'll try to sort it out, or maybe I'll just buckle down on GBHawk so we can deprecate Gambatte, at this point it's quite outdated anyway. Either way I'll put this on the issue tracker since it seems pretty serious.

Posted: 11/5/2017 2:55 PM

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Alyosha

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Good on you for deciding to step away and let some things go. It can be difficult to stop doing things you feel responsible for, even when the alternative is crashing and burning. Hope you find a good balance and get rested!

dwangoAC wrote:

TL;DR: I believe the so called "limited" opportunities at AGDQ 2018 are a result of my own shortcomings/life situations rather than a reflection on the site itself

dwangoAC wrote:

I can't emphasize enough how much the "limited" aspect of AGDQ 2018 TASBot content is a result of me. This is largely because no one else really wanted to actively share in or take over leading the effort

I think maybe you are being a bit too hard on yourself here. Perhps aside from DKC2, I would say that we really didn't have anything to offer, and I don't think that would have changed if someone else had taken your place. I would offer up the opinion that TASBot, much like TASVideos itself, has more or less run it's course with what's currently possible. We need some serious R&D before we are in a position similar to 2014 where there was novel and exciting stuff to offer. Anyway, good luck with the prep!

Posted: 11/4/2017 1:23 PM

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Alyosha

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Ford wrote:

Yes vote from me. Hell, even the scores are the proper colors now!

What the.... 0_0 I must have watched that movie a dozen times and never noticed that!

Posted: 11/4/2017 1:20 PM

Post subject: Re: SMBall EXP 1-10 console verified, SDW2 confirmed in

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Alyosha

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dwangoAC wrote:

This is a long overdue update but it's still going to be a bit rambly, I have a lot on my mind right now. That's it for now, I need sleep as I haven't been getting enough of that

Yeah, it's extremely obvious just from your uncharacteristic posts. Take a break man. D: As for the actual info, cool stuff! Nice work to team TASBot for making the most of limited opportunities.

Posted: 11/4/2017 1:33 AM

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Alyosha

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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/42857093323881631 I managed a 32.69, only one time increment away from the legendary 32.67. Please replace the movie file with this one.

Posted: 11/3/2017 12:47 PM

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Alyosha

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PikachuMan wrote:

I encountered a crash bug when rebooting core or closing emulator when running Gameboy games.

It looks like the crash happens when going from 'enable BIOS = true' to 'enable BIOS = false'. I'll look into it. EDIT: It looks like the core is not able to properly dispose of the state pointer for some reason. I don't know why yet. EDIT2: I don't know, now it just seems to happen randomly. I rebuilt the emulator several times, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. What does this imply? Compiler bug? Memory management issue?

Posted: 11/3/2017 12:39 PM

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Alyosha

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^ Nope, just me forgetting to reset the instruction pointer index after a reset. Fixed.

Posted: 11/2/2017 1:05 PM

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Alyosha

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Agreed with the sentiment that technical gimmicks aren't likely to hold many people's attention anymore. I don't know, the selection committee said they wanted typical TAS stuff, but I'm not sure they really actually do. My personal opinion is something interactive is needed to boost interest. Like, maybe we can do the SMB in SMW ACE, but give TASbot real time control of various aspects of the game, like enemy behaviour, to make it super hard and trolly. Then we can have a race between SMB runners to see if they can beat TASbot-SMB. Well, just an idea for something different.

Posted: 11/1/2017 7:00 PM

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Alyosha

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Sonia wrote:

Also, I was wondering about something. Alyosha, could you please add a volume slider for the SMS core? The reason I'm asking this is the same as when they asked you to add it for NEShawk. It's just that when you enable FM Chip, the volume is way too low. You can only hear it properly if you set your PC's volume to max.

I'll do this as I rewrite the SMS/GG core to bring it up to speed with the other cores. This will start to happen in the not-too-distant future.

Posted: 11/1/2017 4:32 PM

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Alyosha

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The story surrounding Todd Rogers' Barnstorming time is filled with as much intrigue as Dragster. Basically there are 4 times at issue: 32.04: Originally enterred into the databast at TwinGalaxies. Obviously impossible but still took a lot of effort to get it removed. I guess this was at a time when belief in the 'human factor' was still quite strong and Todd Rogers' reputation still un-blemished. 32.74: The 32.04 was changed to this since the thought is that 32.04 was just a typo and 32.74 is the lowest readily achievable score, which Todd probably legitamitely achieved numerous times (but I'm not sure if a specifc instance was used as justification for changing the 32.04 to this instead.) 32.74 is the current record according to TG. 32.50: This is one of those legendary times that there are claimed witnesses to but no evidence other then hearsay. There would need to be some kind of serious glitch discovery in order for this score to be achieved. At some point this score was the world record but was removed for reasons I'm not clear about. 32.67: Another legendary time, but this one is borderline believable. RTM, the former chief referee at TG, claims to have witnessed it personally. And actually, it might legitamitely be possible. There are several spots in my current run where it's possible to gain time, but I cannot maintain it throughout the run. Perhaps if someone really understood the games mechanics, they could work out how to improve the time here, it might even be decided in Todd Rogers' favor, who knows. But, I'm not interested enough to bother. My only motiavtion here is that the current TAS fails to beat the RTA record, which is even recorded on video, so it's a bit embarrasing that the published TAS should fail to beat it.

Posted: 10/30/2017 9:26 PM

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Alyosha

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I just recently went back to try to match the RTA world record for game 2. I was able to beat it just slightly with a 49.95. I don't know the programming details of what I changed, I just compared against my old run until I found some improvement. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/42764456087635749

Posted: 10/30/2017 7:34 PM

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Alyosha

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Debugging is definitely one of BizHawk's big weak points at the moment. Lack of subframe inputs is as well. For in-house cores, the situation is at least tractable. NESHawk for example already has the entire core state available on every single clock tick. I've made progress on making other cores work this way as well. Eventually all in house cores will work this way. As feos mentions though this would require a new ecosystem to have any real use, but it's basically doable. For ported cores the problem seems to be much more complicated. I'm not sure it's really even practical, and the maintanance burden would likely be quite large. But, these are also the cores that people are most interested in, so that's awkward. Maybe we are just seeing the limits of this kind of multi-system, multi-source architecture?

Tompa wrote:

Not sure if this type of thing counts too for you list: With the SNES9X core you are able to disable the Transparency effects. This is very useful to have when TASing dark rooms, as you'll be able to easily see anyway. However, this option does not exist with the BSNES core. If that could be added somehoe, it would be nice.

I think this is already a feature request, not sure if its exactly the same: https://github.com/TASVideos/BizHawk/issues/267 Sounds difficult and unlikely to happen.

Posted: 10/27/2017 2:05 AM

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Alyosha

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Sonia wrote:

I only did request [URL=https://github.com/TASVideos/BizHawk/issues/960]this[/URL] sometime ago, and pointed out the reasons why. I see it labeled as high priority. Think you can do it, Alyosha? or is there someone else already taking care of it?

Can I waterbox Mednafen's PCE core? lol no. 8D I don't know anything about waterbox or mednafen or any of the relevent infrastructure stuff. natt would have to do that one. I could potentially fix PCEHawk, I've looked into the code base in the past and it's not that much worse then other cores (except for the CD stuff.) It would need a ton of work though starting with a new CPU core. But, there's really no point in having both in BizHawk. If Mednafen's core was ported, it would 100% obsolete PCEHawk. Properly fixing PCEHawk would by necessity make it on par with Mednafen, so porting it wouldn't be needed at that point. I think I'll end up doing Coleco Adam next, so at least on my end the PCE can will be kicked down the road a bit longer.

Posted: 10/27/2017 1:46 AM

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Alyosha

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creaothceann wrote:

Just for fun I tested SMB on my PC at home (Win10 Pro @ i7-4790K @ 4GHz) 0.0.0.1790: 186 fps 0.0.0.1791: 180 fps 0.0.0.1864: 179 fps 0.0.0.1864: ~3200 fps (QuickNES core)

You win this round QuickNES.... I just added Mapper 114 support for Aladdin SuperGame. I also cleaned up NESHawk a bit, but it didn't speed anything up.

Posted: 10/26/2017 11:25 PM

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Alyosha

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There is an MMC3 version that is marked as [!] from GoodNES: Aladdin (SuperGame) (Mapper 4) [!].nes md5:505DE5B7465F89013D6797523A079D61 This version hes no lava wall in the last level, ~~it also doesnt run in FCEUX (due to obscure IRQ stuff that I forgot the details of.)~~ Nevermind it seems to run just fine, i must have been thinking of something else. There is also a 'Mapper 114' version which doesnt work in NESHawk. So yeah, seems like one of these 2 would be the prefered version?

Posted: 10/26/2017 6:03 PM

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Alyosha

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Is that lava level fixed though? It looks terrible in both. Though I agree up until that point it's much better then the current version.

Posted: 10/26/2017 11:57 AM

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Alyosha

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creaothceann wrote:

My results: https://imgur.com/a/7vpxE 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, Service Pack 1

Thanks for the testing, that is consistent with what I would expect. Sorry Sonia but it looks like you just got unlucky :( I'll try to find some general optimizations that will at least get you back up to 1x speed in games like Kirby. A NES emulator not being able to hit 1x, even under abnormal conditions, just seems silly, there must be something I can do to get some better performance.

Posted: 10/26/2017 1:58 AM

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Alyosha

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So it seems certain that the PPU changes are the culprit here, but I looked over the code again and there just really isn't anything that would slow it down so much. (It's just a mess of 'if' 'switch' and 'for' loops really.) From a compiler / different OS perspective (I do all my testing on Windows 10) the biggest change I made was taking FrameAdvance out of 'unsafe' mode since it was no longer relevent. I suppose there is a chance this could have a real impact on performance for your machine, but I wouldn't know anything about why. In looking over things again I also had a spurious 'unsafe' array I just removed, but I doubt that has any impact. So far the only thing I can see that sticks out is that you are using windows 7. If anyone else with Windows 7 is reading this, can you please try NESHawk and see if you are having any similar slowdowns?

Posted: 10/25/2017 7:02 PM

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Alyosha

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Thanks for the feedback so far. I'll look into at least getting Trace Logger going in mGBA, that seems pretty important. I'll probably look at Code Data Logger in NESHawk, although that's less important. The debugger more or less needs a rewrite, so that won't be happening soon. Our GPGX build is very dated, That one will need natt.

TASeditor wrote:

Output log (dynamic RAM Watch).

Can you give an example for this one? Still so much to do! 8D

Posted: 10/24/2017 11:57 PM

Post subject: Request for Comment: What to do Next?

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Alyosha

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Hi all, I'm looking for input on what things people want to see that I might be able to work on in BizHawk. Up until now I've just done whatever without any real direction. But now I'd like to try to do things that people are actually interested in. So, just to be clear, I'm looking for things that people would actually, really use to make a TAS, not just 'it would be cool to have this system in BizHawk.' I really want to focus on something that would actually be used to do some TASing. I've had a request for arcade PacMan, so I'm thinking of doing that, but I'd still like to hear other ideas. Anyway, I'm open to suggestions. I do still plan on working on GBHawk but it's on the back burner until I can muster up the motivation to do the audio. I like to be working on a few different thing at once anyway.

Posted: 10/24/2017 11:39 PM

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Alyosha

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Hmm, strange stuff. Maybe it's something like anti-virus or drivers, but I can't think of a reason why only NESHawk would be affected. Thanks for trying though.

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