Where's the test ROM?
This is crazy, I am deeply impressed by your progress here. Well done.
I've made some progress lately in analyzing why and how games sync. I improved NMI behaviour in the emulator and now have managed to see a behaviour that has never occured before in emulator but happened about 50% of the time in True's console testing.
Unfortunately, in doing so I lost sync in Battletoads 2p warps, which did sync on console , so must in some way have represented a valid console state.
The complicating factor here is that ppu/cpu alignment allows for some pretty diificult to capture changes in emulation (without emulating at another level lower accuracy.) So the current build must be emulating a different alignment then the release nuild.
Also, NMI timings are not thoroughly tested by test roms. But if this streemerz run in my test build syncs it should mean its close.
Yes, I'm still planning to submit, and obviously I need to lock everything down this week. I see that Shadow of the Ninja was suggested, but in case we end up on console I'd like to stick to titles that I have in my (limited) collection. With that limit in mind I'm thinking about submitting: Battletoads (2p warps seems like a good suggestion) Bionic Commando River City Ransom (playaround)
I've made a number of accuracy improvements to NESHawk lately, including getting Huge Insect to work. This game relies on an obscure hardware glitch in the PPU that I overlooked until now.
Also Micro Machines now runs without graphical glitches, but as always with this game this is tentative until proven totally accurate.
I've made numeroud changes recently, so if anyone notices any bugs please let me know. I tested pretty thoroughly with all the most difficult cases I know so I don't think anything is wrong but can't be certain.
Ok that makes pretty good sense. I went ahead and booted up my Intellivision with a CRT, and the image dimensions seem to match up perfectly, so you've got me convinced! I just want to make sure - have all the sound bugs been ironed out yet? I can still detect many sounds being slightly different than how they are on console. Since jzintv sounds nearly identical to how the sound is on console, I decided to do a short comparison video of some sounds between Bizhawk (current dev build) and jzintv, so it's easier to show what differences I'm hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI6IcnOjqXs Hope this helps!
The only difference between this and the results posted by Quietust in NESDEV is one extra 'FF' at the beginning. Quietust mentioned that there might be a variable number of those bytes at the beginning (which represents the tests starting a different pixel) but I currently don't understand why this would be the case or what the expected outcome should be.
This is actually good news since I didn't have any new good leads lately as to why some runs were failing to sync, so I hope this leads to some new information.
But all the behaviour is now emulated correctly, so this is a pretty big accuracy improvement. Let's hope there are more to come!
See this thread for more info:
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=2295
Just came back here to give this thread a bump! Just curious if any progress has been made. I assume you guys have a lot more discussion on this in IRC so I was just wondering if there has been any advancements.
I know this is an older topic, I'm wondering if anybody can help me with this? I'm interested in TAS running on real hardware and I've had quite a bit of success so far. I have an Arduino board running at 64MHz and I'm using the interrupt pins to capture the pulse and latch signals and sending out controller output to the data line. My goal is to TAS run Super Mario Bros. on real hardware, and I'm a little disappointed right now that it's not consistent. I often get through the first couple levels, but that's not a guarantee. The farthest I have ever gotten is about half way through World 8-1, eventually some frame trigger fails and I have no idea where the randomness is coming from. Does anyone know of what may be causing my frames to be captured incorrectly? I understand lag frames, but is there anything that may cause like a random lag frame?
This is just something I'm throwing out there. I have the spare console and I'm not currently working on NES projects so I can set this up if it sounds intriguing. Thoughts?