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Glitcher wrote:
Um... can someone please tell me how the heck I'm supposed to START playing? I have the "Super Mario Bros. (JU) (PRG0) [h1].nes" rom and I downloaded and applied the patch successfully. The game loads up to the title screen, but that's as far I as I get. None of the controls respond, so I can't play. Can someone clue me in?
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Glitcher wrote:
It's just a figure of speech, meaning it demands an answer. Your profile says you live in Finland, but is your native language english? I don't want any miscommunications in future.
No, my native language is not english.
I know what "begs to question" means, but the way you wrote it, I thought you were thinking this run is somehow dubious, that you're suspecting it's cheated or something.
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Xerophyte wrote:
1 minute out of 40?
03:51 - 03:56
22:56 - 23:13 (third best)
25:39 - 26:52
30:09 - 31:14
33:38 - 34:39 (best part in my opinion, along with the next)
34:50 - 35:05 (second best)
~two minutes in total. Regrettably too little, yes.
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Travis Wells wrote:
Why do you exit solar systems backwards?
Because when the ship emerges in the hyperspace, it will be automatically reoriented the same way it was when it left the solar system. If it is anything other than upwards, it will incur an unwanted delay unless that's the direction you would turn the ship into anyway.
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JSmith wrote:
One thing that did occur to me was that you might be able to beat the Druuge faster by manipulating them into burning crew twice. (Not likely in that short amount of time)
Hmm, good idea. Also, everything in those battles was determined by the speed of recharging of the Cruiser's batteries, but actual time difference could have been gotten by firing the last missile as close to the Mauler as possible.
However, it was quite difficult to get close to the Mauler, considering the difference in the speeds of those two ships...
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JSmith wrote:
This felt kinda like the Pokémon TAS. Except the entertaining bits were shorter.
I have no idea how that is possible.
But I can understand the "entertaining bits were short" part, although in my opinion, the good music makes even the long hyperspace travels interesting.
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Glitcher wrote:
I see. What about that trick where you pull rocks out of thin air at the end of Wily Castle 3? I know the glitch where you can pick up a rock while still leaving it in place, but magically conjuring up rocks when they've all been thrown seems impossible.
And another point: when you get hit by Bomb Man in Wily's Castle, you mysteriously float upwards. These things beg to question...
Beg to question what?
About pulling rock out of thin air: When you hit the B button at the precise frame when the thrown brick disappears, the brick will be returned to Megaman's hand. Whether he's facing another block at that moment, or whether there are any blocks remaining on the field, does not matter.
As for floating upwards -- when you hit the Start button when Megaman is receiving damage, the weapon box will normally be brought up. However, if there's one of your weapons at the screen at the same time (bomb, magnet beam, any projectile), the weapon box will not appear, and instead, Megaman will appear to receive the damage again.
When Megaman receives damage, he bounces up a little bit. This was simply repeated multiple times.
Also, each time he receives damage, some sweatdrops are generated. In Bombman's battle, the number of these sweatdrops is intentionally increased above the maximum limit so that when Bombman's bomb denotates, the object table, which can only contain a fixed number of objects, is overflowed, and as a result, Megaman's data is overwritten, causing some glitching.
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Glitcher wrote:
PS. I recently saw a video where you can use the Magnet Beam to scroll behind the wall next to the first teleporter in Wily Castle 4 and reach Wily's scrambled saucer early. Why can't that trick work here?
That trick causes game crash. Although the saucer appears, the game reboots as soon as the saucer power meter starts charging.
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Don't get so heated up over nothing. Misclicks happen. People might be on bad mood.
Most importantly, I want honest votes, not "party discipline" votes where a differently thinking person is subject to a witch hunt.
Even with occassional misclicks, it is all within the limits of statistical error marginal. Don't take polls as facts.
I emphasize the part "statistical error marginal". You can educate people "don't vote when you are influenced by emotions" or something, but it doesn't change the fact that polls are a statistical phenomenon. As such, you need to understand that there's an error marginal, no matter how much you educate people. A single misclick does not matter, as long as a significant percentage of the votes are honest.
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Deep Loner wrote:
Now, are GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd compatible (as in, can a program written for one work on the other)?
Mostly so, yes. There's actually a big family of BSD/POSIX operating systems where programs can be ported from one OS to another. That's the good thing in standards.
I don't think anyone here uses GNU/Hurd. Hurd is still somewhat a research project. It doesn't have enough developers, so it progresses slow.
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Oh, I just realized. TASing games that utilize the mouse, might be extra challenging, if the game implements their own mouse driver. Because during frame advance / pause, you won't have any idea where the mouse cursor is, because it's the game which is normally supposed to draw the cursor, and the game is paused…
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creaothceann wrote:
Maybe you can change it so that savestates are only saved at the top (or bottom) of the screen?
That would mean also changing the frame granularity.
Doing so would mean that the point where input is read, is changed from the outmost CPU emulation loop into the innermost VGA circuitry emulation code.
It would not be a move for robustness... Also, it could prevent input from being read alltogether when the display is disabled.
But something like that could be considered. It is not an entirely bad idea.
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As already discussed on IRC, the biggest problem with TASing DOS games is that when a TAS is produced, the chances of someone else being able to view the movie (be it for verifying the authenticity of the movie, or for creating an AVI, or for other reasons) are close to zero.
This, because of a myriad of different ways the game may have been installed and other files that may be present in the game's running directory, and also because of different options in dosbox that need to be taken care of but currently are not. Believe or not, whether you choose SB or GUS emulation for the game, will affect movie sync.
Presence of saved games may affect movie sync. Presence of .bat files may affect movie sync. Heck, even the last-modification time of the game's setup file may affect movie sync.
Due to legal issues, we cannot enable the downloading of the (commercial/registered shareware) games on this site, so "extract this zip" option is out.
It is possible that we will have to devise new rules regarding the PC runs than we have done so far for console game runs.
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I discovered the source of the crashes...
It happens when the combination of loadstates causes the wrong number of scanlines to be sent to DrawLine (due to the fact that savestates can be taken in the middle of screen refresh, and that it is not always the same moment).
I don't know any neat way to fix it.
I devised a quick hack which allows me to finish SC2 without further crashes, but it won't work with any game that doesn't use standard mode 13h without scrolling register manipulation... I'm not going to include this hack in the patch.
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However, in the source I provided, there's the nesvideos_piece (for AVI recording) which does not compile nicely under Windows, due to use of poll() and requiring libgd.
You need to download this file http://bisqwit.iki.fi/src/nesvideos-donothing.cpp and replace the nesvideos.cpp file in dosbox source with it.
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The dll file is required at runtime. At compiletime, SDL header files (.h files) and sdl-config program (which tells configure where the .h files are, among other things) are also required.
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I will soon try to endeavor for compiling a Windows version of this.
___________________________
(Possible use of uncommon language in preceding post is intentional.)
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GNU are those GPL-licensed programs which are approved by the FSF to be called GNU programs.
It is a name sticker. Basically, it means it's an "official" (as in FSF-approved) free program that has at least some merit (worthy of being offered to be installed in a free unix-like operating system).
Disclaimer: This was my interpretation.
