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Truncated wrote:
Okay, here goes stupid suggestion time.
Thank you!
> At 2650, have you tried taking the right path?
I haven't. It's a good idea! I've previously rejected it because it requires to wait for the appearing blocks, but it might not be a bigger wait than the one required to access the left ladder.
However, the ladder trick is not useful at that side, because the trick can only be used to accelerate up-motion and right-motion. I want left-motion and using up-motion leads Rockman into the wall with no way out.
Edit: Ok, I tried this. It's 142 frames slower than the left way.
> At 5250, the game lags a lot. Is it because of the magnet beam or is it always like that?
> Could you use the magnetbeam ammo elsewhere?
Compared to some later things, it lags very little in there. But yes, it's because of many objects on screen. Three mines, two magnet beams and two wide electric beams.
Rockman is much more lag-sensitive under FCEU than under Famtasia.
I'm afraid this is the best way I can use the beams though. Rockman climbs very slowly.
> At 5800 something (paused too late, I don't know the specific frame) it
> looks like you hesitate for a few frames before exiting the wall above
> the guts block.
Correct. It was to avoid a collision with the red jumping piece of junk.
I actually tried manipulating luck for this screen a couple of times, and this was the best result I got. Other results included the red machine doing a wide jump after Rockman, hitting him and causing considerable delay.
Obviously, even this delay is frame-precisely as little as possible.
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nitsuja wrote:
Bisqwit wrote:
nitsuja wrote:
The AVI output finally works?
No, but I'm optimistic that you can fix it :P
Argh, I wonder what it could be this time?
Ah, I'm sorry - I haven't tried version 6b yet.
I didn't notice you released it (despite doing some forum adminstration that specifically touched that post).
I'll try it in a few hours.
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Darn. I'm gonna miss those chicken nugget smiley faces... And those playing card suits... And that pair of sixteenth notes that had the misfortune of sharing its code number with carriage return...
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
I wonder if Bisqwit should have locked this topic instead so that people would be less likely to use the old versions of VBA discussed here. That has started to annoy me.
If the problem is people are too stupid to look for the newest messages in the thread, Nitsuja should edit the previous posts or remove the obsolete files from the server.
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Say, can't the first 31 or 32 characters be displayed as visible symbols, too? I know it was the case in ZZT...
They're control characters, such as backspace, newline, tab and so on.
It was possible to have symbols in them on the PC textmode where the bytes were directly poked to the display RAM, but not any longer in the world of protocols.
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Oh, I always referred to that as "Extended ASCII"...
Extended ASCII (IBM's term) is CP437 (below), not ISO-8859-1 (compare to above).
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
ÇüéâäàåçêëèïîìÄÅÉæÆôöòûùÿÖÜ¢£¥₧ƒáíóúñѪº¿⌐¬½¼¡«»░▒▓│┤╡╢╖╕╣║╗╝╜╛┐└┴┬├─┼╞╟╚╔╩╦╠═╬╧╨╤╥╙
╘╒╓╫╪┘┌█▄▌▐▀αßΓπΣσµτΦΘΩδ∞φε∩≡±≥≤⌠⌡÷≈°·•√ⁿ²■
Edit: I meant CP437, not CP850.
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flagitious wrote:
since it is random, it will eventually be sorted and will stop
How do you prove that the (unspecified) pseudorandom number generator eventually yields a sorted array?
Pseudorandom number generators generally don't yield every possible number combination even if ran infinitely.
There's a set sequence they'll repeat, and there's no way of ensuring the sequence contains a subsequence that will eventually lead into the desired result.
For that reason, there's no guarantee that even this code ever terminates:
int array[] = {0,0,1,0,0};
for(;;)
{
int c = rand() % 5;
if(array[c] == 1) break;
}
Even if it were truly random instead of pseudorandom, there's exists a calculatable probability that the outcome never yields the desired number during N iterations of the loop.
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nitsuja wrote:
Yes, it's 1 byte of ASCII per character (left to right in the file), taken directly from the ROM. z is 122, ä is 228 (and the other character you asked about just shows up as a box for me).
I noticed in the code you posted, it always outputs to test0.avi even if you tell it at the commandline to output it somewhere else, I changed this but you changed it back in version 2, so was this the desired behaviour?
I don't understand what you mean. Or maybe that was an obsolete question?
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Truncated wrote:
I suggest updating the picture for this movie with something more extraordinary, perhaps with the glitched grappling hook. The current picture doesn't do this movie justice.
I'll do that when I get home. I published this movie remotely, but I can't take screenshots remotely.
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Ferret Warlord wrote:
If doing a soft reset were to help speed things along, would an author be allowed to do so in a movie?
I don't see why not.
In fact, it's so obscure playing technique (not something a normal player would attempt) that it's in fact a good thing :P
However, all of this under the "no cheapness" rule that forbids the secret keysequences (such as the Konami code and using of 2nd controller in Mega Man 3).
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nitsuja wrote:
I'm unclear about what the audio logging parameters are - there seem to be 2 rate parameters, 1 called rate and 1 called something like samples. I think I've determined that rate is the number of samples per second (44100 for me) and samples is number of samples being written at the moment, but maybe this should be more explicit in the header (I thought one of them would be the number of bytes per second but neither seems to be).
rate is the sampling rate, for example: 44100
bits is 8 or 16
chans is 1 or 2
nsamples is the number of samples being written in this call.
As the comment says, "nsamples*chans*(bits/8) = bytes in *data."
Which means, that the "data" buffer is expected to contain exactly
nsamples samples, each of which is chans*(bits/8) bytes in size.
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michael flatley wrote:
I'd like to request that I be the one who creates the avi. It will conform to whatever specifications bisqwit requires. I'm very good at encoding avi files and I feel I'd be the best one to do it.
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ANGERFIST wrote:
I was wondering when you (Bisqwit) are going to convert the file to avi if you can do a tiny exception and make the avi file a bit biger than the usual/standard, so that one may get full satisfaction of this 100% beautiful run.
How long will it be? Hour? Three? Five?
In any case, we're aiming for AVI files that are fluent to watch and don't destroy any visual information the watcher would like to see, while still being in sane size.
In some movies (Battletoads, Sonic 3...), that's hard to accomplish, but we're doing our best.
We = Phil, Dehacked, I.
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nitsuja wrote:
If you're able to change the mode from DirectDraw to something else, maybe that will help, but I'm guessing not.
GDI expects 32-bit surface, and I'm using 16-bit. No work.
GL modes don't work, because I don't have opengl properly installed.
nitsuja wrote:
This is a very fixable problem, though, I can put the text in the image that's being drawn to the screen instead of on top of the screen.
If then please. :)
nitsuja wrote:
And I was probably wrong about _popen, but the problem for me is that it always opens it in Windows Media Player which doesn't know what to do with the data because it apparently isn't in a valid AVI format, even after some of it's been written.
WMP is very picky unlike MPlayer.
AVI is not meant to be streamable, but it works very well with MPlayer.
I want to try that _popen thing in Wine however.
Or maybe if you can make it a commandline flag so I don't have to wait for the next day when you're next available in case it doesn't work :)
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Omega wrote:
if you're really busy and not too willing to work on it at least for a while, I'm willing to help you make this. We could work on it together, as in take turns in actually recording the frames, whenever both of us have time.
I'm all for "go for it".
Boco has done a great job so far, but I'd hate to see the interest (of movie makers) dropping due to lack of time / energy, because it's sure interesting to _watch_.
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nitsuja wrote:
By the way, _popen() is not what it seems like it should be (it tries to run the file in a new console window), so I had to change it back to fwrite().
Maybe it would have worked properly in Wine. Now I never know.
Or maybe it would have been possible to do it with CreatePipe and such calls.
You wrote a comment:
// windows has _popen but that actually tries to RUN the file, not open it for output
which sounds exactly like what it was _supposed_ to do.
The idea is that I want to execute the program that handles the movie stream directly instead of having to pass it via an intermediate file.
With the fopen technique, I can still use a "fifo" - that is, a file-looking entity (that can be fopened) that actually is a pipe (the data written to the file is immediately read by the program that opened the pipe for reading, without the data ever visiting the filesystem).
The problem with "fifo" is that I need to launch the readers before launching the emulator, and if the emulator never actually opens the pipe(s) for writing (because of a parameter error for example), the readers will be left running in a waiting state even after the emulator exits, everafter waiting until someone finally opens the fifo for writing.
------------
nitsuja wrote:
I tested this one...
After great studies, it was revealed that when there are onscreen texts, such as the input display or frame counter, the emulator can only run at ~3% speed and eats 70-90 % of system resources. TERRIBLE lag.
When there are no onscreen texts, it runs fine.
Do you have an idea why it happens?
------------
I also noticed that wine hogs about 1.3 GB of virtual memory upon start, no matter what its executing. :o
I have 1 GB of RAM in this machine - maybe it's related.
------------
When running VBA, wine says a lot of:
err:dsound:DSOUND_MixOne underrun on sound buffer 0x77c4ae90
err:dsound:DSOUND_MixOne underrun on sound buffer 0x77c4ae90
err:dsound:DSOUND_MixOne underrun on sound buffer 0x77c4ae90
err:dsound:DSOUND_MixOne underrun on sound buffer 0x77c4ae90
err:dsound:DSOUND_MixOne underrun on sound buffer 0x77c4ae90
and this has happened with all VBA versions so far.
It happens very very rarely with Famtasia, even if it's ran on 900% speed.
When it happens, sound chops and may sometimes turn completely mute, as if some error situation is never resolved.
------------
Then there was some audio desync problem.
https://files.tasvideos.org/bisqwit/vba-problem3.avi
In this AVI, it seems like mencoder is receiving only half a second of silence.
https://files.tasvideos.org/bisqwit/vba-problem3b.avi
In this AVI, the amount is different.
_Something_ eats the silence... It could be some pessimization of LAME.
In an attempt to solve it...
------------
I created an updated nesvideos-piece module again.
News: It creates now a real interleaved AVI file instead of two separate streams. For this reason, it now only requires one Set...Cmd call.
NESVideoSetAudioCmd() no longer exists.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/nesvideos-piece.cchttp://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/nesvideos-piece.hh
Also, the calling semantics of NESVideoLoggingAudio() and NESVideoLoggingVideo() have changed. Most importantly, NESVideoLoggingAudio() now requires specifying the exact format of the audio data.
The relevance of this update is important: it resolves all the nasty deadlocking issues that happen when pipes are opened at different times and programs expect them in a certain order.
It _may_ also fix the A/V sync problems. At least it works fine with FCEU :)
However, for the logger to be usable for DeHackEd and others too, the logo creation would have to be sani...argh...ed a bit.
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Moved from the Dracula X thread.
Locking, because this is a stupid topic.
As for my opinion of this topic -- as I understood, SSVegetto doesn't like freenode, because freenode doesn't offer a free IP address cloaking.
Fine - don't use an IP address cloaking then! Then you can chat freely.
It's not like your "CPE-nn-nnn-nn-nn.new.res.rr.com" host is some grave secret.
And the showing of IP address doesn't seem to bother the 34 persons who are at the #nesvideos channel right now.
It doesn't bother even me - my IP address (bisqwit.iki.fi! Wow! How would you have guessed.) is publicly available too.
