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[img_right]http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/elitepal1.png[/img_right]Elite is a legendary true-3D game, one of the first and most influential ones, and one that has been ported to great many different architectures.
One of those architectures is the NES. It is an incredible technological accomplishment: Who would have thought that the NES can do real-time vector graphics?
Here is a short Youtube video showing how it looks like on the NES: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoBIOi00sEI
I remember trying it once on Nesticle, but after that, I haven't heard much of it at all.
Here is a documentary of the making of that game: http://gdc.gamespot.com/story/6301740/how-elite-took-flight/?tag=newsfeatures%3Btitle
NES Elite was only ever published as a PAL version. It was also ported to NTSC by the original authors, but never published.
It is a space-trading game with multiple possible goals, including the goal of becoming a pilot with "The Elite" rank. So, who would be interested in learning how this game works and in making a TAS of it?
According to some sources, the NES version was also the most feature-complete one, so it would make sense to TAS that rather than some of the BBC Micro versions.
Link to video
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erokky wrote:
On a scale of 1 to 10 (low to high), rate the importance of the following ten factors in terms of how they have helped to shape who you are today. The emphasis is placed on who you are, so there are no right or wrong answers. (Copy and paste the list below into your post.)
Will do.
- family and upbringing: 10. My parents had a great deal of effect to how I grew to be, in good and evil. Circumstances usually shape people.
- friends, peer groups: 9. Knowing how I compare to my peers, and having no serious friends in general for most of my life, has made me very self-conscious and introvert since the early childhood.
- sexuality: 3. My sexuality has developed slowly, which allowing me to adjust. Though the very fact may have shaped me more than I realize.
- aspirations: 1. I'd say aspirations come as a result from one's persona, not the other way around.
- education, profession: 2. Similar as above, I think my education and professional status have come as a consequence of what I am as a person rather than the other way around.
- financial status: 8. This is very difficult to rate. My parents were born in post-war Finland, where everyone was short of everything, things were rationed, and they really had to learn to spend efficiently, and to not waste. Naturally, they taught those principles to me, and I embraced those principles, for it was and still is wise in my opinion. Once their part of my upbringing was over, financial status stopped being an issue for me, because I have always somehow managed without having to invent new kind of compromises, and because I have absolutely never felt a desire to spend all that I have. Therefore my own financial status has not been a factor to my person; rather, it has been a consequence.
- culture: 2. It is impossible to tell how I would have grown, if it had been a different culture. I believe that as an introverted person to the core the culture's contribution to it has not been large.
- religion, beliefs: 4. I think the religion I grew with defined some kind of framework, put some fences, in which my values developed. Though my values now form more like a cloud that has different densities at different points and whose edges go beyond the childhood limits, I think it still centers in the proximity of the same spot as when I was a child. It changes shape from day to day, which is why I think it is use the analogy of a cloud. It is impossible to tell how exactly it differs from the contribution of my parents in general, or how it differs from the culture of the nation I grew in, or from simply the weight coefficients of my core nature to begin with.
- geography, climate: 5. Like anyone, I have grown to understand which weathers I like and which ones I don't. Biology is a factor to that equation. The percentual availability of the weathers that I like in the framework of the climate of my home country certainly has played some part in how much experience I have collected in different places.
- scientific and technological advances: 9. Computers have dominated my free time for about half of my life. I cannot imagine how my life would have been different in, say, the 1940s, or the 1800s. I have always had an inclination towards technology, or towards understanding how things work in general. As a child I disassembled many things, desperate to learn the working principles behind them and fascinated by their very existence.
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
Hi Bisqwit, what are you up to today?
Hi TASVideoAgent! Long time no talk.
Mostly it seems that I have been doing low color graphics gimmicks, like this [youtube.com], this [youtube.com] and this [bisqwit.iki.fi].
Right now (in a month's scale) I am making a 16-color raytracer… It's a collaboration.
No TASes to talk about, sorry.
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From my latest traffic stats report, visitors' domain statistics in order: net 30%, com 20%, unresolved 12%, jp 7%, edu 5%, fi 5%, se 4%, ca 3%, pl 2%, fr 2%.
As everyone knows, net and com come from everywhere in the world (for example, kotinet.com and aina.net are Finnish domains; hinet.net is Chinese). While it is true that english-speaking are the largest audience of tasvideos and that America has the largest english-speaking population per-country in the world, it may be too hasty to overestimate the proportion of north-american audience compared to the rest.
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feos wrote:
Sorry for such a question, but how to install that in windows? I extracted everything with 7z & don't know what to do next. Never compiled anything.
It is a source code package. It needs to be compiled into an executable program first.
Lacking <tools of choice> for making Windows binaries at the moment, I am afraid I cannot assist in this problem. Probably someone who has experience in operating a MinGW/MSYS installation can help...
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I request that http://tasvideos.org/NewMovies.html be changed to exclude irrelevant updates, which are all too commonplace today.
Rationale: Clicking the More... link on the front page under Latest Publications, I expect to see a logical extension to the list already provided. Instead, I'm treated to something that is rather difficult to find the-looking-for thing in.
Or change the said More... link to lead to something that provides the relevant information in a manner that does not invoke a "eh, what is this, where's the information I wanted" response.
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Warp wrote:
In many cases the asm will not have been written by a human, but generated with a compiler, making understanding it even harder, as the human design element has been removed.
On the other hand, compiler-generated code is often mechanical enough that you can depict the original control structures, or even the original expressions in case of simpler compilers, with relative ease.
Human-generated code tends to be full of "clever tricks" that just aren't worth it for compiler-designers to implement.
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Hi! I might as well introduce myself too.
I'm a 30-something Finnish guy who's been following tasvideos since its very beginning (in fact, before anyone else even knew it existed). At first I was quite hesitant to register here, considering that the forums did not even exist, but after some convincing by regulars I had to set up the forums. I have created a few TASes myself, but I like it better to get others to do them. After all, it turned out that most people are better at it than I am, and the hassle of competing is not something I particularly enjoy doing, because although ideologically I only care about the end result no matter who does it, psychologically it is a fact (at least for me) that once you create something, you have put yourself into it; some pride is inevitably attached to it (you're proud of what you have created), and it hurts having it being made abandonable by someone else. Whether it happens for valid reasons (tricks you missed or optimizations someone else does better), or for invalid reasons (your cool arts gets replaced with bleh arts), it hurts, although differently. For a non-competitive person like me, the position of coaching works better, which is why since the beginning of the site I assumed the role of making documentation about everything TAS (aside from the auxiliary unavoidable tasks of creating technical bits like the site's code itself).
The concept of TAS fascinates me too; there is something to be said achieving absolute control over accomplishing whatever one sets up to do; in being able to fix all one's mistakes before anyone even gets a chance to see them. At times, I really wish the real life worked that way, too. To be able to control one's every muscle at perfect deliberation, choreographing them to achieve something that looks most definitely impossible. And in the process, discovering a secret aspect or two about the universe's physics; physics, that we have learned to make so many assumptions about.
At one point of time, TASVideos was, no lying about it, the biggest thing that dominated my free time. Lately, I had a switch of priorities, and I had to give TASVideos to other capable hands. Although it did not go as smoothly as I hoped, in retrospect I am satisfied to see that once again I was proven to be not indispensable; I had successfully changed the site to not depend on me. In other words, the child left the nest (after a period of decreasingly subtle persuasion), and did not die in the wilderness, but rather, is doing quite well.
Though there are people who might see it differently.
I still lurk at the background at times, though once in a while I also take the liberty of disappearing entirely, which is also fine. Oh, and rather than post in TASVideos's off-topic forum about programming stuff I post that in Youtube todays.
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These different consoles use different controllers. There is no "same input" that can be applied.
Unless you take the largest common denominator of both controllers, but then you're going for a special case which is kind of artificial.
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Warp wrote:
I'm still of the opinion that resetting is not valid input in TASes and should be banned. and this only strengthens that opinion.
And I think the reset button is one of the input keys, with games supposed to be designed to handle it in certain way. The key just is not located physically in the same place as the other inputs, but it is still an input button.
Resetting during save might be questionable, though, because it is nearly impossible to program it "properly"...
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micro500 wrote:
the basic idea is this:
... restart 14ms timer, run update_buttons when done ...
Why 14ms? That produces a framerate of approximately 71.43.
It should be around 16ms plus some decimals that I am uncertain of.
(50/3 ms ~ 16.667 ms for exact 60fps, 655171/39375 ms ~ 16.369 ms for exact FCEU's framerate, etc.)
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Warp wrote:
Personally I don't have any problem in TASes being published even though only a minority of viewers would enjoy it. I don't see what's wrong with that.
With the volume of TASVideos movies today, I agree. The principle of narrowing down by popular genres was relevant when there was actually concern of presenting a profilic set of movies. Now the valid question is, in my opinion "does TASing accomplish anything unexpected compared to a casual non-assisted player", which does disqualify e.g. Front Line, but allows Hikaru no Go. Though I'd be tempted to go for an even more lenient line, "are there people who would like to watch this". Which would allow Hikaru no Go, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Star Control II and perhaps even Color a Dinosaur, assuming there was an agreeable goal to it.
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Nahoc wrote:
Bisqwit wrote:
Point probably is that his account, as well, is just a step away from getting a "strike" stain to it (get three of those, and your account is deleted along with all its videos).
This isn't true. I got about 20 of those (got one on Gradius also) and my account is going just swell.
I said "step away from", not "about to get". Well, maybe my meaning wasn't too clear, but I meant that the content has been identified and is now subject to whatever Konami wishes to do. As long as they choose to do nothing, that account is "just swell". But that may change.
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Warp wrote:
A pretty accurate assessment. What's your point?
Point probably is that his account, as well, is just a step away from getting a "strike" stain to it (get three of those, and your account is deleted along with all its videos). The fact that Konami has installed "content identification" for something in the Gradius game is alarming. That stuff is only installed for the purpose of tracking down people who use one's intellectual property, and it costs, so there is a proprietary-ownership kind of motive as well. What will happen to video game gameplay videos if the litigation hordes start infesting them as well?
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Hmm. I wonder if the parallel port of a PC can be connected directly to the joypad socket (with some pin adaptation of course). Or a serial port. If I had a TV (with which I could try to use my NTDec, a Famicom clone), I would try this. No need for a special Arduino board if a PC can be used...
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Kirkq wrote:
Also with your current boards, they could theoretically support SMB3 if software agreements could be sorted out, right? (Does the circuit need to be modified to open up possibilities of games like SMB3 to work, or just the software?)
If I have understood correctly, what the circuit does is it just plays back a stream of "when the console asks for the next set of buttons-pressed-down-bitmask, here's what to reply". The console (or in fact, the game) provides all the timing; the circuit does not have any timers whatsoever. It's just like a faucet, except instead of flowing continuously, it flows a drop at time upon request. Mupen64 movie files are built upon this principle (of recording input only whenever the game requests for it).
I think DarkKobold's suggestion for dumping the movies only upon game's requests would work. If not (due to lua's limitations), perhaps modifying the emulator itself to accomplish the same thing. I don't know if that is already being done here.
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"A lag frame" is simply when an NMI occurs before the actual game program has finished doing whatever it planned doing before the next NMI, such as run AI, spawn/delete actors, mogrify actors, set up instructions for the NMI routine to execute while the PPU is having a lunchbreak, etc.
What it can do depends on the number of CPU cycles elapsed in each instructions and on the number of CPU cycles that are the interval for NMIs to occur.
NMI is, as you all know, the signal sent by the PPU to the CPU telling "I'm gone to lunchbreak, you take advantage of it *now* and don't break anything", upon which the CPU stops everything it was doing and goes to execute the NMI routine (also provided by the game), after which it resumes what it was doing before. It happens about 60 times per second.
Thus, differences between the real hardware and the emulator with respect to lag frames are simply caused by the emulator counting a different number of cycles at some point or other than the real hardware. It is difficult to emulate properly, because the exact timings are not precisely known, and the timing of a single instruction can depend on multiple factors.
