Posts for Bisqwit


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Also, inside the tree, you had to wait for a door to open. The door is not bound to timer - it's random. Try different movements before the door appears, and you might have it opening faster.
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I only watched the first level, because that's what I can compare myself with. You used a slightly different route than I did, but it might been better than my way. However there were some flaws: - You missed about half a second in the very beginning of the game, because you didn't use the Start key on autofire. The intro screen played longer than it needed to. (Note that when you do this, you have to verify that your recording is correct before you start playing the game - the beginning of the game is the most common moment of desync.) - You collected too many gems. Not only was it slow to collect them (you explicitly distracted and jumped to get them), but it also took longer to count (to gain score) at the end of the level. - At the long dropping down inside the tree, your controlling was bad. You got hurt, you stayed still. Perhaps you tried to avoid gems, but it looked bad. But you handled the flying skull really fast. I'm impressed. I hope you'll fix these problems :)
Post subject: Re: Wizards n Warriors
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WalkerBoh wrote:
Wohoo this game works for me! So I started to make a time attack at it. Dunno if it´s the best ever made but this is my first try and there is alot to improve.. Or not depending on how you see things. Anyways, I just found out there is a major glitch in the game which alows you to skip the last 4-5 levels (don´t remember how many exactly). This would save awful lot of time but you will never see the final boss. Would this be ok for a time attack of this game?
It's ok for me. When you've done with the first level, please send me your FMV so I'll do an early review of it.
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"Common ROM availability" isn't one of the factors considered when making timeattacks.
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Smirre wrote:
Is Battle of Olympus a difficult game? I played it back then as a child and couldn't get far from start. Well,, maybe it had something to do with not understanding english? ;)
It's difficult, but more importantly very long. I'd estimate that a minimal completion takes at least 40 minutes, more likely something like 1.5 hours. Even more importantly, the physics in that game is somewhat clumsy and I don't recall seeing any glitches in the game. Meaning that a timeattack at this game wouldn't provide many surprises. The game is not "impossible" - I have beated it on a real NES.
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Then try it :) A frame where select key is pressed has the 6th bit on (byte & 0x40).
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Guess one of the downloaders is with a huge bandwidth and he eats you? :) Can't really say without knowing the max-settings of all of the parties involved in that setup...
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Yes, you can copypaste any length of button sequences from FMV to another. The header doesn't need to be edited for that. It's only a matter of a number of consequent bytes transferred from a file to other. But it might be difficult to find out the exact source / destination frame position.
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Shortly said, I refused the Track'n Field submission because its goal seemed to be "ego", not "entertainment". Its only motivator was to "beat" Arc. It did that - it found bigger score and better times in many tasks. Arc aimed for that too, but he also tried to demonstrate what happens if you do even slight looking mistakes. I like Arc's goal better. I couldn't care less of the exact "best numbers". The mission "this isn't humanly possible" has already been reached, and I'm satisfied with that. My site is not an ego collection. It's for entertaining movies. If a movie happens to improve records (especially someone else's) but is less interesting, I'll reject it. I did that once for Michael Fried's SMB3 movie, too. Regarding Castlevania v8, the Akumajou Densetsu run wasn't an inspiring factor. I had just watched the faults of v7 movie long enough to decide how to improve it.
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I'll make a mental note at that.
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GoodNES name appears to be "Kirby's Adventure (E).nes". MD5 sum is 6118e4f266604fc1d7312d083008e923.
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Boco wrote:
In the newer videos, this information (along with "Created in Family Computer Emulator 5.10"), minus rerecord count (why?) is in subtitles at the beginning of the video.
I don't think the rerecord count is very much needed. I don't actually like those subtitles - they are sometimes hard to read / distinguish from the text outputted by the game - i.e. white text on black background, exactly the same as on the screen anyway... The dialog way was better, despite that it couldn't fit a very long movie name. But the current technique (capturing the XPutImage calls) doesn't allow it.
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Good luck. You can have a look at FCE-Ultra - it's a free NES emulator (free in the rights sense, you can use its source code and modify it).
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Yggdrasil wrote:
Yea I'd like to see stats for the tracker's seeds, as well as the ratio for users ....
http://bisqwit.iki.fi:6969/ BitTorrent users are always anonymous - there is no per-user statistics. As for referring URLs, top 5 are: 1. Direct request (no referer) 2. http://nes.greatstreamingvideo.com/ (yes, this obsolete address does dominate) 3. http://home.comcast.net/~arcthelad/ (Arc's site, same as above) 4. Google search 5. http://www.nintendo-inside.jp/news/136/13656.html
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qFox wrote:
well for anyone who cares, http://members.home.nl/qfox/kirby.attempt.one.fmv
Is this really for Kirby? I couldn't get it working on European or USA (PRG 1) version. Anyway it didn't take me three tries to learn fluent controlling without reason :) And I still learned things during the creation of the released version. For example, I should have been more careful with autofire. From sound effects you can hear that I often start the "wheel" two or three times in row. It's slower than to start it once. I should redo it sometime.
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Creating a movie-compatible emulator requires that you know exactly how the emulator emulates the system. This means things like number of cycles per screen refresh, number of scanlines, vblanks etc. I don't know all details but I know they're many and debated. The actual movie format is insignificant. Famtasia movie format looks like this: 144 bytes of header; data Header has: FMV^Z at 0, flags (32 bits) at 4, rerecord count (32 bits) at 8, emulator name (64 bytes) at 16, movie name (64 bytes) at 80. Data is: 1 byte per frame. Byte has 8 bits corresponding to the states of 8 buttons: R,L,U,D,B,A,SE,ST, starting from least significant bit. No savestates, no screenshots, no end tags. I don't know the flags format or how FDS commands are expressed. FDS commands (if applicable) and second controller (if applicable) are probably interleaved somehow.
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blip wrote:
After thinking about it for a bit, I think this is a solution:
// disable the routine that polls for a free sound buffer
		{ 0x30010,    1, "\xc3" },
// check that the sound buffer is free before attempting to play sound
		{ 0x2ff6e, 0x16, "\
\x8b\x0d\x3c\x23\x47\x00\x8b\x04\x8d\x40\x24\x47\x00\xb2\x01\x84\x50\x10\x74\x7f\xeb\x1f" },
This one seems to do nothing but crash if I check the "max speed" checkbox and run the game.
Unhandled exception: page fault on write access to 0x8080808c in 32-bit code (0x40218507).
In 32-bit mode.
Register dump:
 CS:0073 SS:007b DS:007b ES:007b FS:0033 GS:0007
 EIP:40218507 ESP:406af128 EBP:406af14c EFLAGS:00010206(  R- 00  I   - -P1 )
 EAX:80808080 EBX:40242ba0 ECX:41af5518 EDX:80808080
 ESI:41af5518 EDI:00001000
Stack dump:
0x406af128 (KERNEL32.DLL.VerSetConditionMask+0x12c2ea):  41ac0000 00001000 406af13c 00000001
0x406af138 (KERNEL32.DLL.VerSetConditionMask+0x12c2fa):  41ac0000 41ac0000 0044c0f8 00001000
0x406af148 (KERNEL32.DLL.VerSetConditionMask+0x12c30a):  00000000 00000090 00432586 41ac0000
0x406af158 (KERNEL32.DLL.VerSetConditionMask+0x12c31a):  00000003 00001000 00001000 00432523
0x406af168 (KERNEL32.DLL.VerSetConditionMask+0x12c32a):  00001000 406af1e4 0044c0f8 004324f0
0x406af178 (KERNEL32.DLL.VerSetConditionMask+0x12c33a):  00001000 00000000 00439fb5 00001000
0x406af188 (KERNEL32.DLL.VerSetConditionMask+0x12c34a): 

Backtrace:
=>0 0x40218507 (NTDLL.DLL.RtlAllocateHeap+0x87 in NTDLL.DLL) (ebp=406af14c)
  1 0x00432586 (FAMBLIP.EXE..text+0x31586 in FAMBLIP.EXE) (ebp=00000090)

0x40218507 (NTDLL.DLL.RtlAllocateHeap+0x87 in NTDLL.DLL): movl  %eax,0xc(%edx)
Modules:
Address                 Module  Name
0x00400000-00489000     (PE)    H:\nes\fam\FAMBLIP.EXE
0x40200000-4024a000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\NTDLL.DLL
0x404c0000-40597000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\KERNEL32.DLL
0x406d0000-407e9000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\USER32.DLL
0x40800000-40866000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\GDI32.DLL
0x40870000-40898000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\ADVAPI32.DLL
0x408b0000-40919000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\COMDLG32.DLL
0x40940000-4098f000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\SHELL32.DLL
0x409b0000-40a04000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\OLE32.DLL
0x40a20000-40a4b000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\RPCRT4.DLL
0x40a60000-40a9b000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\SHLWAPI.DLL
0x40ab0000-40b44000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\COMCTL32.DLL
0x40b50000-40b65000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\WINSPOOL.DRV
0x40b70000-40bd6000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\WINMM.DLL
0x40cc0000-40d22000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\X11DRV.DLL
0x41730000-41748000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IMM32.DLL
0x41880000-41897000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\WINEALSA.DRV
0x41960000-4196c000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\MSACM.DRV
0x41970000-4198e000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\MSACM32.DLL
0x41ab0000-41ab5000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\MIDIMAP.DRV
0x421e0000-421f2000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\JOYSTICK.DRV
0x424c0000-42502000     (PE)    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\DDRAW.DLL
Threads:
process  tid      prio
0000000c (D) H:\nes\fam\FAMBLIP.EXE
        0000000f    0
        0000000e    0
        0000000d    0 <==
WineDbg terminated on pid c
I've been using the C3-less patch now for a long time without problems. I use DrawFrame=1, Occupation=1, AutoFrame=0, Benchmark=0, FullSpeed=0 and vary the ExecSpeed between 5..900 very successfully - no problems. People at Mkakikomitai (Morimoto's BBS) are apparently complaining of some problems with the patch I use, but I don't understand what problems they are having.
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I get that a lot on slow machines (P233), but almost never on fast machines (Athlon). Sometimes Famtasia saves a quicksave that you can not load without getting an error message. Unfortunately there is no workaround. You just have to load another save and unpause.
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Surprising creative solutions Awesome skill and precision Game famousness These are some factors. Speed is good, because it feeds the skill and precision and it should prevent the game becoming boring. I particularly like movies that make me think "no way, no one could play like that" and "wow, how did he invent that". Game famousness helps people understanding the game better (and thus appreciating the play better), and famous games are also often better than unknown games. They might have good control (allows more impressive maneuvers) and complex overall design (prevents the game becoming boring and repeative after the first level).
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So far in my Rockman movie progress I've made 87 backups. That's about 12 per result minute :) I stop the recording, make a backup copy, then view the recording (to check it's ok), and resume recording. Sometimes I branch, creating alternate choices and comparing them, and sometimes I undo from a backup because I've made a mistake that I can't undo otherwise.
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I don't actually know how different they are. I know that timings are unique to each emulator, but does it matter so much or not, is a question to me...
Post subject: April 2004 statistics
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(bump) I edited the first post in this thread to contain the completed April statistics.
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This movie was encoded by Phil, and he couldn't get the file smaller without the video quality suffering a lot.
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I'll hold this submission until I see what the other is going to be like (timewise).
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Bob Whoops wrote:
Wasn't sure why it was on Bisqwit's list of ideas.
Maybe for the same reason everyone asks movies for boring games ;) It's a hard game and enjoyable to play.