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dunnius wrote:
Xkeeper wrote:
There is one, turn off Javascript
On my old G4 Mac that I use for seeding the videos, the animation causes the CPU usage to go to 100%.
On X11 based Firefox clients, the animation indeed causes horrible CPU usage.
Therefore I have disabled it for X11 based Firefox clients, identified by the string "X11;" in the HTTP user agent. If "G4 Mac" has this same mishap, maybe I should disable it for that one too.
However, I do not know how to identify G4 browsers.
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mmbossman wrote:
I forget whether that was the intention of Bisqwit or not, although I'm sure he's said it before.
My intention at the start, and ever so since has been to provide entertaining video game movies.
That speed is a very effective means to provide that goal, is just a coincidence, but in my books, it has never been the goal by itself.
I'm always ready to sacrifice a few frames here and there if 1) it keeps the player much more motivated (frame-squashing labor can be quite dismotivating) and the audience would never know the difference 2) it allows showing the audience a more impressive vista than otherwise.
Of course, #1 leaves my products open for obsoletion by those who are actually willing to do the frame-squashing labor that no audience member would ever notice if it weren't for the numbers. But I don't care.
And for #2, it's controversial when frames are "saved" by sacrificing a cool stunt or two and always arises some debate. Some of those "cool" stunts are rather subjective, too. This happened with SMB walkathons in my opinion.
As for the logo / slogan: The site name became TASVideos as a replacement to NESVideos since we're no longer limited to NES and I wanted to promote the term TAS as opposed to timeattacks. I expanded the TAS abbreviation to "Tool-assisted speedrun" to show what it stands for. However, speed has never been the site's ultimate goal, so I sometimes changed it to "tool-assisted superplay" which also fits the TAS acronym. But the actual goal is "entertaining video game movies". It just doesn't happen to have a cool acronym.
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alden wrote:
I was working on a Lua script to enable weapon switching with the Select key but got stuck on updating the PPU so the palette didn't get screwed up.
Well, I can help in that regard. (For Mega Man / Rockman.)
Data at $D485 = MegamanPalette. It's a table of eight two-byte records. Each describing the two color values in Megaman's suit, for the following weapons, respectively: P,C,I,B,F,E,G,M
Function at $C72A = PaletteSetupForSprites. Before calling, poke the first color value to $3E1 and the second color value to $3E2. The function will reprogram the palette to indicate correct Megaman's colors.
If you cannot call this function, you can emulate its function by doing as follows:
- Poke the address of SpritePalettes ($3E0), 16-bit, into $38..$39 and $3A..$3B.
- Poke the value 0x18 into the address $34, and the value 0x01 into the address $37.
After doing this, the next NMI will update the PPU properly to indicate the new colour values.
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mega_man_3 wrote:
Is it possible? I got this idea from playing on the Mega Man Anniversary Collection! I was wondering if it was possible to do a speedrun with no lag and switching weapons with the press of a button! Sounds like a neat idea! :)
Please elaborate.
Are you talking about NES Mega Man?
What do you mean "switching weapons with the press of a button"?
Also, what does "no lag" have to do with anything? Isn't this quite an arbitrary goal?
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Kyrsimys wrote:
So, is there something wrong with thesemovies that you want to improve? Is there something in your movie that hasn't been done in them or do you have some other motivation for the run?
They're not particularly optimal, failing even in basic techniques such as jumping down a ledge. Mostly they are proof of concept material. Fine in 2003, but now we can do better.
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The MKV was recorded at 320x240? Is this really the correct choice for this game? For it looks too blurry in my opinion. Blurriness that is not caused by too low bitrate, but because it was scaled to a different resolution using something like a bicubic filter.
Or is the blur caused by improper scaling (perhaps double scaling, first to 640x480 and then back to 320x240) performed by the emulator? In that case, the problem should be fixed before attempting more encodes.
I think in the future, AVI/MKV for PSX TASes should be made in whatever resolution is the most commonly used one with that particular game.
Chrono Cross, for instance, uses 512x480 (IIRC) for status screens, 256x240 for FMVs, 640x480 on the BIOS logo screen (not due to the game), and 320x240 for everything else (with 640x240, 320x480 etc. occasionally appearing for 1 frame duration). I made the AVIs on 320x240, because it is the most common resolution in that game, and those AVIs are crisp with each pixel of the AVI clearly matching the same pixel in the original imagery, barring bitrate-deprived codec-induced blur.
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Lord Tom wrote:
Update: Sunsoft 3 is done, holy crap, it's done. I think I spent about 30-40 hours on this level alone. Barring similar difficulties with the final 2 levels, this should (finally) be complete in another week or so. Sorry for the long wait!
Congratulations :) I await for the new submission...
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Liked it. Definitely a weird movie...
Speaking of weird, there's something weird with the sound in that MP4.
Most noticeable in the ending. The musical instruments randomly disappear from the theme, as though there was a shortage of channels, which there most definitely should not be (8 channels after all). The SPC file of the title theme is without problem...
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Mukki wrote:
I disagree. I'd quite like to see a glitchless RM1 run, however I seem to remember Bisqwit saying that he was working on one (although I doubt that it is still active at the moment).
I have since abandoned the project. Go ahead, grab it.
I would like to see the completed task. I disagree that it would be boring / non-novel to watch; instead, it would bring the kind of weapons change variety seen in e.g. Mega Man 6 TAS, that is not seen in Mega Man right now.
Though it is disputable, which glitches are acceptable and which ones not…
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So to change CD during creation of a PCSX TAS, you will have to use the menu function labelled "Open cd case" instead of just pressing the equivalent button in the CD drive?
Is that obvious? Are people prone making a mistake there?
Also, what happens if you hit that menu selection while the emulator is paused? Does it automagically create two event frames to the movie, or what? Does it unpause automatically? How are you supposed to do CD changes frame-precisely?
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So what happens if the player does as I described above?
I.e. pauses emulator, switches CD, unpauses emulator.
(It's not entirely a hypothetic question: I did precisely this every time I replaced CD during the creation of my Chrono Cross TAS on pSX.)
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mz wrote:
It's not possible to be opened and closed during the same frame. I don't understand the second sentence. :/
The second sentence means: For the duration of the first 1001 frames (frames 0-1000), "CD 1" is and has been inserted in the system.
Then the emulation is paused, CD ejected, "CD 2" inserted and emulation resumed.
From frame 1001 onwards, CD 2 is and has been inserted.
So a CD change event happened on frame 1001: An open & close on the same frame.
What happens if the player attempts to do this?
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Thanks... And how about this one?
Bisqwit wrote:
How about if the CD case is opened & closed during the same frame? For example, frames 0―1000, "CD 1" is inserted, frames 1001―3000, "CD 2" is inserted.
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Was the control byte added before or after some PXM movies were created that are about to be submitted here? Can it be detected somehow, to know whether a control byte is to be expected or not?
Also, this movie file format you linked to does not indicate which CD is inserted.
And, how is it handled during movie playback? Is the movie watcher expected to change the CD atomically in 1-frame, if such operation was done in frame-advance during movie creation?
How about if the CD case is opened & closed during the same frame? For example, frames 0―1000, "CD 1" is inserted, frames 1001―3000, "CD 2" is inserted.
mz wrote:
Bisqwit wrote:
Continuation: Does the movie file format include way to indicate CD changes (including the information about which CD was inserted)? Note: Should also include information about which CD was inserted in the beginning of the movie.
The SVN version has all this.
Consider the possibility that during normal play, while the game is reading data from the CD, the player suddenly takes the CD out and puts another in, changing the game radically.
How about the "enable/disable cheats" -- how does that work? Can it be used to abuse the submission system? If the movie file header attests "movie does not contain embedded cheat list", is the "enable/disable chats" command a no-op?
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Thank you for updating PXM.html, mz.
However, I tried but cannot see CD change events mentioned in the event stream (controller data). You told me earlier that those are handled (in the SVN version). How?
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I think that the AVI should reproduce what happens on the emulator, and on the console ― this including the BIOS (scph1001.bin) logo screen.
However, since the BIOS logo is the same for every PSX movie, the visual of it could be replaced with TASVideos logo (though audio should be kept at the background).
Edit: Clarified that I mean the authentic PSX BIOS (scph1001.bin), not the emulated (and stripped-down) one.
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A reminder to developers... real-time play support is not a required objective to start TASing. Accurate emulation is far more important than real-time play.
Because TASes are usually made in slow motion (frame advance) anyway; AVI/MKV constructed from the playback can be made to play at full (normal) speed even if the emulator ran at miniscule FPS rate when it was recorded.
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Posting a heads-up about this emulator, hoping more discussion will take place here.
The compatibility of Dolphin looks quite promising according to this list: http://www.dolphin-emu.com/list.php
It's a dual emulator, it emulates both Wii and GameCube. Which makes sense, because Wii was designed backward compatible with GameCube.
I have no idea how its TAS support fares, though, but it is open source, which is a very promising thing.
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From my Rockman disassembly:
CurrentBeginScreen = $27 ;In Rockman2, $14
; ^The screen that begins the current strip. Only updated in transitions.
CurrentEndScreen = $28 ;In Rockman2, $15
; ^The screen where the current strip ends. Only updated in transitions.
CurrentOrderNum = $29 ;In Rockman2, $38
; ^Pointer to the order table. Only updated in transitions.
So now we have techniques that write into $38 and $14.
Can we get a technique that writes into $15? Then we don't need delay-scrolling to the right anymore. We can just march to the right...
