Posts for Bisqwit


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Schnretzl wrote:
Question: Is Nightwish really big over in Finland? Are you a fan?
There are fans, I suppose. I am somewhat out of their target group, however.
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wicked wrote:
and this is the same way for using to manipulate where the enemy (ex: any game) will apper and wich moves he is going to do?
If that is the level of your present knowledge, then mmbossman's first post answers your question completely.
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Xipo wrote:
I wonder how can they find how to pass the gate without key.It is too magical.
Theory: Gate is an object (like the mice), not a map structure (like a brick). Choice 1: Collision detection with objects is done at every second frame (not every frame). Choice 2: Ejection from collisions is done 1 frame after collision check. Hitting pause stops the game before it can do the results of the collision check, and when resuming, you have another new frame where to move before a collision check is run.
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Bob A wrote:
according to my experience, pSX isn't good at all. it says it can't find libgtkglext-x11-1.0.so.0, even after i installed it. the windows version just crashes in wine.
Quoth the README:
http://psxemulator.gazaxian.com/readme.txt wrote:
Under Linux pSX requires the following shared libraries/packages : OpenGL ALSA GTK GTKGLEXT libxml2
Are you sure you installed that library? Not its source code? Not to some other system? Not some other version? Not some development headers only? Was the file it complains about placed in /usr/lib/ ? Or did it start complaining about some other library after you installed that one? Do not try to run it under Wine. That's just stupid.
Post subject: Re: source links on emulator page broken
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TheAxeMan wrote:
I was trying to download the source from the emulators page and get permission errors of some sort. Do some of these links need to be updated?
----> Sticky topic number 1: http://tasvideos.org/forum/t/6531
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broco wrote:
Somebody has just hacked an emulator to do this! It's been tested on the famous ROM hack "asshole mario". Here's the guy's blog post: http://msm.grumpybumpers.com/?p=20 And an impressive video of the ghosting in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2OytHzZ72Y
That is very interesting. Also, apparently, there is a minor bug in the code: it sometimes puts a permanent white rectangle where a character disappered. Also, the piranha plants that move up and down seem to work funny. mcc, your trick employs similar techniques as my tiletracker. :)
Post subject: Re: Down Time?
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feitclub wrote:
OK, I have been unable to access tasvideos.org (or bisqwit.iki.fi for that matter) for weeks, and suddenly I could visit the site today. I assumed the site had been down, but the forum activity proves otherwise. Anyone have a theory why? Keep in mind I am accessing the site from Japan, but not from a work computer (i.e. through a filter of any kind).
I haven't been aware of any problems like that, and there haven't been any policy / firewall changes lately. I rebooted the server 7 days ago, which means that if some firewall blocks were set before that, they reset then. If you have been unable during the last 7 days as well, then only remaining theories are issues out of my control, such as censoring by external parties.
Post subject: Re: Host / Upload problem
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What are the symptoms that occur when you notice that you cannot upload to Youtube? I mean, is there message that pops up, or something?
Post subject: Re: Zowayix
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Zowayix wrote:
I have an idea. Why not try a run where you get the lowest score possible?
Because waiting 200 to 300 time units before going to the flagpole isn't exactly entertaining to watch.
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I don't think it matters which media the ISO is read from -- a CD drive, a harddrive or a network share. I use the latter. The emulator is supposed to handle timings, not the host. Even if your media is slow, that's no different from running mupen64 on a slow computer. The timings in the emulation are still created with the emulated system's rules, not the host's rules; i.e. AVIs made from movies will play as if they were created on the authentic system.
Post subject: Re: PSX emulator to function like VBA and FCE Ultra?
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Wait, and you shall have. Probably. According to my sources, re-recording movie support is being developed to pSX. And according to my experiences, pSX is pretty good.
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Once you learn programming, you realize how to apply it to create games. Start from simple ones, i.e. text based ones such as "I'm thinking a number from 1-100, guess what it is ... smaller/bigger". Once you learn graphics, try creating a simple tile-based game. Here is a screenshot of one of my earliest such games. In this game, the tiles are procedurally created (i.e. by drawing different colored lines and pixels). The movement is as crude as in Boulderdasher. Basic rules are created: gravity, collision checks, enemy AI, bonus items, exits, level loading, death. If you think you can get the rotation and collision checks right, you can try to create a Tetris clone. Here's a screenshot of my first Tetris clone. It operates in text mode. Creating such game is certainly teaching for a beginning programmer. Going that route, you can start tackling more and more difficult challenges as you go. The important question is not "how are games created". The important question is "what is programming". Games are not special in any way. It is just an application of programming theories; a rule set given to the computer, that the computer obeys, to produce an expected behavior. And, do not aim to create a game for some console. Leave that to the experts. If you go that route, you can discard all the easy tools you have for PC, and have to start learning the intrinsic hardware details on that particular console, and program in a way not unlike building a house by piling peas one by one. Once you're not a beginner, you'll pile bricks one by one instead of peas, but that's not really much an advancement in methology. So, forget consoles.
Post subject: Re: Portal Speedrun
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So far, I have liked all the high-quality Portal speedruns I've seen on Youtube. It is pretty amazing. Makes me want to see what it could be on tool-assisted. EDIT: But this is the first time I see portal entry/placement glitches being used in these speedruns.
Post subject: Re: Creating a TAS doesn't seem very user friendly
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The pSX author apparently considers adding a rewinding feature to pSX.
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Aglar wrote:
Oh yeah! The agent desynched really nice. Can you tell it to try again or something?
That wouldn't really help. I guess you used an unsupported emulator.
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I certainly did not expect this. Twelve points for surprise. Congratulations.
Post subject: Re: Emulator Hosting
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Completely irrelevant, but JXQ, you should fix two things in your HTML page: * Instead of <div class="header1">header</div>, use <h1>header</h1>. Similarly for <h2>. This brings structure to the page (instead of mere layout), and helps computer programs analyze the page properly (web crawlers can pick up headers, and speech synthesizers use proper emphasis). You can always use the CSS to shape the h1 and h2 tags to look however you want. * Instead of &u=1195, use &amp;u=1195 -- otherwise your HTML is ambiguous (or rather, invalid) and a validator will complain about it, and some browsers may be confused and unable to follow the link. (Because & is a special character in HTML that starts an entity reference. &amp; is the entity reference corresponding to the character &.) * Your <a name="anchor"> tags are unmatched with an </a>.
Post subject: Re: #1838: Arc's NES Maniac Mansion in 06:29.77
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Congratulations Arc.
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Hm, I was going to post a praise about Auracheese (I bought a sector of it a week ago and have been enjoying it immensely in small pieces), but apparently I have already posted one. Drats. My favourite side dish is Aura cheese beetroot casserole.
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Thanks for the kind-spirited feedback. I'm already looking towards having a chance (time, motivation and energy) of rewriting most of the site from scratch. I've got around 30% of it planned, and I intend to plan the rest along creating it. Unfortunately at the present moment there's no shortage of distractions, and no ample supply of creative energy either. Sorry about the problem with Opera, but I really don't know any easy way to fix it. The reason why I cannot relayout the site is that doing so would require undoing entirely what I did that caused that problem to appear, which is reorder the page such that the actual content is sent first and then the menubar. With table layout (i.e. the only layout that I know works on Opera), there's no way to send the right side cell first and then the left side. Why I want the leftside cell sent last is, because it contains advertisements, and loading those advertisements may stall the rendering for a second or two; it is not nice if the displaying of the actual page content (i.e. the movie listing) is delayed. Hence I want to send the ad cell last, and the contents first.
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Laacktoer? Laecktoer? MrSweed? DMTM? Try to decide?
submitter wrote:
I make some mistakes at WORLD 4-2.
Anything why this shouldn't be speedily rejected? I don't think we need both a NTSC and PAL version of this game published, unless there's some radical difference. Though I have to admit, seeing the familiar version of the game brings some good mood to me.
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Warp wrote:
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Nope, it's short for "The United States of America". Don't forget!
I see. Then what's the continent called?
There's already a topic for debate about that topic, here. Do not rehash it here.
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AdmiralJonB wrote:
I'm sorry, after re-reading my post I guess it wasn't very clear at all... I was more meaning of taking a screenshot of another program. The same for the control.
Oh. For that there is no portable solution. It depends on the windowing system. In X11, you can loop recursively through XQueryTree() results to find a window by its name, and then XGetImage() to read the image into a buffer. If you require high speed, you can use XShmGetImage() instead, though it requires that the X server is local and supports the XShm extension. After you have the frame buffer, you can write it into a file using the code I gave earlier. A much easier solution is to call externally a program that already does the job, such as import from imagemagick. In Microsoft Windows, the API for reading the contents of different windows is different. You can find such documentation on MSDN; I don't know anything about them except that it involves a lot of capital letters. And of course other windowing systems exist too. As said, not portable method exists. And to control another window... the same thing applies here. What are you trying to, a Minesweeper cheating program? Or are you intending to creates TASes of some games by scripting the input using external program and recording the output?
Post subject: Re: A project I'm working on... (Programmers advice requeste
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You can use libgd for portable handling of images. For an example, here is how I capture screenshots in Dega:
#include <gd.h>
static void CreatePNG(const char* beauty_fn)
{
    FILE*fp = fopen(beauty_fn, "wb");
    if(!fp) { perror(beauty_fn); return; }
    
    // xbuf, width, height
    gdImagePtr im = gdImageCreateTrueColor(width,height);
    for(unsigned y=0; y<height; ++y)
        for(unsigned x=0; x<width; ++x)
        {
            const unsigned char* pixptr = &xbuf[(x + y * width)*3];
            unsigned rr = pixptr[2];
            unsigned gg = pixptr[1];
            unsigned bb = pixptr[0];
            gdImageSetPixel(im, x,y, (rr<<16)|(gg<<8)|(bb<<0));
        }
    
    gdImagePng(im, fp);
    gdImageDestroy(im);
    fclose(fp);  
}
xbuf is here a pointer to the image rendered by the emulator; it is an array of 3-byte (BGR) pixels ordered from left to right, up to down.
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Lag happens when the number of instructions ran before the NMI occurs is less than the number of instructions the game wants to perform before the NMI occurs. The number of clock cycles consumed by different instructions (including memory access delays etc), and the exact timing of NMI, can affect lag greatly.