Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Bisqwit wrote:
I regret not being always at my politest to everyone, and being prolongedly neglectful at times. Though in my defense, I still did to the best of my abilities.
You are one of the most polite and helpful people I've ever known, which is why I find it so strange that you have this as one of your signatures. You should know better than to ascribe such damning attributes to huge, heterogeneous groups of people (numbering more than 1 billion individuals in this case). I don't think it befits you.
What I regret is getting so angry at Warp the other day. I don't regret speaking out, but I should have done it in a far more composed manner. I didn't check back to see his response, because then I'd be compelled to again misuse a topic that wasn't supposed to be so deeply divisive.
I also regret not finishing any TAS projects years ago. Right now I don't have the time for it anymore, but back then I did. A missed opportunity.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
There's actually no scientific evidence whatsoever that the universe is deterministic. It seems logical that it would be, but things that seem logical aren't always true.
Quantum physics is a great example. One relatively popular theory right now is called the many-worlds interpretation, which states that there are actually an uncountable number of universes—one for every possible outcome of all quantum states. "Prior to many-worlds, reality had been viewed as a single unfolding history. Many-worlds, rather, views reality as a many-branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realised."
So maybe the universe is deterministic specifically because randomness is resolved by allowing both possibilities to exist alongside one another, yet in a local sense (inside of our local universe) the quantum random bit would still, for all intents and purposes, be completely random and nondeterministic.
But thinking at an even more local level, it would seem preposterous that quantum effects could have such a major impact on our conscious actions. Could there be an alternative universe in which Hitler got accepted into art school and thus the Holocaust was averted? Maybe, but that means the intake examinator would have to have consciously decided to accept him. It's a stretch to say that some random strain of quantum outcomes could have made him or her make that specific decision. Unless he or she consulted Schrödinger's cat.
Personally, I don't have a clue as to whether the universe is deterministic or not. I'd like to think it is, but thinking is rarely a good idea. It's more likely, however, that on a local level—our daily thoughts, actions, decisions, et cetera—are deterministic.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Spider-Waffle wrote:
As other users have stated, I feel there needs to be adequate warning that banning is in the future for this type of behavior. You could issue temporary bans first. I feel xkeeper probably didn't release his behavior was so destructive or what exactly needed to change or that it had to change or banning would ensue. If this was done I bet he would have changed his ways.
A temporary ban can go a long way to get the message across, this seems under-utilized.
I personally don't know much about this particular situation, so I'll refrain from saying anything about Xkeeper, but I generally agree with this.
I'm not really running any big sites anymore but a couple of years ago I moderated a very busy section of a general discussion forum with over 20k members. What I found was that it's usually just as effective to simply send someone a PM kindly explaining that you think whatever he or she is doing is inappropriate, and that people might complain. Being open about these things towards members resulted in avoiding any sort of punishment probably 75% of the time. And those times punitive action was needed, it was usually just a warning (the forum had a warn system, I guess we don't have that) and at most a temporary ban. But people were generally ready apologize and dial it down a bit.
In my view, permanent bans should really be used for spambots and for extremely rare circumstances such as someone making legal threats against the site or other members or for people whose views are so extreme (like self-admitted neo-Nazis) that they're only going to be a constant nuisance.
Not that I'm saying I know what the deal is here, of course. This is a different forum altogether and my experience there might not be relevant here at all.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I'll give this a read later. Should be interesting.
Frankly, the last thing I want right now is to have another highly divisive debate (after virtually exploding in the other topic, though I insist that hasn't happened to me in a long time), but I'll say this: the United States and Europe have a long and bloody history of oppressing foreign nations that continues to this day. People are often jittery to compare anything to the Third Reich, and while I think every situation is unique and deserving of its own explanation, we should not be afraid to point out the parallels that do exist.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
I think that it's quite sad that you are completely oblivious to the fact that that's a perfect example of playing the racism card. The leftist multiculturalist propaganda has taught you well, and you have swallowed it whole, hook, line and sinker.
You're an extremely misguided individual.
Yes, he's so terrible for being sensitive to the fact that Muslims are by far the greatest recipients of racist anger today. And yes, he's just a dumb "leftist multiculturalist" for thinking that perhaps we should lay off on those Muslims and stop pretending to be good liberal intellectuals by complaining about Islamist practices that aren't actually in play here in Europe and by extension incriminating those who practice any form of Islam.
For even suggesting that Islamophobia is fuelled by racism we're automatically "playing the racist card", which means we're wrong and we're just like white power supremacists. Hey, what's that about hypocrisy again?
Do you have any idea how many Muslim houses of prayer are literally being attacked? How many Muslims fall victim to hate crimes? How many people are beaten up because they're Muslim? How many Muslims don't get a job because the one hiring thinks they're dangerous?
Europe is, by and large, more racist now than the US is, and you are proof: you are perfectly content to keep demonizing an entire group of people simply because "I'm really criticizing Islam" and "they're not a race, so I'm not racist". You may not be racist yourself—I don't know—but you're enabling those that are.
But then again, I'm probably just an indoctrinated "leftist multiculturalist" whose crime is I prefer everybody to be able to live and be themselves here in peace.
Warp wrote:
Your argument "islamophobia is just racism is disguise" would have a greater weight if the islamic culture would indeed be like that of any other religion, such as buddhism, hinduism, shintoism, hare krishna and so on.
And this is exactly what I mean. People are so keen to look at the actions of the few, or even things that happen all the way over in Saudi Arabia, as a way of trying to convince everybody that Muslims are "different" and that they reject Western values. Forget about the fact that European Muslims are vastly more liberal than their Middle-Eastern and African counterparts. Forget about it entirely: they're Muslims. They're DIFFERENT! I am Warp and I am not a racist.
Meanwhile, there are others on this forum who truly believe in "Eurabia", the concept that Muslims are going to reproduce themselves to domination. Which in reality is statistically impossible, and even if the demographics of it worked out it still makes the racist assumption that Muslims are all the same, that there aren't many separate groups and communities within the demographic, and that Muslims will all band together to turn Europe into a caliphate. I wonder if Warp believes in that, too? Does he also believe that European leaders have conspired to make this happen?
The most frequent victims of the most severe racism in Europe today are Muslims. Period. No contest. Yet there are people like Warp who will gladly keep on insisting that "they're different", and "their culture is cruel", and that every Muslims in fact fully endorses some of the more awful aspects of the Islamic religion. Who cares that European Muslims are not only incredibly divided but also, barring an insignificant few exceptions, incredibly different from their counterparts elsewhere in the world? Who cares that it's not only incredibly stupid, but also offensive to consider them all one and the same, and then to attack the group as a whole?
"Criticism of Islam" again proves itself to be just a thinly veiled excuse for frustrated European natives to assert their dominance. Yet they will insist that "the leftist multiculturalists" are the racists. Warp, congratulations, you use exactly the same stupid arguments that I've seen stupid young right-wingers use for years and years now. But that's okay, because you're just being a good European liberal by speaking out against the horrible tsunami of Islam that's sweeping across our great continent, right?
edit: on a side note, I think I personally would be a lot happier if this topic was locked. I don't really want to discuss politics in here because this is exactly the sort of thing that happens when people start discussing extremely divisive issues. I can respectfully disagree on many topics, but not when one side of the aisle is actively perpetuating a climate of hatred against an entire group of people under the guise of "criticism of Islam", whether they intend it or not. I just can't. So Warp will no doubt respond and I'll respond to him, and others will join in too. So let's just end this, I don't even care if Warp gets the last say.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
We had a huge discussion about this a while ago. If I'm not mistaken, the new official stance is that we should not add aspect ratio correction to movies unless we're reasonably certain that it's needed (such as for PSX games that have a non-4:3 resolution). This would apply to SGB games as well.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Screenshot suggestion from Dooty.
non AR corrected, lossless: http://wedemandhtml.com/tmp/abe_2.png
<45KB proper one:
If someone can squeeze out some more quality, feel free. :)
edit: suggestion by Zeupar.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Johannes wrote:
Like I mentioned before, one of our major parties subscribes to a racist conspiracy theory that says Europe will be taken over by Islamists in a few generations
Source? And how is it "racist" (my god, that term has become meaningless)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurabia
Again, I don't want this to become a discussion. But go ahead and read this and see for yourself what you make out of it. ("Conspiracy theory" accurately describes it, because one of its core tenets is that the political class is explicitly causing Europe to be "taken over" and turned into an Islamic caliphate.)
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
Dada wrote:
The time difference is due to the FMVs not being displayed correctly.
How many FMVs are there in this video (that account for a 7 minute difference)?
I went ahead and did some more investigation. First of all, if I record the TAS using the regular PCSX plugin (which causes visual glitches) the length of the encode corresponds pretty much exactly with the movie file with all other settings, and the ROM, left intact. That rules out incorrectly rendering a PAL game as if it were NTSC.
However, I found that there's a slight difference in gameplay speed as well. The PEOpS version plays back slightly faster. Using the regular plugin, it takes 146 frames for Abe to run to the second screen at the beginning (from the first frame he's visible until the first non-transition frame in the second screen). It takes only 138 with PEOpS. On the regular plugin, it takes 1191 frames to reach the sixth screen. Using PEOpS, it takes 1093 frames. Those are not insignificant differences. I remember someone saying that PEOpS probably doesn't render lag frames, which might explain it.
Another likely source of the speedups is every major transition (for example, going to and from a location inside the Scrabania and Paramonia temples). Most of those transitions have an FMV. The FMV is skipped, but the game is still rendered at 200fps for a short while.
I knew that there was probably a discrepancy in the regular gameplay as well, but not this big.
Still, the reason why I never bothered to investigate this in such detail before is because there's no real way to fix them that I know of. We've discussed this for some time but unless someone is willing to go over the PEOpS 1.4 source I doubt we'll ever get a clean encode of this game. :(
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
And these are precisely the parties that are widely demonized, vilified and compared to nazis (by both the other parties and the media at large). Very much here in Finland, and I know for a fact that it happens also (and even worse) in Sweden. The equivalent party in the UK is also generally vilified. I don't know what the exact situation is in Denmark.
I can't comment on the situation in Finland or Denmark. I tend to keep to domestic happenings because it's very difficult to get a clear picture, and to get all the facts when you have to rely on mostly translated and relatively distant accounts.
But based on my experience here, it's not so much the parties themselves that are being demonized, but some of the more radical ideas that they adhere to. There is quite a lot of overlap between these parties and the radical, fact-free right; not just membership overlap (because that's where a lot of their core voters are), but in ideology as well. Like I mentioned before, one of our major parties subscribes to a racist conspiracy theory that says Europe will be taken over by Islamists in a few generations. It's not even statistically possible, but that's the main line. The same goes for a bunch of other core ideas. It should be noted that Geert Wilders, the leader of the PVV, was one of the high-profile politicians and polemicists enthusiastically cited in Anders Breivik's manifesto.
To me, these are worrying things that are worthy of ridicule. I'm not saying that just anybody who believes that "multiculturalism has failed" also believes these things (on the contrary), but honestly, I've been immersed in this debate for far too long and have never heard any truly convincing arguments from the other side.
Anyway, I might have jumped the gun here. I'm not interested in having a debate about this with anybody.
But to respond to your original statement, I don't think anyone with reasonable ideas is getting ridiculed. (At least, not anymore than any other party.) If that were so, the right-wing VVD would not be in power here today, nor would the PVV be providing support to its coalition with the moderate CDA. It's truly absurd or morally defunct arguments that are, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
Anybody who even doubts this is demonized and considered a second class citizen.
Oh come on. There are entire political parties making great strides all around Europe right now on that very platform. Based around the very idea of multiculturalism having "failed", and that the left-wing hippie elites are willfully ignorant of this because they don't care about "their own kind". Here in the Netherlands one of the coalition parties subscribes to an Islamic takeover conspiracy theory, and the prime minister spoke about "giving the Netherlands back to the Dutch".
This was the most major political issue of the past decade and probably will be in this one too.
You haven't been paying attention if you still think you're being "demonized" for holding a contrary opinion. Either that, or you're quite happy to be in a position where you can complain and would rather not give it up. But in the real world, this has become as mainstream as anything.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
AjAX wrote:
So this is A 'US' version originally running at 50fps but converted to 60fps? or the Iso or whatever is a fake US? I had to dump my psx game lately because of a similar problem, it was a US game clocked at 60 but running at 50fps, just curious :)
It's a US game running at 60fps and encoded at 60fps. The time difference is due to the FMVs not being displayed correctly. Your game might have been 50fps due to the use of a European BIOS?
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
So the ratio between the run length and the video length being almost exactly 50:60 was mere coincidence?
It appears so. The CD-ROM used for this run is SLUS00190, which is the US version of Abe's Oddysee. He also used the US BIOS.
The discrepancy is about the same as in the 100% run (or it will be after I add the intro and ending back in). If I was incorrectly encoding these runs we'd see a different discrepancy.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
How is it possible that the run length is 42:55 but the video length is only 36:50?
Edit: Thinking about it, the relation between 42:55 and 36:50 is almost exactly the same as the relation between 60 and 50, which would mean that this is a 50 fps game encoded at 60 fps.
It's because every single video in the game is rendered at 200 fps. That's both the intro and ending, but also every single screen transition (even though they all get skipped except the ending). This is due to plugin/kkapture limitations. The finished version of the 100% run is also about 5 minutes shorter than it should be even after adding the ending back in.
This can't be fixed in any way that I know of, unfortunately, but just like the 100% run I'll capture the intro and ending using a different plugin and edit them in.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
For judging/voting purposes I'm putting up the tempfile. This is NOT the final encode, just a preview.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhWdmhzsEu8
Should probably be up in half an hour or so.
edit: see the final HD encode above.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Nice! I didn't think you would be done with this so soon. Will start working on an encode.
Too bad you couldn't find a way to skip Paramonia/Scrabania, though! :) And I guess the game crashed when using Shrykull's power at the end, just like in the 100% version. Oh well, hopefully those emulator bugs can be fixed sometime.
edit: initial dump is done, tomorrow I'll upload the Youtube version.
edit: HD version is done:
Link to video
(processing at this time)
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Some games simply aren't sync-stable on the console. There's very little you can do in that case.
Console verification should only really be used in extremely rare cases, such as the race condition in Rockman that causes the end-of-level code to be called.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Mario. One reason is that they pretty much ruined Sonic with the awful later games, and another is that some of his fanbase has a pretty disturbing level of dedication.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
OmegaWatcher wrote:
Ferret Warlord wrote:
Yes, translations can and have affected the way a game behaves. For instance, look at FF3J: the esoteric job bugs used in piro's run no longer work the way they do with the popular translation that's available.
If someone can squeeze out some more quality, feel free. :)
edit: suggestion by Zeupar.
