Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
Very impressive for a game that has most of its frustration in the control scheme - anyone that's tried to play Crazy Climber or one of its ports will know what I'm talking about. This is particularly noteworthy not just because it's a technically impressive port of an arcade coin-op, but because it was the first of four games that were only available at the time to Atari Fan Club members (making it a very rare cartridge to find today).
Hopefully once MAMEHawk is a fully-fledged (pun intended) core we can see a TAS of the Crazy Climber arcade game, as this port has only a bare shadow of the original version's quirky charms...
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
AtariProtos has a useful page on this game for anyone not familiar with it. Although it's considered a prototype, the game appears to have been completed (or nearly so) - it was never released due to a combination of the divided rights to the LotR franchise (you might have heard of this before) and the Great Crash of 1983.
Voted "Meh" because it's just not a very good game, unfortunately...
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
feos wrote:
The only other DB where short name of a software was limited to 8 letters was MAME, and it was only limited because of 100 year old DOS limitations for filenames. Now that's where inventing the short name could be tricky, since it has to also remain unique. Some people may see value in us listing what MAME calls a given game, but their system is also weird, like they consider the European name the default and add extra identifiers to other versions, and sometimes those identifiers feel backwards.
Don't forget that MAME's "shortnames" for some games are also changed whenever a new version is released. For example, the database of MAME Action Replay is peppered with game notes in the style of:
"Renamed from 'something' to 'something else' in MAME version 0.XYZ
So use shortname 'something' for versions before XYZ
And use shortname 'something else' for versions XYZ onward"
Trying to keep track of the shortname changes for a submission the same way the MAME team does just sounds like unnecessary extra work and headaches in my opinion...
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
I know in most cases regional and text differences are ignored when it comes to judging optimization, but in this case we're talking at least 3 hours difference in a movie that tops 9 hours. (And if you look at the other branches on the Speedrun.com leaderboards, they are all topped by the Japanese version as well by significant amounts.) Is it worth making an exception for this case when you have a known gap of this massive a size?
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
So basically the bot found that to break this port of the game is to "Press Up+B in certain places to get weird, unintended behavior to happen" and then you had to figure out the RIGHT "weird, unintended behavior" to generate that didn't softlock or crash the game...
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
(eagerly awaits a temp encode)
Also, for anyone that doesn't have any idea about what this hack is here's the RomHacking.net page. This is listed there as completed with version 3.5 in March 2016, so it's safe to assume there won't be any further work done on this hack.
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
So in the future TASers using non-current versions would just have to be sure they pick a developer-stated "beta" instead of whatever's available at the time. (Assuming the devs care enough about such things - many won't, of course...)
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
Alyosha wrote:
NESHawk currently does not match any of the 4 options, as expected since no DMC games work. But now I very clearly know what I'm looking for, should only be a matter of time.
So once the DMC games work would NESHawk be close to 100% emulation of an actual console?
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
I'm curious how this managed to break the file size limit when there's been PSX submissions longer in length than this before that didn't have that problem...
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
This was a rare, European-exclusive release for the Sega 32X. Has anyone tried to TAS this already? It seems to be one of the few 32X games that have TAS potential...
Link to video
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
Wipeoutjack7 wrote:
I haven't tested all possible winds on 9
Something tells me that even if you found a value for the wind that worked, you'd lose more time trying to manipulate for it than you'd save by avoiding the second shot...
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
I think the only time I've seen "sped-up" encodes are ones where loading screens and such are removed. Even the longest currently accepted submissions don't use any kind of speed up in the way you're proposing.
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
To be fair, the gangster on the US cover is a frequently seen enemy in the game - perhaps the marketing team thought showing him instead of the ghost would fit the "Avenging Spirit" title better?
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 252
Location: Stafford, NY
Good video, but I'm wondering if the game keeps getting harder on subsequent loops. I found an old YouTube video of the MSX version and someone posted the following comment on it:
Guess what, when I was like 10yrs old, I climbed to 2000m ten times in a row. It got more and more difficult (not much) but after completeing (sic) it 10 times, it started easy again, as if I had started a new game.
It really should be checked if this also applies to the SG1000 version of the game.
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
