I've always wondered, why are the movie formats frame based and not input poll based? Wouldn't it be stronger against desyncs and more true to hardware emulation? Like, if you're to build a TASBot, it has to work off of the polling.
Android is open source, but getting a phone with android on it, not so much, because the phone manufacturers control the specific distribution you're getting and what you can do with it.
Given that the OS open source, they can't restrict what you can do with it.
Besides, it's not like Android devices are locked or anything. You can boot to the system recovery menu and do whatever you want there. You can replace the system with whatever you want (even moreso with the Android SDK).
"Rooting" and Android system still sounds like "rooting" eg. OpenSuse.
"Rooting" doesn't need to be quoted here, it's a real term. You don't run most of your software as root in OpenSuse, nor do you in Android.
There's a real issue in user operating systems with making root available via a yes/no dialog. To most users, "yes" may very well be automatically selected. So root access is not something that the Android operating system (normally) allows software to get, because any amount of hurdles will be jumped over to see, as Raymond Chen once described them, the dancing bunnies.
The issues come in with closed source hardware drivers and manufacturer/carriers that lock you out from the ways you should be able to access your device. So you can't enable root access, nor can you flash a proper copy of Android to your device.
Don't support those companies. Plain and simple.
His end result isn't bad, but I consider it to be the wrong approach. I'd love to see something that ray traces the pixels as if from an electron gun to where they'd collide on the curved screen.
e: I wonder if 60hz would even be enough?
i cant for the life of me figure out why no one seems to care that FCEUX, the best emulator for NES (for TAS and otherwise) does not have the option for scan lines!!
I've never seen scan lines done well but it's been at least 10 years since I've looked.
What you really want to do is simulate the physics of a CRT, and you're going to need a boat load of pixels to get there. Bonus points if you simulate the losses of different wiring setups, notably RF cabling.
OK, so I've used the trials of many softwares to see what best suites my needs and here we go:
Backblaze seems really nice. The client doesn't use many resources while it's doing it's thing, has a Mac/Windows client, except some deal breakers.
It's an exclusion based backup. Which this likely works for most people who don't understand file systems, I don't want to backup everything and exclude specifics. I want the vice versa.
It also did not support multiple computers properly. Because of my job, I full-time use multiple laptops and multiple VMs.
Carbonite has a nice client, minimal resource usage, etc. Except same issue with multiple computers.
Cyphertite seemed really nice, but no mac client = me not a customer.
This brings us to our winner. SafeSync. It pains me to say it, but a product made by TrendMicro has easily beaten the competition, hands down. It's the most expensive (well, not considering almost all others need you to have an account per computer), but it hands down meets my criteria.
The web interface is a Java applet crapfest, but it works. The local software seems to work decently well, too. I was able to grab a 20mb directory that was stuffed full of files pretty easily.
You can select which local directories to back up, and which remote directories to pull back down, and to where. So it can double as a syncing tool like dropbox. It does not appear to support versioning, sadly.
SugarSync after a week gave me some shaddy build of their client to resolve my issue, but it renamed and spammed copies of a crapton of my files. Needless to say, when your source code directory has 27,979 files in 4,427 folders, that's a super shitty thing. It's been 4 days and their customer support hasn't responded about that issue. Their software worked great on Windows but their Mac client is dangerously buggy.
Edit: Arg. There's too many annoyances with SafeSync. It smells too heavily of poorly done corporate-ware, even though it does have the feature set I want. I'm just going to move everything I want to sync/backup to \dropbox\
Duderson wrote:
I'm looking to switch who I use, so I'd like some recommendations from you guys because you're less likely to be paid off :)
I used mozy in the past but when it came time to get my files, it took ~2 weeks. The service seems fine but their client is miserable. It uses tons of CPU to backup and restoration of files is a joke.
I currently use sugarsync, but since I have to use OSX now for work, it's constantly getting it's upload queue stuck. I like that it has android/ios automatic photo backups and stuff, but my only concern are my real files. There's multiple support cases that are years old with them so I doubt it's getting fixed.
dropbox is not an option as I need files in arbitrary locations to be backed up.
Anyone tried BackBlaze or Carbonite?
Thanks to everyone for contributing! Some very useful software in here.
The Archive Browser - OSX - I'm a winrar GUI junky and I couldn't find a GUI archive manager I liked on OSX until this one. Nothings ever as good as winrar, but this is good enough!
HyperDock - OSX - Mimics the Windows 7 window preview when you hover over dock icons, making multi-tasking easier.
Cinch - OSX - Mimics the Windows 7 behavior for dragging windows to the screen edge. Left and right side cause an automatic 50% resize, top causes maximize, and drag away from maximize causes normalize.
Rightload - Windows - My favorite FTP client, hands down. You right click on a file in Explorer and select one of your preconfigured destinations. When done, it gives you the file link(s) as urls, anchor tags, bb codes ,or any of the above with thumbnail previews.
If run directly, it allows you to paste your clipboard that's an image (automatic png'ed!) or text.
If uploading images, it has configurable auto-thumbnailing. I can't say enough good about this program.
Elpis - Windows - A very solid desktop Pandora client. It lacks the advanced stream management features but is super solid at playing.
iNFekt - Windows - A good program to view NFO files.
Oh yes, I use Notepad++ constantly. Sublime Text has grown in favor among most devs for their non-IDE code editing needs but I still prefer Notepad++.
Patashu wrote:
SpeedCrunch is a calculator and can be an alternative to PowerCalc. It has variables and a bunch of useful functions, many that powercalc is missing (including but not limited to: factorial, mod, and, or, xor, not, oct, bin, hex, all hyperbolic and trigonometric functions and inverses, gamma, erf, lots of probability functions, min, max, average, abs, arithmetic shifts...). The main feature missing from it that I liked about PowerCalc is user-definable functions, but if you're going to build a big, crazy function or program, you may as well cut out the middle man and open a Python or LUA interactive prompt at that point :)
Wow! This program is great. I still prefer (from habit) PowerCalc but this is the nicest OSX calculator I've used. My old favorite calc was //echo $calc in mIRC but I haven't had that installed in a decade.
Bobo the King wrote:
I used JDiskReport on my old computer, but never got around to installing it on my new computer. I have no idea how up-to-date it is. Maybe we should compare all three? I'll download 'em. (Then they can all tell me how much space is being taken up by all three!)
JDiskReport used to be my goto but compared to SpaceSniffer it's slower, less responsive, and at least last I used it, could end up infinitely recursing on symbolic links in the file system. Despite this it's still a great program.
I found it on a useful stack exchange thread that discusses a lot of this software: http://superuser.com/questions/8248/how-can-i-visualize-the-file-system-usage-on-windows
I'm always looking to expand my bank of useful software. Doubly so for OSX where all I really have/know about are CLI programs from the linux world.
So I'd like to share some software I find useful that aren't the obvious choices (sublime, audium, etc)
PowerGrep - Windows - A useful GUI grep-style tool. A common pattern is I right click in Explorer on the root source dir in Explorer and select PowerGrep All Subdirectories to search a code base. The results are very code friendly and even has binary support. The awesome formatting of the results makes it more useful to the CLI counterparts to me. Their Regex Buddy program is also mega-useful.
PowerCalc - Windows - From the Microsoft Windows XP Powertoys. Easily my favorite calculator software. Supports binary/hex/dec input/output.
SpaceSniffer - Windows - Head over heels the best "what's using my disk space?" application I've used. Even properly supports filesystem links so no more infinite recursions.
Fences - Windows - A useful product if you use your Windows Desktop. It can show arbitrary directories as Explorer's detailed list on your desktop.
Express Notes - Windows - Popup an autosaving multi-file notepad with shift+f8 from anywhere. Have it save to dropbox to auto-sync/backup. I've been using this for almost a decade. Notational Velocity is an OSX program that's like this, but I never got a taste for it.
As for SNES, similar things would work there, albeit with much larger (E)EPROM chips (e.g. 1024kB chip).
You could likely use any sized ROM, just adapt the pins over. I used to make NES flash carts with 1mbit flash roms.
Do any games read from prior to writing to WRAM? It's been like 10 years, but I recall seeing them zero it out, even. The contents are likely inconsistent and might be considered "undefinable."
edit: sum the contents as the PRNG seed!
This is a really cool site feature! This information has always been managed very disjointedly despite some efforts like data crystal.
A lot of people want to use this for different things.
I can see each value as needing a short description (title), long description (real descriptive text), and a symbolic name for a disassembler/debugger.
All of that will look very poor in the current HTML table. I'd consider something along the lines of:
[ 0x1234:1 | Some Title | some_title ]
[ A longer description that can span lines ]
[ 0x1235:1 | Some Title 2 | some_title_2 ]
[ A longer description that can span lines ]
[ 0x1236 ... 0x1240 ]
[ 0x1241:1 | Keeps going on, etc etc etc ]
That example shows gaps as '[ 0x1236 ... 0x1240 ]' which imho is mega-useful for assessing what you're looking at. Are they broken apart variables or a struct? A struct view would be awesome, too.
Assuming it could be done, you'd have to think in terms of resources. The difficulty with this game is that until you unlock and item, you can't find it in the dungeon, so some items are off limits right there.
Also, as far as a goal, you don't unlock The Womb until after your first playthrough of the first 6 floors, so to beat Mom's Heart and get the "real" ending you would need to have a save (or I believe it is possible to use We Can Go Deeper on The Depths 2 to skip to The Womb before you even unlock it), and to defeat It Lives you would need a save with 10 wins on it.
That really is a big issue. A "100%" unlock run to base a speed run's save from may not be interesting because the number of complete descents with various characters it requires. I bet a "beats The Chest with Isaac" could be done entertaining and may unlock enough for a speed run to be optimal.
We have 2 Super Mario Brother runs that lack running. The primary goal here is to make TAS videos that entertain the user.
Left+right? Sure. No left+right? Sure. Make it entertaining and the other rules suddenly matter less.
Maybe should not of been submitted, but I would watch an encode if one was posted. I loved these games.
Though a TAS is never very good to watch for them, I do like revisiting some of the mini-games that the games featured
Can you elaborate on "insanely buggy mechanics"? You might know something I don't. The strangest things I know combo-wise in this game are the morph combos or doing grabs in the middle of a juggle.
My memory has faded but I recall there being juggles that just didn't feel possible.
I like the WIP. Shows some very entertaining bugs/weirdness
I'm interested in seeing these once they're finish/wip and encoded. I played both of them some what heavily because I loved the insanely buggy mechanics.
You could do combos/juggles that made no sense what so ever.
Add some syncing info. Like 'and... begin' for right when they select 'new game' or whatever, then cut that out and dub over the audio track of the game.
