Posts for Lex


Lex
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Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Fair enough. However, most emulators save when the game says it saved. I don't disagree that the current situation with SRAM is okay for working around issues with other systems like SNES which have games which abuse SRAM somehow, but it must be obvious that the current situation is not ideal for usability with memory card systems, which couldn't possibly have games that abuse memory card save blocks for cheating out more performance, since flash memory cards are traditionally super slow. I'm not demanding a change or anything outlandish like that, but I'd like to know if anyone thinks I'm making any sense when I say that the user expects the emulator to have saved at the exact point when the software it's running says it's saved some data.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Even if it's crashing, the emulator should update the saveram file on the hard drive at the time you save in-game, not only when the emulator exits. What if your computer loses power or hardware fails in some other way? RetroArch has a crude solution: an option to save SRAM to disk every given interval. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing.
Lex
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Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Are you trying to say the image, while simply using the emulator itself, is being upscaled using nearest neighbor (aka point) instead of any other upscaling algorithm like bilinear, bicubic, etc.? If so, that's a setting in the emulator you're using, not a Windows setting. It's up to the emulator's video programming to decide how to present the image, and with the standalone versions of the emulators you mentioned, each has its own video options menu to peruse. I suggest you poke around and explore the video options menus in those emulators. If you mean that the video capture (usually AVI for those older emulators) output looks weird after upscaling during playback in your video player, then I suggest you follow the video playback guide I wrote for encoders who are Windows users. After having done so, you can choose between several image upscaling algorithms in madVR's settings, as shown in this screenshot:
Post subject: Re: If you get a seizure don't come crying to me.
Lex
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Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Spikestuff wrote:
Edit: To whoever this "Alex Folland" is who disabled their replies.
Alex wrote:
I appreciate the effort you spent on creating this test, but visually, this video sucks to watch. A blinking game sprite from Super Metroid or Road Runner's Death Valley Rally would be preferable.
A simple seizure test with flickering between black and white is quicker and easier and more notable than doing game footage, it can be done manually and checked frame by frame to make sure it flickers. Alternately I could've done the flickering test a bit differently with going through the colours Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Purple, Pink, Black, White etc. etc. but simple 2 colours is once again quicker and easier and more notable. Your comment has also been deleted due to the fact you came from TASVideos and you didn't own up here and that you don't have a reply system.
Hello. I am the "Alex Folland" whose comment you saw on YouTube. I did not mean to act anonymously by commenting on YouTube and I have not "disabled replies". I have been replied to on many other YouTube comments. I've checked my account settings just in case and I saw no relevant option. My theory is that since I'm using a Google+ account and you may not be, YouTube doesn't let you reply in that case. Also, I still see my comment there. It appears not to have been deleted. Maybe Google evilly hides deletion from the original authors of comments to privately create a seemingly-happy world for everyone. Regarding the video itself, I stand by my YouTube comment and I agree with Warp's parentheses statement. The test video is visually unsettling. Note that I'm only voicing my complaint with no expectation of immediate change; just sharing publicly so it's understood that there are people who feel this way. I mean I value your freedom to leave your video exactly how it is. Also, I do agree that it is a highly effective test of 60Hz playback, and I thank you for sharing it.
Lex
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Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Warp wrote:
How would I know if YouTube is playing at 60fps or 30fps?
You can right-click on the video and click "stats for nerds", which tells you the frame rate. I don't think this works for embedded videos, but it works on YouTube's site.
Lex
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Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
It is newly official, but the innovative encoders around here figured out how to unofficially do it before YouTube did it (semi-)properly.
Lex
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Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
We know. The main thread is in the encoders' corner, here: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12097
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Go to this link to test your browser's renderer: http://www.testufo.com/#test=stutter&demo=smooth&foreground=FFFFFF&background=000000&max=12&pps=720 If it's not perfectly smooth and your browser ends up saying "Sync failure" instead of "Valid", your browser's renderer sucks, unfortunately.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I had been a fan of speed runs of various games already starting in ~2003. I had seen the original Morimoto TAS from Kazaa in 2003, though I didn't know it was tool-assisted. I just thought whoever was playing was ridiculously good, for years. I had seen unassisted speed runs that were roughly as good, like Mega Man X done with only the blaster, etc. Eventually, I saw a few Sonic 2 TASes which I also thought were unassisted since I didn't know about TASing. They were nonsensically fast, and I did some more research and learned more about the wider TASing community, especially at TASvideos, then. This was in 2004, though I was only an unregistered forum lurker at that time. I have been deep into the Worms Armageddon community since 1999. In the mean time, Deadcode from the Worms Armageddon community independently wrote tools for a private build of Worms Armageddon. He had been given the game's source code by the development company, Team17, in order to maintain it. I hadn't put together immediately that Deadcode's single step, frame advance, and other tools were essentially the same system (though more advanced in a few ways) used by console TASers. He hadn't heard of console TASing when he wrote those tools. It excited me that Deadcode had independently programmed TASing tools, so I had to share his triumph with the world, and the pride I had for my "home" community of Worms Armageddon, so I registered and ended up writing this thread: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5736.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Gamer Maiden Sonia wrote:
ummm... errr... I'm really sorry for bringing this up Nach, but It's just that there was no reply for when I apologized earlier, so I can't tell if you accepted it or if you are holding hard feelings against me... (I'm bad at this stuff) but I really hope the latter isn't the case...
In all seriousness, you really shouldn't worry so much about Nach. Nach is a mature person who, if dealt with in a reasonable manner, will not harbor and maintain bad feelings. He tends not to get worked up over things since he's had many experiences with tons of different communities in his life. I am speaking for him because it's guaranteed that he wouldn't say something so directly and you clearly needed a direct answer.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
http://cde.peru21.pe//ima/0/0/1/5/6/156906.jpg This might be useful. It's a map of search engine dominance worldwide. Edit: Oh, my mistake. It seems to be a map of the "most visited website", which can include Facebook, which is not a search engine.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Boot Camp works well too.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I liked this. It looks optimized and the movements are pretty fun. The character's big, so avoiding things in the smallest spots, which happens often, looks pretty funny.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
That's basically what my guide says to do, yeah. It goes one small step further and uses madVR though.
Post subject: Updated video playback guide for Windows users
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
This is a guide to setting up a video playback chain which will properly play all the common video file container and codec formats without installing a whole lot of unnecessary junk on your machine, and pointedly without VLC, as it has a long history of many problems with correct playback. This guide uses MPC-HC and madVR to achieve a playback chain which uses the latest in video container format and decoding technology. Since I am personally a Windows user, this guide is meant for Windows users.
    Uninstall any codec packs you have. They will not be necessary. Install the MPC-HC nightly build from here: https://nightly.mpc-hc.org/ ("x86" or "x64" exe installer (choose depending on your OS: "x86" for 32-bit Windows and "x64" for 64-bit windows); should look something like "MPC-HC.1.7.10.236.x64.exe" with possibly a new version number) Install madVR from here: http://madshi.net/madVR.zip (Extract somewhere permanent* and run install.bat to register the filter. The folder you place these contents in will be where madVR runs from. Unlike most installers, you can't delete these files after use if you still want to use the installed software.) Run MPC-HC. In MPC-HC menus, navigate to "View" -> "Options" -> "Output". Click the dropdown box immediately below "DirectShow Video" to expand it and click "madVR". This sets the renderer MPC-HC will use to be madVR. In the left pane, click "Internal Filters". Under "Internal LAV Filters settings", click "Video decoder" to open its options menu. In the "Output Formats" section, disable all the checkboxes except "RGB32" and "RGB24", then set "RGB Output levels (for YUV -> RGB conversion)" to "PC (0-255)", then set "Dithering Mode" to "Random Dithering". The result should look somewhat like this: http://lex.clansfx.co.uk/image/screenshots/lavoutputformats.png. Click "OK". Click "OK". Open a video file with the version of MPC-HC you now have installed. In the system tray (bunch of icons on the right side of taskbar), right-click the madVR icon (looks like some beige lettering that says "MAD") and click "Edit madVR Settings...". On the left, expand the "rendering" menu and click "general settings". Disable "enable automatic fullscreen exclusive mode". Click "OK".
When that's done, you should have excellent video playback for almost every modern video-related format and codec available. To keep updated, simply check the sites linked at the beginning of this guide and run the newer installers. Rationale for madVR: madshi (madVR's developer) has taken playback smoothness research to extreme depth to minimize frame drops. This is especially helpful for high framerate video, such as output from video game consoles; video which is abundant on TASvideos. Minimizing frame drops helps encoders ensure their final resulting video will look good to the general public. This also helps for personal pleasure viewing of most content. This is without mentioning that madVR is relatively high-performance with subtitle rendering in particular, so playback of high resolution soft-subtitled content is usually less choppy on slower computers. Rationale for RGB step in LAV Video Decoder options: For those curious, the reasoning behind having RGB output through LAV Video Decoder is because the color conversion employed by LAV Video Decoder is known to be good and all renderers accept RGB as input, so you will be able to easily swap renderers if something funny is happening with madVR and still have good color output. This has helped me before. For those who have seen my previous guide, the main difference in this new guide is that the MPC-HC devs have opted to replace the original internal MPC-HC playback filters with LAV filters for greater compatibility. This is great because it makes the setup process much shorter and simpler! Also, since LAV Splitter now supports ordered chapters in matroska video, the Haali Splitter step is no longer necessary. To forum mods: Please don't merge this with the "Ask a question, get an answer" thread like you did the last time I posted a guide. It makes it very difficult to link this to people who need help. Also, nobody asked a question and this is not an answer to that question. This guide is meant to improve playback chains for more people so we can avoid having encoders using Windows with broken playback chains. Unless many many things were rewritten from scratch by an expert, VLC is a cancer. Avoid it. * By "somewhere permanent", I mean a path on your hard drive you plan on keeping intact during video playback. MadVR uses the path of those extracted files to run, so don't delete or move them after installing madVR or else it won't run. I personally put them in a madVR folder in my MPC-HC directory.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
1 pixel on your LCD is comprised of 3 subpixels: 1 of each primary color.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Yes. Colors displayed on LCD monitors are comprised of varying levels of red, green, and blue.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel I'm not sure where you're getting "yellow" from. The primary colors of light are red, green, and blue.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
If a TASer is TASing on an emulator which isn't doing what the actual system would be doing, they are not TASing any recognized and existing game. They are, in that case, TASing some broken program brought into existence by haphazardly reading a ROM copy in a way that was never intended by anyone who developed the game associated with that ROM file's original cartridge. In essence, TASing with inaccurate emulation is TASing nothing real at all. TASers want to avoid this situation in order to show what's actually possible in a game played by a super-human player who can keep memory values, registers, etc. etc. in their head while pressing exactly what they want to press at exactly the right times. It's an interesting concept, and the results can range from being exciting on a theoretical level to downright hilarious, with the viewer assuming that the situation could have actually happened in the real game with the right sequence of input. Also, a TAS on an inaccurate emulator may do something that is not actually possible in the real game, which could cause much frustration for, say, an unassisted speed-runner trying to perform some trick they saw in what they thought was a legitimate TAS.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Optimal programmatic solving of video game movement pathing has been done for Worms Armageddon battle race maps. BRSolver is a program which, partially by mapping the possible movements by trying input, finds the optimal (shortest time taken) path through a battle race map. By doing this, BRSolver discovered the flipwalking glitch and can generate an optimal WA replay file given any map with start and finish coordinate data. Here is an archive containing a normally very difficult Yoshi's Island themed battle race map by Wyvern and its BRSolver solution which includes: -the batch file used to run BRSolver which has start and finish coordinates, plus a couple map-specific flags -an image which traces the path taken by BRSolver through the possible movement space from start to finish -a human-readable log of the path taken by BRSolver -a Worms Armageddon replay file http://lex.clansfx.co.uk/worms/Wyvern_YoshisMercilessIsland_BRSolver.zip Due to the nature of offline competitions in the Worms Armageddon community, the developers of BRSolver (CyberShadow and Deadcode) have decided against releasing the program itself to the public, as it could possibly be used in some way to fabricate competition-winning replays, which would then have to be policed more closely; a great inconvenience for all involved. I've posted this as a possible inspiration for other similar programs yet to be written because I believe BRSolver to be a program which produces 100% optimal TASes, something that I have not otherwise seen achieved.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Remember that when you're reading the chat, you're reading the opinions of many separate people. They should not be interpreted as one entity, as natural as it feels to do so. One person claiming democracy to be "slow and boring" is not necessarily the same as the person wholeheartedly embracing the progress made in democracy mode.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
It would attempt to prove that Ryuto is a really awesome artist. That's already been proven though.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Yes it is. Check the second post. Bisqwit shows it. I'll just show it here too.
Lex
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
There are now >44000 people, and the twitch chat lag is affecting the game. The input stream comes in bursts at this point.