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I believe the Famicom Disk System would be a perfect candidate for such a thing because the program data resides on writable memory.
The pinnacle of this would be to start playing a specific Famicom Disk System game and somehow abuse a glitch that would allow reprogramming the entire disk so that it becomes an entirely different game.
The holy grail: Playing Zelda no Densetsu and transforming it into Super Mario Bros. through input alone! :D
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I would like to revive this thread because of recent progress in console verification.
Basically I see 2 types of input:
- Passive: the input is ignored unless it is done at the exact moment the hardware attempts to read it. Examples includes buttons on NES controllers and turned-on microphones.
- Active: the input causes an interrupt or changes the overall state of the hardware. Examples include hard resets, disc swapping and connecting/disconnecting a USB controller.
Thanks to console verification bots, it has been proven that even in cases of passive input, such input can be read multiple times per frame, preventing potentially useful scenarios to TASers. They are also easily detectable and can prevent desyncs. In my opinion, this is how all emulators used for TASing should read and record passive input as well.
Active input is a bit more complex since emulators aren't perfect simulators. On this regard, I believe input should be allowed at the precision the emulator guarantees proper emulation of a given set of operations. For these moments, emulators should be able in theory to allow inserting breakpoints in the emulation process (not just CPU-bound operations) and insert active input immediately after a break occurs.
By adding such features in emulators, it would then be possible for example to extend the left+right concept to even more varied directional inputs and corrupt save data through hard reset at the exact block required to perform a specific trick.
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Bisqwit wrote:
deuxhero wrote:
What exception is made for Rygar and why?
In Rygar, the second half of the ending text does not appear until someone hits the key. The exception is that the movie can end when the final hit is delivered, and to see the second half of the ending text, the encoder must hit the key to turn the "page". In those encodings which I did, I pressed the key right when the song goes to the second part. Other encoders have hit it at other times or forgotten about the whole thing.
Is this exception still relevant anymore? There are plenty of other games with interactive ending sequences, and there's even the recent [1946] SNES EarthBound "check glitch" by pirohiko, MUGG in 09:01.77 that found a way to skip all of the credits to jump directly to the ending screen and saved more than 10 minutes by doing so.
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Brandon wrote:
Well, this run's predecessor has been verified, right? I know this is highly controversial, but it'd be a shame to replace an accurate run with an inaccurate run, if we can in fact prove that the run could never sync on a console. At the same time, I don't know if this would be fixable.
I have to sadly agree with Brandon here. If this run is proven impossible to be played back on a real copy of SMB, then it doesn't beat the game and should be either fixed or rejected.
I'm holding my vote until this matter is resolved.
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Voting no for bad game choice and bad goal:
- The game physics are too simplistic for a TAS. Except for the hovering glitch and the level end fanfare skipping, it looks too close to a normal speedrun.
- The evolving art design goes by so quickly it cannot be appreciated, and it's the core appeal of the game.
- The gameplay is designed around going through eversion layers in your advantage to progress, but you skip all that since your goal isn't the good ending. The result is a much more boring route.
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Bad optimization combined with no Toad Award forces me to vote no. However, I really like this idea and wouldn't mind seeing this run published if only to encourage more people to beat this run.
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Personman wrote:
No one (I don't think?) wants to eliminate the longer runs. The idea is to have the "less-glitched" runs be the ones that get a special category, while the absolute fastest run is labeled any%. After all, the name does imply at any percent of the game's objectives may be completed before reaching the end state.
So we can have a "beats Bowser" run and a "beats Ganondorf" run or whatever. The default, any% category should go to the absolute fastest run.
Longer runs are fine, but I do have a problem with them when they are simply considered less glitchy rather than have clearly defined alternate goals and when they do not bring something different compared to other categories, not to mention that avoiding a specific glitch is almost always a bad goal choice.
For instance, we can't use "beats Bowser" as a new category as you suggested. What if there was a run that would teleport Mario from an early level to Bowser's room directly? I think it would be quickly rejected when compared to the current submissions. A better category name would be "shortest overworld route to Bowser". Still, this is in my opinion a bad goal choice compared to any% and 100% (I won't mention why again).
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I watched the whole thing and I really enjoyed your tutorial, especially the optimizing video - I never realized how much fractional pixels and speed values could make such a difference before. My only complain so far that it was often tedious at times and the videos could have easily been cut in half without losing content, if only for all the trouble you had moving windows around your minuscule recording area.
I vote for a lua script tutorial in a future video.
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kaizoman666 wrote:
SML2:6GC isn't the best example to bring up, due to it obsoleting the previous run that wasn't labeled "glitched", because the previous run abused a glitch that was part of the "glitched" run, and so the two runs were considered too similar to be separated. Doesn't mean a non-glitched run can't be submitted, it just can't use the glitch.
It'd be like if you used the walk-through-walls glitch to TAS ALTTP without skipping to the credits, and still tried to submit it as a non-glitched run.
In the case of SML2:6GC, the fact that the same glitch was used in the previous movie was not the only reason for obsoletion. See here:
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=258997#258997
As for ALttP, the only reasoning I could find for having 2 categories was that the long version was considered a full playthrough, even though the short version is currently labeled "glitched" while the long version is also full of game-breaking glitches (including passing through solid objects and hovering over holes). The original decision goes back from 2005 when the site was still young, so I couldn't find any better explanation. asteron's explanation of what a "glitched" category is matches the full playthrough reasoning perfectly however so I'm gonna go with that (although I find this definition of "glitched" vague and highly confusing).
Considering the above, and since I'm in the opinion that a full playthrough of SMW is a full 100% run, creating a separate category for this run would not be consistent with past decisions.
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Weatherton wrote:
If the process were real (i.e. glitch the menus to get a file with 120 stars), it could be used to beat the current 0 star TAS. Assuming all keys were also opened (a reasonable assumption given that this is a hypothetical situation anyway), the player could simply run up to the final Bowser fight and beat him to see the credits.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. What's your point?
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Kirkq wrote:
Given the state of the current "any%" that recently hit the workbench, I think this opens up room for 3 categories.
1: Credits glitch
2: any%
3: any% low glitch
In my opinion, I don't see the point of having different categories for every type of glitch ever found. I won't go into much detail since I already discussed this matter in the other SMW submission, but basically I only see the relevance of the following categories:
- Any%
- 100%
- Glitchless 100%
rog wrote:
The difference is fairly obvious. In oot, you don't beat the game until you do the exact same thing you would normally do: beat the final boss. Most of the game before that is skipped, but in the end, you still need to beat the boss.
You are correct: the credits glitch directly beats the game while the reverse bottle adventure glitch does not. What I meant was that both glitches are memory manipulation bugs and thus must be considered equally powerful. If the RBA glitch is allowed, then the credits glitch must also be allowed.
As for the rest, I already discussed it in my previous posts, but I would find it a real shame if this run would be rejected simply because the game is not beaten the expected way.
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Wow, very nice and precise explanation p4plus2! Impressive, I like that!
So basically, beating SMW normally eventually causes the game to reach game mode 29 and stay on it until reset. If somehow we would have jumped directly to game mode 29 from game mode 14 however, it would have looked as if the game simply hanged while playing instead of a win, but by passing through game mode 27 beforehand, then we get the ending screen, which is the latest output feedback of the ending sequence.
Also, if I understand the code you posted correctly (correct me if I'm wrong), passing through game mode 26 simply allows a smoother transition, since the game would otherwise need to overflow the brightness value during game mode 28 to reach game mode 29.
Considering this, even though reaching game mode 29 is the final win state of SMW, since there is no win output feedback that far in the code, the best test in my opinion to determine a win is to check if the program counter equals $00963D, or in other words if the game is about to execute the code associated with game mode 27.
As for those that feel that the correct win test should be at the earliest point of the ending sequence rather than the latest, well that point would be the exact moment when Bowser is defeated, not the Thank You screen. Therefore, both versions of this run would need to be rejected, since adding the 3 frames would merely be a compromise that satisfies nobody except on a purely subjective level.
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p4plus2 wrote:
How do you define the "machine thinking you won"? As far as the SNES cares it just executes opcodes, there is no real hardware "win state". That said, there are software level win states, and I believe that once a software level "winning" routine has been triggered, that would qualify as winning.♦
That's exactly what I meant - I was including the program counter as part of the hardware state. So here, the "display ending screen" routine is executing, therefore you win. Having the wrong background music is irrelevant - even under normal conditions, the ending screen is just the continuation of the music of the previous screen.
Derakon wrote:
So, if I found a "write to save memory" glitch and set the win bit, then you'd accept that the game was completed, even if I was in the middle of a level at the time?
I don't see the difference between doing that and using the reverse bottle adventure glitch in Ocarina of Time to pick up sage medallions out of thin air.
That said, I think most people would require some kind of visual feedback as evidence, and checking the value of a bit in RAM is not the proper method to do so in general as you just pointed out, unless changing that bit has some obvious consequences. Therefore, checking the program counter value and the stack state is a much better test to determine a win.
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CtrlAltDestroy wrote:
You know what this reminds me of? This movie: http://tasvideos.org/1365M.html
That movie had a bunch of weird incomprehensible stuff happen, and then returned to the title screen, with no ending sequence. But just because the world number was greater than 7, beating the castle counted as "winning" and thus the game was counted as beaten just because an invisible flag was set unbeknownst to the player.
I love both this movie and that one for the sheer WTF value, but you have to admit this one has a clearer ending, because it at least has a "THE END" screen.
Just an observation.
I would add unto that and state that this is most likely the reason why there is such wildly opposite opinions on this matter: there is no consensus on which criteria to use as the definition of "beating the game".
For some people like me, "beating the game" means getting the hardware to a state that was designed to be reached only after completing the game's primary objective. For some other people. "beating the game" means reaching an ending sequence and feel some sort of closure. For some more other people, "beating the game" means completing the game's primary objective itself as originally designed. All of these definitions are similar and usually interchangeable, but not in this case.
Unfortunately, in the context of a friendly competition, there needs to be a clear goal that everyone can agree upon. So then, when do you beat the game? When the machine thinks that you've won, when you feel that you've won, or when the original game design says that you've won? For somebody like me that has studied game theory, the only reasonable answer is when the machine thinks that you've won, because it is easily definable and observable, while the other choices are open to interpretation and subjectivity.
As far as entertainment is concerned, I think it's quite clear that publishing one version over the other (or neither of them) will cause many disappointed people, and I believe that our personal definition of "beating the game" is a reflection of how we each enjoy our games.
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I'll copy-paste what I wrote in another thread since it is relevant:
In my opinion, there should be no such thing as a "glitched" category in the first place, but rather a "no player-defined restriction" category which should be the default. The existence of any other category by introducing player-defined restrictions should be based on whether or not introducing these restrictions is an interesting goal in itself and if the final result offers something significantly new and/or different from the others, such as "no save data corruption by resetting" or "no wall clipping" for example.
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DarkMoon wrote:
So using any glitch at all constitutes a "glitched" category?
In my opinion, there should be no such thing as a "glitched" category in the first place, but rather a "no player-defined restriction" category which should be the default. The existence of any other category by introducing player-defined restrictions should be based on whether or not introducing these restrictions is an interesting goal in itself and if the final result offers something significantly new and/or different from the others, such as "no save data corruption by resetting" or "no wall clipping" for example.
In the case of this particular submission, the restriction added is "no credits glitch". In my opinion, this is not an interesting goal in itself, and the only thing new and different in such a category when compared to no restrictions or a glitchless restriction is the item box glitch itself, which would most likely be used in a (glitched) 96-exit restriction in more interesting ways. Sure, the item box glitch is interesting in itself, but I fail to see the pertinence to add a separate category just for swapping a level-skipping glitch with another one.
DarkMoon wrote:
Because you need Yoshi, of which there are none in YI1.
Ah I forgot about that. However, there's a Yoshi in YI2, so why wait until after beating YI3 before backtracking to YI1 to perform the glitch?
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MUGG wrote:
The 9 minute smv sure is a crazy way of ending the TAS, but I figured the majority of the audience would want the staff roll in the TAS, for its beautiful and moving ending themes. I'm not so sure about this one. Personally I find the The End screens in SMW and EB quite abrupt and it's not offering the "feeling" of having completed the game to the viewer. Therefore, I'd like to note that I'd be in favor of the upcoming SMW TAS to trigger the ending sequence rather than the abrupt The End screen.
At the end of the day I can appreciate both versions of both runs, it's just bothering me to see the CREDITS glitch in smw to simply show a The End screen with the level's BGM still playing. It's not showing any credits.
As I already mentioned in the SMW credits glitch submission thread, I completely disagree with this logic. I don't care about seeing longer ending sequences, and on top of that doing so in this case more than doubles the input length. I have voted Yes, but only because the quick ending version was not submitted separately. You should definitely replace the current submission with this much more entertaining and shorter one.
By the way, congratulations for this awesome improvement!
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Nice glitch! Unfortunately I have to vote No because of the credits glitch run that was just submitted. I just do not see the point for 2 glitched any% runs categories. The same strategies you used could be applied to a glitched 100% run and would be much more interesting and entertaining I believe.
By the way, why backtrack all the way to YI1 after beating YI3? Wouldn't it be faster to start with YI1 right away to avoid more walking on the overworld map?
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Nahoc wrote:
DarkKobold wrote:
I don't feel like this one ends, quite the way the other movie ends. Could you add the 3 frames, and link to that movie?
The music continues, and the splash screen just fades in. Not really the same as "reaching the credits"
I second this. You should really use those 3 extra frames to get the "full credits".
Man I haven't logged in on these forums for years. However I was compelled to do so because I strongly disagree with you two. Having a longer input (in this case 3 frames) in order to reach the ending screen even later is much less entertaining in my opinion. Sacrificing those frames would only cause the viewer to witness the same old Super Mario World ending everybody has seen countless times already.
This difference of opinion is definitely a gray area though. The movie rules clearly states that "a speed-oriented movie must beat all existing records", and the movie guidelines states that "you are permitted to trade off speed for entertainment". The way I interpret these seemingly contradictory statements is the following: trading speed for entertainment is allowed only if it isn't a speed-oriented movie.
However, I know that there has been some precedent in the past to the contrary such as one of the Castlevania SotN runs to avoid spamming the Wolf transformation. (All of the SotN runs are all strangely missing from the Movies section right now for some reason so I can't link to the one I'm referring to.) I'm not sure if it's because a faster run has not yet been made even though that improvement was known to the author or because it was considered a valid exception to the rule and that known improvement would have been rejected for entertainment purposes, but I find this practice quite annoying and not entertaining at all. In any case, I believe a clarification of this gray zone in the current rules/guidelines of TASvideos is in order.
In the end, as long as this gray area will remain, it will be the decision of a judge to decide which version to publish, and if said judge decides to select the most entertaining version rather than the absolute fastest, then it becomes a matter of public opinion, and I think it would be wise to post an encode of the longer version in this thread so that everybody can state which version is the most entertaining for them.
Needless to say, I hope the absolute fastest will be selected. For the rest, I leave the final decision to the judges.
That said, kudos to everybody that made this run possible, this was very impressive and entertaining! May I suggest a commentary directly on the encode since the input is so strange?
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I noticed that when recoding an AVI in snes9x 1.51, the resulting AVI is at 50.00 fps for PAL games and 60.00 fps for NTSC games.
But isn't that odd? NTSC is closer to 59.94 fps than 60.00 fps! To be more exact, NTSC runs at (60/1.001) fps!
Does that mean that all NTSC pre-recorded videos on TASvideos are played back 0.1% too fast? Is there any way to fix this?
What about when you playback a SMV file from the emulator, or just play the game at normal speed? Does snes9x run at 60 fps or at true NTSC speed? Is there a setting to control this?
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I really like the new site layout, congrats!
The only problem I can see is that there is no longer a "Rate" link on the front page while you're logged in.
Despite this, I believe that the new layout is definitely a major improvement. ^_^
