ePenis-thread \o/
- Workstation Athlon64 X2 5000+, 6 GB Ram, Radeon HD 5770, HDs 160GB, 240GB, 320GB. Gentoo Linux (work) & Windows 7 (gaming). Monitors 24" 1920x1200 + 21" 1600x1200 + projector Acer H5350 (1280x720) for movies and the Wii.
- Server Athlon64 3000+, 1GB Ram, no GPU, HDs 80GB, 500GB, 500GB, 750GB
- Notebook Core2 Duo T8100, 4 GB Ram, Quadro NVS 140M, 1680x1050. The GPU is from nvidia's defective series, already had to replace the fan due to too much stress. Hopefully the GPU lives until nice fusion notebooks are available :/
Next up is a new mobo/ram/CPU for the workstation while the old one trickles down to the server. Still waiting for a reasonably powerful quad- or 6-core from AMD with low power consumption. But apparently that's not going to happen until the first 32nm CPUs arrive.
I should also throw out all those small HDs and replace them with three large ones, for noise reduction. But meh, those things cost money. And a weekend with a screwdriver and copying and reinstalling windows because it's too stupid for cloning.
If item% is part of your goals, inventory-manipulating glitches mustn't be used.
It's awesome to state controversial opinions as facts. That way you don't need actual arguments! ;)
About as boring as the actual show. Has nothing impressive to show except for a single case of trivial luck manipulation.
I did laugh at the vote-buttons though. We should publish those.
Technically impressive, but the warping got boring after a while. I enjoyed the boss-rush videos more - they feature over-the-top boss-slaughtering, but lose the uneventful stuff in between.
You did draw a dinosaur, but the lack of colors make this games unsuitable for TASing. Voting NO.
j/k, I really enjoyed it. These are the kind of TASes I can even show to my non-gamer friends to make them laugh.
I am interested in how hard that alien correspondent thing would be if the symbols for +-*/ are also different.
First, figure out which symbols are digits and which are operators. If it's not obvious from the layout, just type something and see what the calculator does.
Then calculate
ABCDE ? ABCDE
for all 4 operators. The result with 7 or more digits was done through multiplication, the one with 4 to 6 digits through addition.
You've got two other results, one of them resulted in 1 and the other in 0. Calculate 0+1.
With 5 operations, you now know all 4 operators and the digits 0 and 1, adding just 3 operations to the previous case.
I can do that faster:
calculate A-A (1 operation)
Now we know which symbol is 0
calculate B/B (1 operation)
where B is any symbol that's not the zero, now we know the 1
Calculate 1+1 = 2, 2+1 = 3, ... (7 operations)
Now we have all numbers from 0 to 8. The remaining one is number 9.
-> 9 symbols determined in 9 operations.
Bonus 1: This works with any amount of symbols. If we don't know in advance how many symbols there are (even though we could count the buttons on the calculator), we need 2 more calculations in step 3, adding up until we get a 2-digit result.
Bonus 2: if there are leftover symbols (duplicates), each's weight can be determined by adding 1, thus 1 calculation per symbol. If we pick a 0-duplicate in step 2, we just note it as 0 and pick another.
This relies on the calculator to always choose a single representation for each digits in its results. If the calculator chooses the symbols in its results randomly, there's no algorithm to determine all weights that's guaranteed to terminate.
Bonus 3: uhm, so if there's no symbol for 7, what would the calculator say when I type 6+1? If the result is empty, I'll just try 6+2 next until I find a symbol. Doesn't work if symbols for 0 or 1 are lacking, or if a larger range of symbols is missing.
Bonus 4: First determine all integers as above, then determine any remaining fractional symbol. Enumerate |N x |N, try each fraction and see if it produces a missing symbol. Stop when all symbols are found. Guaranteed to terminate, someday, unless the calculator's batteries run out or you die of old age.
look, if I was about to spend my entire life with a princess that's too stupid to answer anything but yes/no-questions and has a high chance of being a dishonest brat, I'd just shag the most beautiful one, then saddle my horse and ride off to a distant country.
The real question would be: would you prefer the honest one, or would you rather go with the one that's bound to tell you every day how smart and beautiful you are, and how happy she is to be married to you? :p
(of course, 4 questions are enough to determine all three princesses. There's probably a solution with less, but given the smarts of those princesses, the kind of questions needed might make their heads explode.)
IMHO the pacing of this run is fine. No need to go for hard mode.
I can't play the .DSM's either, the linux version of DeSmuMe always crashes when I try. Looking forward to the next youtube'd WIP :)
ah, an encode :)
It's interesting to note that even with a perfectly symmetrical problem, the optimal solution seems to be very chaotic, without symmetry and with completely unexpected results (try guessing which balls are pocketed at the beginning of a shot).
It's evident that games like this will never be TASed to their full potential by mere humans with a bit of re-recording. Makes me wonder which other games are out there with similar complex and chaotic decision trees?
oh, yes vote of course. Turning chaos (seemingly random shots) into order (pocketed balls) is a kind of beauty that's rarely found anywhere else.
I largely agree with the "grey area" part, but there are two things I wish to add.
There's another, more important difference between consoles and PCs than the purpose they were designed for: games for consoles are usually delivered on a read-only medium.
The second point is that resetting during a save is not accurately emulated.
emulator: you hit "reset". Every write that's been issued by the program has already been passed to the filesystem on the host and will eventually be written to disk.
real PC: you hit "reset". Some data is lost in memory caches. Some more data is lost on the hard drive while it was waiting for the platters to rotate into position. Maybe a block was halfway written and is now permanently unreadable due to containing a wrong checksum.
As such, resetting a game while files are open for writing isn't emulated properly and shouldn't be used.
My opinion on the matter is that we shouldn't touch any file that's not explicitely marked as a configuration file, and even then only if it's either strictly needed (like for sound configuration) or produces a more interesting run (which is up to individual debate).
This run coloured a dinosaur. Pale green. From watching.
The appeal of this run is basically a gimmick. Not that that has ever stopped us from publishing. The game isn't too bad, either. But I'd like an explanation about the coins after the first boss, too. Standing around idly looks bad.
moozooh wrote:
As games were distributed on rewritable floppy discs during the time, a slight difference in data could render the run either unverifiable or at all unacceptable as per the dirty SRAM clause.
not only that, certain copy protection mechanisms relied on the disk controller reading different data each time it passed over a sector. The .IDF format can handle that, but as a result it's non-deterministic. It's also closed source. Useless.
Pretty much the only thing that runs on standard .ADF are cracked versions with suspicious intros, and you know we don't want to use those. Very few games went without disk-based copy protection; those usually required entering some words from the manual or something.
Run Linux inside VirtualBox on a Mac, using Wine to run UAE where you execute ShapeShifter to emulate an old M680x0 macintosh computer. Port DOSBox to that, run an NES emulator inside.
Mac -> Linux -> Windows -> Amiga -> 680x0-Mac -> DOS -> NES
7 systems, if you're stupid enough to own an actual apple computer. You might be able to fit in a *BSD (if that counts) or Atari (not sure about the emu situation).
Oh yeah, I wish samus could do that. Maybe she could, if she just stopped wearing a ton of metal on her body.
Umihara Kawase-games are difficult to watch. For someone who doesn't know the game, it's too fast, too unusual to understand what's really going on, and when you almost think you understood, there's a bunch of credits out of nowhere and the run ends.
I guess half the viewers just stop watching, the other half continue watching it again and again until they love it.
I belong to the second group. Yes vote.
I'm always amazed how it's possible that a re-creation of a game written for a 1.8MHz CPU does not run at full speed on a machine that's more than a thousand times faster.
yeah, those "oh, I know that room"-moments are usually signs of a poor hack.
I didn't bother searching and installing the hack, but if the any% on youtube is similar, that's be a no-vote from me. *
"Here, go collect 1384798 energy tanks! We'll bother with enemies later!" :/
* Not actually voting since I haven't watched this run
I did consider the picture idea, but there are some difficulties. The field is only 10 blocks wide, which is not enough to draw even the most basic Mario or Link sprites. You are also limited because every line needs to contain at least one hole. Either way, in the ends, I couldn't think of a nice, recognizable image.
