I laughed my head off at how horrible this one is. From the stretched out Google logo to the Sponsorship by Microsoft.
The basic scheme of the scam is always about some kind of inheritance or large bank account which has somehow lost its owner and needs to be transferred overseas so that the government or whoever doesn't impound it (or a myriad of variations to this basic scheme), and the sum is always in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, from which the victim is promised something like 10% or 20% if he helps in this transfer, in other words, the victim is promised sums like $1900000 (ONE MILLION NINE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS). The victims who get fooled by this invariably get greedy by such a large amount of money.
In this case, however, I think the scammers made a slight blunder with the amount of money. Why would google award over a million dollars to a random user? That's a suspiciously large sum, and would be quite unprecedent. This might raise the suspicion of even the most naive people.
A sum like 10 thousand dollars might have worked a lot better, as it's a much more believable sum for such an award.
This works both ways, I tend to ignore things that are megathreads because the quality is usually low.
This particular megathread might work much better because it would be a distillation of the interesting content (in other words, the WIP videos themselves), rather than 10% being the interesting content and 90% being useless natter, as usual in huge threads.
This seems wrong, somehow - like you're losing colour information and not getting the full breadth of what's happened in the movie. I mean, look at the ones on the first page - they're absolutely flooded with colour and little variations, this one looks more like a gif.
I don't know if there's some kind of bug in the script or not, but getting rather dull results from averaging thousands of frames of a single game is not something which should be surprising.
If there's an enormous amount of color variation in a certain pixel, the average will most probably be a shade of gray. If the variation encompasses a large area of pixels, large gray areas are to be expected.
In areas of very little variation the little variation there is is expected to be completely lost. For example, assume that the movie is 1000 frames long and at some area of the screen you have mostly a static color, like the blue of a sky. For a few frames there may be something else on those specific pixels. However, since you have something like 990 frames of blue pixels on that area and 10 frames of something else, averaging them will drop those 10 frames of variation virtually completely out (iow. you might see something like a 1% deviation from the blue, which is almost indistinguishable).
There are two matchings here:
* The emulator needs to match framerate of console (as close as possible)
* The console needs to near-match framerate of whatever relevant TV standard (in this case NTSC).
The first match should be as exact as possible because it is emulation quality matter.
The later match does not have to be exact. real TVs don't require exact rate match, they will sync if frequency is near enough. Too far and sync might be lost.
So when watched on real NTSC TV, NES output really does have field rate of sightly over 60fps.
I thought that PAL TV refresh rates are 50 FPS because the AC current in PAL areas is 50 Hz, and likewise NTCS uses 60 FPS because the AC current in NTSC areas is 60 Hz (after all, TV was invented way before any of this digital stuff, so everything was pretty analog and the timings were taken directly from the AC power input). Consoles need to match the refresh rate of the TV for rather obvious reasons (which is why there were separate PAL and NTSC consoles).
I'm guessing the best solution would be to directly convert the array u, containing all information about the averaged picture, into an image file, without displaying it first. However, I don't know how to do that, or if a lua script even can do something like that (if someone knows, I would be very interested).
Even if lua (as implemented in the emulators) doesn't support writing to image files directly, if it supports writing text to a file, then you can do it. The PPM format is ascii-based and really, really simple. Writing a raw pixel array to a PPM takes only 2 or 3 lines of code in almost any language. Then you can use eg. ImageMagick to convert the PPM to a PNG.
lol, this thread is way off track, but i have a teacher at my school (ex football coach, and this is in us) who puts movies on the last few days of every term. he has a box of pirated movies that he casually pulls out. it has suprised me this past x years how many pirated movies i have seen shown at school.
Depending on which country you live, you could anonymously inform the appropriate authorities. Especially if you have any kind of grudge against said professor or the school... (Of course this depends a lot on the country, but at least in Finland authorities would be interested if a public school was doing such blatant piracy.)
Some people use it for the sake of nostalgia; they enjoy the game for what it is.
In fact, it's not always necessarily just about the "nostalgia", but purely because you want to play a good game, and that game happens to be made for an old console which you don't own and/or the game itself might not be available anymore.
Of course from a moral point of view this presents a dilemma, because technically speaking you are breaking the law by doing that. Personally speaking I would be completely ready to pay real money to buy certain PlayStation 1 games (which I could then play with an emulator, as I don't own the console), but those games are just not available, period. I have searched at local shops here which still sell some (used) PS1 games, but the selection is invariably very poor and naturally lack the games I want (mainly those of the JRPG kind). I have tried to search in online shops, and most just don't sell PS1 games at all, and even those which do, not very surprisingly have a very poor selection and lack the games I want. It's just physically impossible to get these games legally anymore. Of course this still doesn't make it any less illegal to just download the roms, at least technically speaking.
FODA wrote:
- copying files from someone's pc to yours through p2p doesn't qualify as a subject for conversation
I attended an English course at the University here many years ago, and as a task we had to make a short presentation on any subject in English. One of the students made a presentation about a movie he saw (I think it was the South Park movie) and he very casually mentioned how he had downloaded it from the internet to see it (the movie was still rather new back then). I was a bit amazed how casually and naturally some people will admit to their own piracy in public, in front of a class of students and a professor, like it was the most natural thing in the world, without any worry.
Make large code blocks collapsible.
In other words, if a code block is larger than a certain threshold, collapse it (using javascript) and add a button (like "show" or "expand") which expands it to its normal state.
This way when people post large pieces of lua script, their post won't be miles long by default, and people can expand the code optionally.
How would one go about doing such a thing if they wanted to?
If Lua has access to the pixel data being displayed, I'm sure it would take but just a few lines of Lua code to sum all the pixels of each frame to an array and then divide the values by the number of frames. Then it's a question of whether you can save the values in that array to an image file format (if Lua has no direct support, then you could simply output to a ppm (easiest, as it's an ascii-based format) or raw tga (binary format with an 18-byte header, but very simple), and then use a converter to convert it to a png).
zeromus, Ilari, paul_t, adelikat, nitsuja, gocha, mz, upthorn .... a few more I'm forgetting.
They are pros at emulators, because they code them.
Technically speaking, "pro" means someone who makes a living out of it. For example a pro gamer is someone who actually earns real money out of playing games.
Of course the vernacular meaning of "pro" is someone who is very experienced and skilled at something. (Perhaps in this case "pro" could mean "proficient" instead of "professional"...)
It would be nice if we had a consistent naming convention for files first (as has been suggested several times in the past), before adding even more stuff to the current unofficial loose naming convention.
Btw, isn't "SD" a misnomer for the "normal-resolution" videos? The acronym comes from "standard-definition television", where it signifies a vertical resolution of 480-576 scanlines (iow. pixels in digital media), while most of the normal videos are encoded with a vertical resolution of 224 pixels or such (going as low as 144 pixels with handheld games).
This to me is a logical train of thought. When it is ignored, it appears as though one does not feel a need to watch the run to postulate an argument regarding its publication.
Please note that I had a slightly different mindset about the significance of the rules when I first posed my objection. I admit that this mindset of mine has changed a bit during this thread (towards being more accepting of the debug menu trick used in this run).
My original objection was (and, in fact, still is): Using cheats provided by the game itself (the Konami code being one example of such) is usually prohibited for a reason (they make "god-like" playing accessible to the unassisted player, hence removing most of the relevance of the tool-assisted play). This reason is completely independent of how the cheat is triggered. What matters is the end result: If the run becomes trivial, then it becomes trivial regardless.
The counter-argument to this objection seemed to be that if triggering the cheat is "cool enough" and requires techniques which are extremely difficult (if not even impossible) to achieve in normal play, and/or very elaborate (and hence entertaining) setting-up, then the cheat becomes acceptable.
At first I found this counter-argument to be invalid: It's still triggering a cheat, and the method by which it's being triggered doesn't matter.
However, after the discussion in this thread I have been convinced otherwise, so I have changed my opinion. If triggering the cheat is entertaining enough, then that is, indeed, a good reason to accept the run. After all, even if the cheat itself is making the rest of the run "trivial", triggering the cheat was not, and that in itself can be so entertaining as to warrant publication.
(OTOH, I still disagree with "the cheat becomes acceptable if it can only be triggered using a glitch". What I have started agreeing with is, as said, "the cheat becomes acceptable if it can only be triggered in a way that is entertaining enough".)
You claim that you are not trying to flame me, yet you are doing exactly that.
Imagine that I asked you: "Seriously, why are you here? Do you even like TASes, or do you just like to whine about the length of people's posts and how many paragraphs they use?"
Do you seriously expect me to try to answer such an inflammatory and nonsensical question? If you had read everything I have written in this thread (not to talk about everything I have written in the past), you would not be asking such a stupid question. Your question is inflammatory and insulting, and from the tone of your posts I'm pretty certain it's so on purpose. You know perfectly well that your question is provocative and insulting.
The discussion with you was civil until everyone found out you had not watched the run.
No, it was civil until you "found out" that and unanimously declared that I had "lost all credibility".
You look bad to people because you seem too LAZY to watch the run, making you UNINFORMED about the current run in question.
My objection has still absolutely nothing to do with how the run looks like or how it accesses the debug menu. Even if this was the best run I had ever seen in my life and would blow my mind, it would still have absolutely nothing to do with my objection. Even if I thought that the method by which the debug menu is being accessed is by far the best piece of TASing prowess and because of that this run should be elevated to be the best run of the entire site and would be the only run which deserves two stars, it would still not have any effect on my objection.
My objection was: Is using such a debug menu (which can be used to modify memory) acceptable regardless of how the menu is being accessed? What the run looks like has zero effect on the answer to that question.
Will you finally get that through your thick head, please?
You have insinuated that watching the run would somehow affect my opinion on the subject matter that I have been writing about, but you have completely failed to explain why that would be so.
However, this has not stopped you from making LONG-WINDED posts.
Why do you seem to have such an obsession with multi-paragraph long-winded posts? What the h*** does it matter how long or short posts are? Who cares? Are you paying for your internet connection by the byte or something? I honestly can't understand that.
If you don't want to read "multi-paragraph" "long-winded" posts, then don't. I just can't understand your objection.
Once again, Warp, seriously, why are you here? Do you even like TASes, or do you just like arguing the rules of this site?
You seem to read only what you want to read. Have you even bothered to read everything that I have written in this thread?
I have been having a civil, rational conversation about the rules and how the technique used in this run should be handled according to them, and how the rules should be understood. You started to convert this conversation into some kind of flamewar starting with your "you lost all your credibility" BS.
I commented that in my opinion if the debug menu can be used for entering cheat codes in the same way as you can do with a cheating device such as GameGenie, it would make the technique invalid and against the rules.
TASing can be viewed in a computational way as trying to find the smallest input file that takes the game to a certain state, normally the ending. The input file consists only of the buttons you pressed, it doesn't include any cheat code you entered on certain frames. Therefore, anything that uses Game Genie to complete the game will desync for everyone on playback. This run, however, doesn't use any third-party device to finish the game, it gets to the credits by entering a possible input from the controller. Your comparison doesn't make sense.
The reason in-game cheat codes are usually forbidden is only one: entertainment, which is what the site stands for. Codes that make the run trivial, like Metroid passwords, are rejected. Passwords that take you to the last levels of a puzzle game can be accepted, if finishing all the levels would be repetitive and uninteresting. No line was ever drawn, what determines if something is acceptable is not a generalized concept, but a search for entertaining movies. If you didn't watch it before giving an opinion, you can't tell anything of its value if published.
About special categories, we've also had slower movies obsolete faster ones that weren't as entertaining. There are also movies that obsoleted others on different platforms. New categories are also heavily influenced by entertainment, before arguing on non-obsoletion, it's necessary to know if the old movie offers a decent amount of entertainment when a faster possibility is known.
I must admit that those are the soundest arguments so far (or, more specifically, the best expression of the idea, as others have also presented the same arguments, in different wording).
Basically what you are saying is that the rules lay out the basic principle that if a cheat code (or any other similar feature, such as a level password) makes the run trivial (in other words, there's nothing spectacular nor superhuman about it anymore), then it's generally disqualified because there's no entertainment value. However, if such a feature would in contrast increase the entertainment value of the run, then using the cheat/password/whatever feature could be considered a valid technique. In other words, the rule "the Konami code is forbidden" is more like an example of something that isn't acceptable, laying out a more broad concept, rather than being a rule all in itself (in other words, if there actually was an actual literal Konami code accessible through the classic key combination in a game which would significantly improve the entertainment value of the run, it might actually be acceptable).
So the question is not so much about "is entering cheat codes prohibited?" as much as "does entering cheat codes make the run trivial?"
Discussing a rule of the website which applies to cheat codes supported by the game itself is invalid if I haven't watched a certain run?
Yes
Thanks for explaining why. You totally convinced me.
Warp wrote:
Do runs get special exceptions of the rules if they look good enough or something?
Yes
Warp wrote:
Could this be applied to other rules as well? Do, for example, using GameGenie codes become a valid form of TASing if the run looks cool enough?
No, the game must stand on it's own without outside influence, just the code that exists on the cartridge. This debug menu exists on the cartridge. And cheat codes are used in runs on this site. Most of them go directly to the concept demos and such.
I'm sorry, but you are being completely contradictory there. First you firmly assert that special exceptions to the rules are justified if breaking the rule makes the run look good enough, and immediately after that you claim that breaking the rule I talked about is not ok. So which is it? Breaking the rules is ok or isn't?
If your intention was to say "this run does not break any rule", then your answer to my previous question above seems to be like arguing just for the sake of an argument, rather than being a justified answer.
And why are you being so hostile anyways? I have not said this run breaks the rules, and I have not said this run should be immediately disqualified. I asked if this run could be breaking the rules, and explained why I think this could be so. People answered the question with arguments that don't sound very convincing to me (namely, "if it's difficult to access the debug menu, it becomes ok to use it even though it would be more questionable if it was trivial to access it"). I expressed my personal view of why those arguments don't sound very convincing to me, and now I'm a "douche".
I'm honestly trying to have a conversation about the rules and the rather exceptional case of this particular game, which creates a rather fuzzy line about whether it can be considered breaking a particular rule or not. Why are some people here considering this as being a jerk and a douche?
Warp wrote:
As I suggested earlier, would the Konami code stop being a cheat if it was more difficult to access? If yes, could you please explain why? I just can't grasp the logic.
Yes, unless you want to also remove all ability to do anything that wasn't intended by the programmers. You could eliminate all OOB glitches and all memory glitches and all wall glitches. As you seem to like to say "Where do you draw the line?!"
Your comparison is not valid. Abusing memory glitches and wall glitches is not prohibited by the rules, and hence they are ok to use regardless of how this abuse happens. However, cheat codes such as the Konami code are prohibited by the rules, and hence they are different from wall glitches. There's a reason why these cheat codes are prohibited, and accessing them via glitching does not change that reason.
Warp wrote:
So your stance is, indeed, that if the cheat code is difficult to access, it becomes acceptable?
There's a pretty large difference between a cheat code and a glitch. If you don't want to make that distinction, that's your problem.
Wait a second. It sounds like you think that I'm opposing the glitch itself, rather than the usage of the debug menu to modify memory addresses. What gives you that impression? I'm not opposing any glitch here.
I suppose it's lucky that this is, I assume, the only old console game with such a debug menu (at least one which is accessible at all), so it shouldn't cause too much of a precedent for other games.
I am, and have always been, the first person to defend exceptions. This doesn't mean I have changed my opinion in this case, though. I just want to make clear that some people took too harshly what I wrote. I was simply trying to discuss if this peculiar case could be considered in the same category as the Konami code (and hence technically forbidden).
Warp, I believe they meant that in-game cheats accessed through a glitch is allowed, but deliberate use of cheat without glitch is banned.
Yes, I can understand that opinion, and I suppose the only thing I can say about it is that personally I disagree with it.
Maybe what ticks me off a bit here is the attitude some people seem to have about this subject. An attitude like it's hard to believe how anybody could have any objection to the idea (ie. that cheats are ok if the only way to access them is by glitching), like if it was some kind of given that it's pretty obviously ok, and it's strange to claim otherwise.
The Game Boy uses the exact same cartridge media as the Game Boy Color, and multiple Game Boy Color games used absurdly high amounts of space (The first striking examples that come to mind are Cannon Fodder (Due to having full blown FMV sequences and 4-5 minutes worth of PCM audio), and the Harry Potter games), the largest coming to mind is a Japan only game whoms name escapes my mind, the amount of space being taken being 8 megabytes. I would not be surprised if the capacity of cartridges could have reached up to 32 megabytes without issue, if Nintendo held onto the platform long enough.
Ok, that explains it.
OTOH, I really wonder how they could afford that kind of storage capacity. It's not the same technology, of course, but in 1989 (when the Game Boy was released) a 32-megabyte hard drive (which was not at all an atypical hard drive size for PCs in 1989) was relatively expensive. Of course I'm not an expert on this subject, so a cartridge containing read-only data might been significantly cheaper to produce.
What is it with this shiny ponyta? Is it like the infinity+1 sword of the pokemon franchise or something? Does catching it entitle to you to a 1-million dollar cash price? Or is it just for the glory and babes?
In the context of running a program executable in a platform it was not made for, one could make the distinction between a simulator and and emulator as follows:
An emulator is a perfect replica of the original hardware, and the program being run has no way of knowing if it's being run on the original or on an emulator, even if it tried to (at least in an optimal situation). The environment is emulated perfectly.
A simulator, on the other hand, allows the program to be run on a different platform, but the program can, if it wants, detect that it's being run on the simulator rather than the target hardware. The simulator might not even emulate the target hardware perfectly, and this completely on purpose (for example the "CPU" could be significantly faster and there could be significantly more RAM available).
For example the iPhone simulator in the iPhone SDK is called a simulator (and not an emulator), and the official reason is exactly that.
