I'm still of the opinion that the controller is what killed Gamecube.
Comparing the Playstation 2 controller to the GameCube controller, I really see what you mean. The latter looks painful to use (besides looking like a toy for toddlers, those which make funny sounds when you press the huge brightly-colored buttons).
PS2's success was simply the result of, "oh, it's like a PlayStation, but better! I want one!" because God knows it had nothing going for it otherwise.
AFAIK one reason which added to its popularity was its support for video DVDs, which effectively made it a DVD player. At the time it was much cheaper than a real DVD player (which were quite expensive at the time).
Add to that its humongous library of high-quality games and its popularity...
Dreamcast, which had a two-year head start, had twice the VRAM, so PS2's textures were right ugly by comparison. It was also an even more difficult beast to tame for developers than Saturn was.
I remember reading developer rants about the PS2 as a platform, and how difficult it was for the developers to make things which were very easy in the Dreamcast and other consoles of the time. The Dreamcast also had technical features which the PS2 lacked completely. (Do I remember correctly that the Dreamcast had hardware support for antialiasing, which was quite rare at the time, and which the PS2 lacked?)
The death of the Dreamcast was a real shame. Basically people simply stopped buying it for the simple reason that Sony had announced that their Playstation 2 is on the way, and will be "much better". Everyone started waiting for the PS2, and the Dreamcast got killed. In the end, the PS2 was *not* much better than the Dreamcast, but people bought it anyways.
Amusingly, the Wii is also succeeding, despite being the weakest platform of this generation. This should prove that hardware capability no longer means a damned thing. But what does? :o
Tell me about it. If I'm not mistaken the Nintendo DS is technically rather inferior to the Playstation Portable, yet the DS is hugely popular while the PSP is still struggling (popular enough to not to die, thankfully, but sufficiently unpopular to get an undeserved negative fame).
Speaking of Nintendo consoles, is it just me imagining, or was the GameCube not really a very notorious console?
I mean, the NES and the SNES were just *huge*. They were like the absolute leaders of game consoles of their times with hardly any rivals (only the Sega Genesis came even close). Then came the N64, which got some popularity, but was completely overshadowed by the incredible popularity of the Sony Playstation. People knew the N64 existed, but the Playstation was really the undisputed number one leader of consoles of the time.
Same with the GameCube vs. the Playstation 2, but perhaps even more pronouncedly. The PS2 was simply staggeringly popular. AFAIK, by far the best-selling console of all times with 140 million units sold worldwide. The GameCube was not bad itself in this regard, with 21 million units sold, but once again completely overshadowed by its competitor.
At the time I got the impression that while they tried to advertise the GameCube, it still wasn't just all that notorious. Most people probably quickly forgot about it.
Luckily for Nintendo they made a great comeback with the Wii.
North-American release of:
NES: 1985 (1986 in Canada)
SNES: 1991
N64: 1996
GameCube: 2001
Wii: 2006
Do we see a pattern here? Can expect the next big Nintendo console to be released in 2011?
Oops, I accidentally wrote the wrong ROM name, I updated it with the correct one now. I'm pretty sure version differences in the emulators does not cause desyncs so I think that it is the ROM that is causing your problems.
I still don't really know what Super Metroid (JU) [!].swc is. I tried it with Super Metroid (JU) [!].smc, but it desyncs after about a minute in. Is "swc" just a typo, or is it really a different rom format?
Or maybe the emulator version does make a difference...
I would like to watch this, but I can't:
1) I have no idea what "Super Metroid.swc" is.
2) I tried with some JU smc files, and it always desynced after about a minute. Is the 1.43v12 (beta 10) requirement strict and could it cause this? (I only have 1.43+ v11 (beta15) for linux.)
To clarify: snes9x+Lua has no way to control mouse input as of yet. With the rom hack that allows the cursor to be controlled with the joypad, snes9x+Lua does a fantastic job with cursor control, as you can have it look at memory to determine exactly where it is.
But if someone wanted to simply "play" mario paint with snes9x, how would it work? And how does it work with frame advance (so that one could make a TAS)?
(I'm asking this because it would be cool to try this myself, but I just don't know how mario paint is "played" with snes9x.)
Overlaying a picture with snes9x is possible but the way I was originally imagining it (very easy) is not. As in, there is a method for overlaying an image, and there is a method for setting transparency, but apparently image overlays do not support partial transparency, at least according to the API. What you could do theoretically is draw the image pixel by pixel.
Maybe adding support for overlaying an image needs to be coded into the snes9x source code. (Another option would be to use an external program for this: The program would show the image semi-transparently, so anything behind it would be shown through it. Then just position the program on top of the snes9x window.)
Moving the mario paint mouse cursor programmatically (with lua) seems like a nightmare. However, how is it moved in snes9x when playing normally? Does snes9x support mouse input, or does it emulate it some other way? How does this work with frame advance?
I was thinking: How hard would it be to hack snes9x to overlay a semi-transparent image (read from an image file) over the emulator window? Could this even be done currently with lua? (I really don't know what lua in snes9x can do.)
Doing this would allow for a human to make a TAS of mario paint to create one of those cool colored images. The human would simply have to replicate the overlaid image in mario paint. Naturally he can try to do it as optimally (ie. fast) as possible, by using all the tools available in mario paint (such as floodfilling, etc).
The next step is to try true color. Initially I'm planning on reducing the 15 available colors to RGB values, then look at the incoming picture's RGB values and finding the closest match arithmetically. A better solution would be to try to create colors by making patterns from the preset colors, for example blue speckled with black to make a dark blue, but that seems like it would take quite a bit more effort.
Programs like imagemagick can take a user-defined color palette and then color-reduce + dither an image using that palette. It should be fairly easy to automatize, given that Mario Paint uses a fixed palette (AFAIK).
"Boo yah" as they say.
Those look superb. The creation of those images (sped up if necessary) would make great youtube videos.
For example, the drawing of a simple stick figure is already a variant of a travelling salesman problem :)
If everything else fails, the images could simply be drawn one pixel at a time. Areas with one color could be drawn by drawing the boundary of the area one pixel at a time and then fill-flooding. (Of course the program would have to smartly deduce if it has to draw the boundary at certain parts. This should be rather trivial to check by simply checking if the outside of the area being filled with the color has a different color than the current bg color.)
It might not be frame-optimal, but at least it could still be impressive.
And if everything else fails, the actual Mario Paint drawing could be done by a human, by using the color-reduced image (perhaps superimposed onto the emulator) as an aid.
Why do all GBA games look the same? This game looks amazingly identical in style to a bunch of other GBA games for which TASes have been published recently.
One would think that the more advanced a game platform is, the more variation there could be to the games, but apparently this is not so.
I have for long been thinking about this:
1) Determine the exact technical graphical limitations of Mario Paint (ie. resolution, which colors are available, how many of them can be used at the same time, are there any tile-based limitations, etc.)
2) Write a program which will take any image file, resize it to the proper resolution and then color-reduce it smartly to those limitations mentioned above.
3) The same program would also calculate the optimal path for drawing that resulting image in Mario Paint (ie. it tries to reduce the number of frames it will require to paint the image with Mario Paint, using some heuristic), and output that data to a file.
4) Create a lua script which will read that file and execute those commands. Use the emulator to create the movie file.
When all of this has been created, it would be possible to convert any image to an optimal Mario Paint movie file. After that it's only a question of searching the coolest possible images. All automatic (ie. basically bot-created), no rerecording needed.
Of course this task would be far from trivial.
And even then, bool is a C++ type, not C. C does not have a boolean type.
Actually the C99 standard does define 'bool', 'true' and 'false', but AFAIK not as reserved keywords (ie. internal types), but as symbols defined in <stdbool.h>.
It is indeed possible, and probably not very hard if you have the necessary RAM-addresses. If you have the RAM-addresses for the current state of all enemies, and you know the value these addresses get when an enemy is killed, you can make a counter that increases by 1 when this happens. This means that the RAM-addresses for the states of the enemies have to have a unique value for when an enemy is killed, so it doesn't mistake an enemy going off-screen for getting killed. This can be used for almost every game, it's just the RAM-addresses that would differ. I hope this made some sense.
That assumes that the enemy statuses are always created at fixed RAM positions. It's perfectly possible that they are created dynamically wherever there's free memory (I don't really know how the memory allocator in SNES programs works). If that is the case, then being able to automatically follow those values would require some serious disassembling and reverse-engineering of the code.
The gradius3 movie would have a humongous kill count and kills/minute count.
Of course it's a matter of definition what counts as a "kill" and what doesn't. For example, how many kills do the bubbles in the second level count as?
I counted the two first levels (it's really laborious and tiresome to count all the kills in this movie), and I counted every *explosion* as a kill (which I think is a fairly unambiguous way of counting), and I got (approximately) 553 kills in the first two levels. They take 5 minutes and 10 seconds, making it 107 kills per minute.
Some of the later levels might be *really* hard to count (eg. the fire level), so I'll just leave it at that.
I wonder if it would be possible to write a lua script which automatically counts the number of kills (as the number of explosions). That would make things enormously easier.
Truthfully, I use Winamp for watching all the TAS AVI files, and the MKV format doesn't work in the video sense. It works fine for the audio though.
I assume that it's rare for you to watch MKV files. Thus I would recommend just installing Media Player Classic (comes eg. with the klite codec pack) and setting up Windows to open MKV files with it. The player itself is very small and lightweight (not to be compared with Windows Media Player 8 and newer) and shouldn't cause too much grievance.
can religious people have existential crises? i'm sure i won't have any because i've already asked every question and got every answer, and i'm not even 30.
"Is this everything there is to my life? Am I really happy with what I have achieved and how I have lived? Do I even have a life? Have I wasted my youth? Why does it seem that everyone else had a great life when they were young, but not me? Should I be doing things which I didn't during my youth, while I still can? Why didn't I do this when I was young? I can't do it anymore. Why do I feel so old and lonely?"
I had very recently my 31st birthday... I.e. I turned 30.
My condolences. Your youth is now officially behind, so you are not young anymore. Now you are middle-aged. Expect existential crises, weight gain and slow but inevitable deterioration of health.
Being there, doing that...
I'm a lousy Windows user, so I had to install some exotic ports to try those things and it turned out to be a bit cumbersome process. In other words:
seq: command not found
Then you should have used the 'for ((i=0; i<=123; ++i)); do <the command>; done' form (with bash).
(Btw, I still can't understand why it seems that 99.9% of linux users prefer bash over zsh. What is it in bash that makes it so good? What is it in bash that zsh doesn't have? I could list a ton of things zsh does have which bash doesn't. Whenever you ask some linux user something about the shell, it's *always* bash, only bash and nothing but bash. I don't remember *ever* seeing anyone (besides myself) even mentioning zsh as an alternative. Yet in my experience zsh is so much more advanced than bash.)
