Btw, my recommendation for making a TAS for the first time:
Once you have completed the TAS of a certain game for the first time, just forget it and start over from the beginning.
That might not sound very tempting when you have spent innumerable hours on your first TAS and have finally got it done, and are proud of it. However, once you start over you will see the reason for this recommendation. You will have learned so much about TASing in general and TASing that game in particular that you will see how you will magically improve your TAS probably from the very first level. You will probably notice saving even several seconds in the first level (almost regardless of the game) in your second attempt compared to the first one, simply because you know the game better now (besides being more experienced about TASing in general).
I warmly recommend doing that. If it so happens that you are a natural talent and you did it almost perfectly the very first time (no offense but I doubt it :) ), you can stop the second attempt after a few levels if you notice that you are not improving the first attempt any.
Oh, and not only with your very first TAS. This same phenomenon will probably happen with many subsequent TASes as well.
The info text at the beginning is wrong. It says "this was a tool-assisted recording". Clearly adelikat forgot to change the text back to normal from King's Bounty. The same goes for astyanax.
If I find FF7 for the Playstation somewhere I might buy it and play it with pSX (I'm not a very big fan of pirating games newer than a certain critical age...). Btw, does anyone know for sure that it will work directly from the game CD with a regular PC CD drive, using the current version of pSX?
Did you know it was released for PC too?
Yeah, and sold eg. at amazon.co.uk at a more expensive price than a brand new modern PC game.
I bought the PSP versions of I and II because they were cheap (I have never played any version of them before), so they are in my todo list.
I have played FF 4, 5 and 6 through, but with (moderate) savestate abuse (not too much, though).
I also own FF8 for the PC (bought it *many* years ago), and I got to the final boss (I think) but didn't pass it then. I have been planning on playing it through again for years. (I just hope it still works in my current computer. Never tried.)
If I find FF7 for the Playstation somewhere I might buy it and play it with pSX (I'm not a very big fan of pirating games newer than a certain critical age...). Btw, does anyone know for sure that it will work directly from the game CD with a regular PC CD drive, using the current version of pSX?
Whether key presses on the first frame should count or not is again debatable.
IMO they should be definitely counted.
While highly unlikely, it's theoretically possible that some game might be completable by pressing and holding one or more keys from the very first frame and keeping them that way all the way through. In this case it makes sense to make the distinction about how many keys were pressed on that first frame (as well as a distinction to a "zero-press movie" where no buttons are pressed at all at any point).
Definition #3 would also make sense over #2 in this way: Is it possible to complete the game by pressing a certain key at the beginning and keeping it pressed, or must the key be released at some point? Technically speaking that makes a difference, and definition #3 accounts for that.
As someone commented, "minimal presses" is far from unambiguous. Is it:
1) The sum of all the keys which are in their down state at each frame?
2) The amount of keys pressed to their down state during the movie?
3) The amount of key state changes during the movie? (In other words, each time the state of a key changes, ie. from non-pressed to pressed and vice-versa, that counts as one.)
(2 and 3 are, technically speaking, almost the same thing, except that 3 produces a number which is almost double of that of 2. However, as a concept they are distinct. In some cases it could make a difference, eg. if we are counting with method 3, eg. if the 'start' button is pressed you don't want to unpress it during the rest of the movie if you don't have to.)
if you're lucky enough the text is contained in the ROM uncompressed and unaltered and can be extracted via simple tools (linux offers the aptly named 'strings') or edited with any hex editor you like.
That assumes NES games use ASCII characters (or other ASCII-compatible encoding) for their text. Is that really so?
I could perfectly imagine NES games *not* using such an encoding. Why would they? It's a wasteful encoding which contains tons of characters probably not needed in the game.
My guess is that most NES games have an image containing the characters used in the game, and all text strings consist simply of index values to that image (ie. 0 meaning the first character, 1 meaning the next one, and so on).
Thus even if the texts are uncompressed in the ROM, you would still have to figure out their "encoding", and you would have to write some kind of converter between that encoding and ASCII if you want to view the strings normally.
Of course the more text there is in the game, the highest the chances that the text is compressed in one way or another. Even a very simple compression scheme may well be very hard to figure out using a hexeditor or even a disassembler.
How about this: The best movie file is the one which completes the game and which compresses the best (eg. with a defined version of 7zip using some defined compression options).
Anyway, thanks to the exceptionally good service by Relacom Oy (former Netsonic Oy), the Internet connection transfer was performed right in schedule -- I told them to do it August 1st, and 9am the old line was disconnected and 10pm (if not earlier -- this was the earliest I brought the server there), the new line was connected.
The server is now located in my new apartment
I think this downtime was actually shorter than some of the unexpected downtimes in the history of tasvideos.org. :P
There were also tons of people giving free hugs to anyone who wanted. A rather peculiar modern phenomenon. Seemed nice (but I was too shy to even think about trying it).
I really hate this. Stop violating my private space.
Emphasis mine...
Quite true. While there were lots of people with their "free hugs", "hug me", etc. signs, they never made any advances to anyone (except other people with similar signs). They always waited for others to ask. I never felt uncomfortable at all near them, which was nice. They do seem to respect people's space.
AFAIK all console games assume the speed of the console is fixed. Thus speeding up the CPU or other hardware is only going to make the game unplayable because it's too fast, so for existing games it's rather moot.
The only situation where there's a theoretical advantage in doing so is if someone creates a console game from scratch for an emulator which has been sped up. But why would anyone want to do that? If someone really wants to make eg. a NES game, he probably will want for it to work with *any* NES system (including the real McCoy). If someone just wants to make a game for a faster hardware, why would he want to limit to what a NES emulator has to offer (even if it's sped up)?
Not that it would be an impossibility. I'm just conjecturing that nobody would go through the trouble to actually making anything worthwhile.
Modularity is a great (and IMO essential) programming technique, but it's not a silver bullet. Modular design can go wrong, and if the overall structure of the program is not easy to figure out, the design has failed.
It is also possible to overmodularize: Split the program into a humongous amount of very small modules. The amount of modules becomes so large that the entire program becomes basically a modular version of spaghetti code. Basically it's just modularity for the sake of modularity, without a good design. Not a good thing.
I went to animecon2008 today, and I actually enjoyed it.
Especially the highlight of today's schedule, the cosplay group contest, was awesome. I haven't been so entertained by live performances in years.
I'm clearly not the only one who thinks that. Before the doors to the main hall (where the contest was held) opened, a queue of at least 200 meters formed (without the slightest exaggeration). The main entrance to the hall was on the second floor of the building, and the queue went from the door to the staircase down, through the main corridor to outside the building and continued there for at least 100 meters. When I realized what they were queuing, I joined the queue. Since the main hall was very big (something like 2000 seats), the queue advanced relatively fast after they opened the doors. However, the queue didn't seem to get any shorter while I was in it. When I go to the second floor, the end of the queue was still outside the building! The hall got pretty full (but AFAIK everyone got in). Now I know what popularity means.
The atmosphere during the competition was great. The performances were hilarious and the viewers were cheering and applauding.
In fact, the overall atmosphere in the animecon was great. Well over half of the people there were all wearing some types of costumes. The most popular themes seemed to be Naruto, Bleach, Kingdom Hearts and some kind of zombie anime I didn't recognize/know. Also pokemon seemed rather popular. Some of the costumes were very involved and well-made.
There was especially one thing there which was really positively surprising, and very rare nowadays: There's a relatively big park besides the building where the animecon was held, and the park was constantly full of young people, and I didn't see even one bottle of beer or alcohol. It really *is* possible to have good fun without alcohol. Many people diss anime fans badly, but IMO this kind of fun is a lot healthier than what you usually see the youth doing. I didn't feel at all like they were a big bunch of freaks, but just people having good healthy fun.
There were also tons of people giving free hugs to anyone who wanted. A rather peculiar modern phenomenon. Seemed nice (but I was too shy to even think about trying it).
It's curious the proportion of males to females. Usually extreme nerdy hobbies are very male-oriented, but at the animecon there seemed to be even more females than males. Seems like anime and the Japanese pop culture are pretty popular among western females.
The only thing I regret is that I didn't know about the animecon early enough. If I had known, I would have gone there yesterday as well (especially for the individuals cosplay contest, which I regret missing).
EDIT: Apparently that "zombie anime" I didn't recognize is Hellsing (many minus points to my nerd factor for not knowing, I suppose). Perhaps I should watch that anime too, as it seems to be popular.
1) In order to downgrade your PSP firmware, you have to find a ROM dump of that older firmware. Those are not distributed by legal means (and most importantly not by any reliable psp homebreed website), which means you have to browse some obscure warez sites in order to find it, with all the risks involved.
2) PSP-bricking trojans are being widely distributed as genuine ROM dumps and homebreed software. If you flash your PSP with one of those, it really becomes unusable (AFAIK there's no way of recovering from a psp firmware trojan).
3) The process of downgrading to a 1.x firmware can sometimes be very complicated and risky. I remember reading instructions where it was just not possible to take the 1.0 ROM dump and just downgrade to it. Some people report getting their PSP accidentally bricked by a faulty downgrade process.
4) If you downgrade to firmware 1.x, you'll have to install a homebreed firmware emulator if you want any game newer than 2 years to work.
5) It is possible to run homebreed software without downgrading by abusing some exploits, but these exploits are not reliable, depend on your PSP model (they are not all completely identical) and firmware version (newer firmwares patch exploits).
6) Running homebreed software *always* involves taking risks. When you start playing with your PSP firmware and exploits, there always exists the risk of something going wrong, even if it's by accident (and nothing malicious was involved). It *is* possible for the PSP firmware to get so messed up that the device won't work anymore and it becomes impossible to recover. Of course any warranty will be null and void if you have done that.
7) In my experience the advantage of being able to run homebreed software is dubious. I did try the TGA exploit in order to run a SNES emulator, so I could play emulated SNES games with my PSP. The problem: The CPU of the PSP is not fast enough to run a SNES emulator at a good framerate. Playing is irritating at 5 FPS and less. I ended up removing the exploit and the emulator because they were basically useless. I prefer not risking the integrity of my PSP, which is not a cheap device.
For example, in Rainbow Six, it's possible to dash through every level without stopping at the low difficulty level, but the high difficulty level requires taking it slowly (in some levels, running causes an instant loss), hiding behind cover, etc. Some people may prefer gunfights where the player is constantly hiding and breaking cover to fire a couple shots, but I wouldn't. I prefer a low-difficulty run that sprints through levels like a madman, strafing enemies and tossing grenades around without missing a beat.
IMO in a game like Rainbow Six the whole charm of a tool-assisted run would be to see the runner find the optimal superhuman strategy at the highest difficulty level. Just dashing through the level at the easiest difficulty level may have its merits, but it would be, IMO, relatively boring in the end.
A regular speedrun of a Rainbow Six-style game at the highest difficulty level might get a bit boring because of human limitations (iow. it might get boring because the player will be constantly just hiding and waiting for the proper opportunity, etc), but all these limitations are removed in a TAS.
I would say I have the total opposite opinion than you: It's precisely when higher difficulty level affects playing strategy that makes the run more interesting.
I think interestingness of gameplay should be at question here, not the graphics.
From a viewer's point of view graphics have a big impact on entertainment. The Atari 2600 just falls into the really ugly graphics side of old consoles.
NES:
Need I say more?
