While this is an incredible performance and an awesome show of TASing prowess, I have my serious doubts about the true entertainment value.
The double Megaman X run was awesome at almost all possible levels (although they could perhaps have looked a bit more "in sync" with each other for added entertainment instead of relying so much in one megaman doing something when the other is not controllable at the moment). The final double-movie itself was quite easy to follow and understand. (Also, having only two soundtracks made it fairly listenable.)
When the quadruple run was announced it was a very exciting idea and I was looking forward to watching it. However, while the achievement itself was very admirable, the resulting movie was a big disappointment. It was very confusing and it was difficult to see what's going on. The four soundtracks at the same time also formed such a cacophony that it was completely unlistenable. Entertainmentwise it was a complete letdown, for me at least.
I doubt this sextuple run would be much better. I'm guessing it will be even worse. While I completely admire the feat, I doubt I'll enjoy actually watching it... :/
If I had watched this I would probably vote meh.
Bisqwit,
I have noticed about myself that when I was younger I couldn't care less about politics (the younger I was, the more I *hated* all kinds of politics, in fact), but the older I have got, the more I find myself reading political articles and especially writing them myself, even to the point that I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not worrying way too much about things I can't really affect. I wonder if this is some kind of natural development of personality which most people go through when they get older.
Have you experienced anything similar? Has your interest in politics (both national and international) increased as you have got older, almost without even noticing? If so, what do you think is the reason? Is it something completely natural, or is it something to worry about (meaning, "oh no, I'm getting old")?
After looking at the Wikipedia article on the Z80 I suspect you're right, most of the registers are indeed 16 bits and there is even an undocumented ability to use a 16-bit I/O address space.
Curiously, the wikipedia article in question calls it an "8-bit microprocessor", and also the "8-bit" article prominently lists the Z80 as one.
This is contradictory to the text in the latter article, which says "In computer architecture, 8-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are at most 8 bits (1 octet) wide. Also, 8-bit CPU and ALU architectures are those that are based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size."
I really can't understand what is the reasoning for calling the Z80 an 8-bit microprocessor. It has 16-bit registers, a 16-bit ALU (which operates on 16-bit registers with single opcodes) and 16-bit memory mapping using 16-bit index registers. Almost everything can be done with 16-bit registers in the Z80.
Either the definition of "8-bit microprocessor" is wrong, or categorizing the Z80 as one is wrong.
Calling the Zilog Z80 an 8-bit processor is quite far-fetched, IMO.
Consoles and computers using the Z80 are called "8-bit" for the simple reason that they were marketed in the "8-bit era", iow. in the same era when other truely 8-bit consoles and computers (such as the NES and C64) were common.
However, the Z80 is a full-fledged 16-bit processor. It has 16-bit registers, it can read and write 16-bit values from and to memory (iow. it has a 16-bit word size), it has a 16-bit ALU (which means that all mathematical operations can be done on 16-bit registers with single opcodes) and it has 16-bit memory addressing (meaning that you can address 64kB of memory with one single register in one single opcode). Even the official assembly language is very similar to that of the 16-bit intel processors.
Thus if you are classifying the "bitness" of consoles purely on the word size of the CPU (and not how the consoles are colloquially referred to), classifying the Zilog Z80 devices as "8-bit" is basically wrong.
Ben Stein has recently released a creationist documentary called "Expelled: no intelligence allowed". Here's his opinion on science: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k216F3HJt84
Would be cool though, place a black hole in an electromagnetic container in a museum.
If Hawking is right, then that would be impossible. (If he is right, a micro-blackhole would disappear in an extremely small fraction of a second.)
Of course he could be wrong. (After all, Hawking radiation is more or less pure speculation based on science which doesn't yet exist, namely the unified theory of quantum mechanics and GR.)
ngq wrote:
well... if there were not parallel timelines, there would be paradoxes, for example if i would go back in time and kill my parents so that i'm never born.
Thus, based on current evidence, the only logical conclusion is that time travel is a physical impossibility. (I'd say it's similar to magnetic monopoles and negative mass in this sense.)
I bet that in the vast majority of cases "hit boxes" are implemented in games as program code (in the form of a bunch of conditionals). This means that there is absolutely no way to automatically know what a certain game is using as "hit box" (or if it's using a completely different technique altogether), and even on a game-by-game basis you would need to disassemble and study the code to try to find the hit box checking routine in order to see how it's done.
I suppose that with many or even most games, once you have disassembled the hitbox checking routine and you know how it does it, you could write a lua script or whatever which does the same thing and shows the hitbox on screen, but I bet it's usually quite a lot of work to get there.
It's not a question of version. It's a question of whether x264 support has been compiled into mencoder or not. By default it's not compiled (if you just get the basic mencoder source); you need to download the ffmpeg (or whatever it was) package separately in order to compile mencoder with that support. It may just be that you had a version of mencoder without x286 support compiled in.
(In comparison, learning Finnish pronounciation should be easy for an English speaker because of the lesser number of phonemes. In practise, that assumption fails, because English speakers tend to think in terms of diphthongs, so when try to read "ee" /eː/, they produce what sounds more like "ii" (/iː/) or "ei" (/ei/), for example.
One problem, at least to American English speakers, is that they don't understand the concept of long vowels. Basically the concept of the long vowel sound (as it exists in Finnish and many other languages) is inexistent in American English, in a very similar way than the distinction between the 'r' and 'l' sounds is inexistent in Japanese and Chinese. (This is also the reason why Japanese transliteration to English usually (and incorrectly) converts long vowels into short ones: Because Americans don't understand the difference.)
The Finnish language relies a lot on the distinction between vowel lengths. Completely different and unrelated words may differ only in vowel length (eg. "tuli", fire, and "tuuli", wind). Many American English speakers have difficult time in distinguishing between them (both when they hear the words spoken and when they try to speak them).
Another problematic case for American English (and sometimes other English dialects) speakers is the strong 'r' sound used in Finnish and other languages (such as Spanish). There's no such sound in English. Depending on the dialect, there may be a really short and soft 'r' sound, or it may lack completely. The 'r' sound in particular is problematic for people because if they don't learn to pronounce it from early childhood, it's very difficult to learn it later (as we all know from Chinese and Japanese people). There just is something about that sound that it has to be learned in early childhood.
It must run linux (saves on Windows price)
It must be energy efficient (a low power consumption)
It must be small (the space is a mather in my case)
It must be cheap (the price is also a mather because I plan on buying more than one)
You clearly want either a cheap laptop or the mac mini. Of course with cheap laptops you can't expect any efficiency to speak of.
It's just an inherent feature of the human nature. I wrote in the guidelines that who the author is should have absolutely no effect on how you vote, but of course people don't read guidelines and even if they do, they don't obey them... :P
I don't remember alot of games being in native widescreen though.
We can do what they do constantly with 4:3 movies: Just zoom it to fit the screen. (The upper and lower parts of the image will be lost, but that doesn't seem to worry anyone with movies, so why should it worry us?)
But what good is surround sound? I'm sure you're aware that most consoles output in stereo, at best, so...?
There are surround stereo reverb filters which we could apply to the audio to make it sound like it's coming from some precise point in a room of certain dimensions. Wouldn't that be ubercool?
TASvideos has always used bleeding edge technology for video encoding, always ahead of everyone else. Thus the next logical step would be to use the newest HD technologies, which are becoming increasingly popular. Thus we should use 1920x1080 resolution and 5.1 channel surround sound in all future publications. Perhaps we could use some "Now in HD!" tag in the videos.
Btw, why hasn't the page http://tasvideos.org/SuperMarioBrosTricks.html been updated to include the flagpole trick? Also the "The Minus World" could be updated to mention the FDS version of SMB (also the first url doesn't work).
AI in racing games has been one of the most difficult tasks in game development during the entire history of computing.
The thing is: Racing games must be made more and more realistic, with more and more accurate physics, as well as more challenging for the players, because that's what players want. Racing games with realistic physics are much cooler and funnier to play.
The problem is: If the computer-controlled cars were subject to the exact same conditions as the player-controlled cars, the AI needed to control those cars properly would be humongously difficult and complicated. Realistic and complicated physics, as well as complicated tracks, means that there are countless odd situations a car can get into, situations which are trivially solvable by a human, but very difficult to code into an AI routine. Not to talk that the AI cars must be challenging and more or less difficult to beat by the human player.
The easiest way to solve this problem is to allow the AI cars to cheat. In other words, they are not bound by the same physics and characteristics (such as field of view). The trickiest part in this is to try to hide this cheating from the player as well as possible (so that the player gets the impression that the race is "fair"). It's not always possible.
Btw, superjupi, who is your avatar?
So, we are left with either: having a big ole debate about it; having someone (Bisqwit) just say this is the list; or having an automated method of polling people's opinions and spitting out a dynamic, informed list.
IMO all of those are better than not having any list at all.
IMO there can (and probably should) be a slight difference between the most favorite movies of TASers in general, and movies which deserve a star.
Experienced TASers and TAS watchers may (and often do) appreciate subtler things than first-time viewers. There may be TASes which are greatly appreciated by the community, but which may be "too complicated" for a first-time viewer who has no experience on TASes.
Starred movies should be a "light and easy to understand" introduction to TASes. Preferably they should also cause a "wow, this looks cool!" effect on the first-time viewer.
Also, the TASes of known and popular games are more suitable for first-time viewers than TASes of obscure games, regardless of how appreciated those TASes are. For this reason I would say that for example the SMB1 TAS should be given a star because SMB1 is one of the best known and most popular games in history. Given that the TAS itself is well above average in quality and relatively short also helps.
