I was wondering if anyone has ever made a patch for a NES emulator so that if a certain game is run with it, instead of using the game's own graphics it uses custom-design higher-quality graphics for it (larger resolution, more colors, alpha channel). I think that could be a cool idea.
Anyone up to the challenge? It would be cool to see some existing TAS with high-quality graphics. :P
I have read the last Pages, and its a Bug, an Emulator Bug, but its still a Bug, so, why not using it. For me it's ok to using them.
Sure. In the next version of the emulator let's introduce a "bug" which grants you complete immunity and removes collision checks. What the heck, let's introduce a "bug" which makes you jump right to the last boss.
While we are at it, why not allow gamegenie codes as well? That would be way easier and less work than having to introduce "bugs" into the emulators.
Frankly, there are runs I'd rather watch without having to download them first.
Could you describe the weird voodoo magic you use to watch a movie without having to download it? ;)
The illusion of "faster download" in youtube comes from the fact that the files are about 1/10th the size and 1/100th the quality. My personal main objection against posting videos to youtube is the loss in quality. A rather good amount of work is put in each video in order to get a high-quality image. All this is poured down the drain when someone makes a crappy conversion to wmv and posts the video to youtube.
If someone submitted a run of some game, but he uses eg. gamegenie codes to achieve things not normally possible in the game, and when his submission is rejected he simply states that he didn't know about such rule, should the submission be accepted because of that? Of course not. "I didn't know" is not a valid excuse to bend the rules.
Difficulty in imposing strict rules doesn't mean that completely clear cases as this one should not be rejected. There's a difference between unclear and clear cases, and this is certainly of the latter type.
Well, then all TAS must be redone from scratch using more perfect emulators? I'm sure none of them behave like the real games.
The TAS is what it is. It uses the emulator version it was made on. It is NOT up to us to check if every stance of every movement and trick work on the real cartridge. I won't remake the TAS, it's final. If you want, do it yourself. But your new emulator isn't perfect either.
I honestly don't understand how you can compare a minor emulation imperfection (such as for example the emulator not producing all the lag frames as the original console) which do not really affect the game itself (even though some lag frames are not "emulated" correctly, the game may still work exactly as the original one, give or take a few frames of difference in speed) to a major emulator bug which affects the *contents* of the game, introducing graphical and even functional elements (such as additional level exits) which are inexistent when the game is played in the original console.
What you are basically saying is: "Since some TASes are made with emulators which do not emulate the original console with 100% accuracy, then *any* emulation bug should be ok, no matter how much it affects the game from what it originally was in the original console."
IMO if an emulator bug allows a major route change which is completely impossible to achieve in the original console, then it's not acceptable to exploit that bug. That's against both the letter and the spirit of the rules of TASing. It's basically equivalent to using gamegenie codes to cheat.
bits of a processor = the size of what it considers to be one word (small pack of bits, usually the largest unit of storage it can perform a single operation with, without needing to chop things up)
Even then it's not completely unambiguous. For example the Sinclair Spectrum was considered an "8-bit computer" even though it had 16-bit registers (and you could execute 16-bit operations, such as additions and substractions, with single opcodes).
I didn't know what to think about the diverse feedback given to this TAS, but after watching it I kind of have to agree that while the idea is very cool, watching the end result is perhaps not as enjoyable as I would have thought. It indeed is so that trying to watch four videos at once is very difficult and confusing.
IMO while this 4-way run has its place as a curiosity, it might be a better idea in the future to just make 2-game runs. And preferably try to make them so that they look as synchronized as possible (iow. both games really look like they are being played identically most of the time). It's more enjoyable that way. Perhaps a good choice of games could help with this.
I have commented on this before. While most movies fall into a more or less small range of lengths (and other parameters), the total range of lengths is very wide. This would mean that to show all the movies in one graph the resolution would have to be quite coarse. For example, if each bar represented one minute (ie. the first bar would represent movies between 0 and 60 seconds long, the second one movies between 60 and 120 seconds, etc), the last bar in the graph would be at minute 261. Most movies would be packed between the 0-45 minute range (only 17% of the total width of the graph) and the rest would consist of mostly individual 1-sized bars here and there. In other words, the first fifth of the graph would have a tight bell curve, and four fifths would consist of sparse tiny bars distributed here and there. I'm not sure this would be very informative.
Would it be possible to have some graphs on the page? Of AVI length, rating, etc.
Sure, as soon as someone suggests what kind of graphs and their measurements.
If it's a 2D plot, then the y-axis would have eg. avi lengths, and the x-axis would have... what?
It would be possible to add an interpreter (or jit-compiler) for some scripting language into the emulator. Of course even if this scripting language is very simplified and many tasks automated, you still have to have at least some basic skills of general programming (so that you can write programs with that script).
The advantage of such a scripting language would be that it would not be necessary to recompile the emulator each time you make a change. The disadvantage is that it would be slower (although a jit-compiling language could somewhat alleviate this problem).
A scripting language to control the emulator doesn't actually need to be very complex. It simply needs some functions to read info from the emulator (such as the current frame, RAM contents, etc) and to submit info to the emulator (keypresses, saving and loading savestates, etc), and then some basic math support (variables, mathematical operators, perhaps some mathematical functions), control structures (conditionals, loops) and data structures (dynamic arrays at least, perhaps lists and trees).
Yeah, we may as well put a flash-embedded version of the run next to the description.
No we can't, because there's no automatic alternative if flash is disabled in the browser. A slideshow using javascript is ok because if javascript is disabled, then it would just show the first image, which would be just ok.
Btw, the argument you just presented is, afaik, called "slippery slope".
And of course such a slideshow would be visually much more pleasing if the different images cross-faded (instead of just changing from one to the next in an instant), which in animated gif terms means HUGE.
Perhaps some javascript could do that using jpegs/pngs without the need for animated gifs?
It was probably because I was very tired or something, but for some strange reason I found this rather hilarious when I saw it for the first time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaIvTjwFTMU
I don't really understand what's the problem you are seeing here. The problem which the "minAge=14" parameter solves is that recently-published movies needlessly scramble the least-voted-movies list. By only listing movies published more than 2 weeks ago this problem is greatly alleviated.
This has nothing to do with download amounts. Download amounts play absolutely no role in this list. I don't understand why you are talking about that in this context.
As for a list of most downloaded movies compensated for time, ever noticed the "All-time audience favorites" table in the statistics page?
Yes. Just add "minAge=14" to the module parameters.
Edit: I added that list, just to see how it looks like. With the 2 weeks minimum it might actually be useful.
Is there a good reason for the absence of a "lowest number of ratings" section?
As laughing_gas said, that list would be constantly changing with new movies, and it would IMO be mostly obsolete. Also, there are probably lots of movies with 1-5 votes and only 10 of them would be shown in the list (of course a top-100 subpage could be created but I don't see the point in that either). I'm not sure this list would be useful. (Of course nothing stops any editor from adding the list there. In fact, the list can be added basically anywhere, so if you want to test it somewhere else, eg. in your own page, you can do it to see how the list would look like.)
Btw, I perfectly understand comicalflop's opinion, and it's precisely why I wanted to create a poll in the first place. I wasn't sure if it would be good to create such lists. Personally I find such lists mildly interesting but in no way critical to the page, so either way is ok IMO. I added it because the majority seemed to think it should be there.
