psssst FireFox will outperform Mozilla in the time being. FireFox is a next generation browser and Mozilla is old and will be replaced by FireFox. I suggest you use FireFox :) (or Opera :))
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
What I would like to see at that site is a comparison between Mozilla and Firefox. That is, what does Firefox offer me which is better than or is not implemented at all in Mozilla?
From what I can see, Firefox seems to be just another browser using the same engine as Mozilla, but with a different GUI and different set of features. I didn't see anything so outstanding that would have made me immediately switch from Mozilla to Firefox.
From what I have heard, Elite is a game which should be technically impossible to make for NES, but it has been done nevertheless.
Could a timeattack be feasible with this game? Has anyone tried? Could be interesting to watch if it can be run through in a rational way.
Actually, if we get technical (in law), there's no such a thing existing as a public domain software.
A copyrighted work becomes PD in most countries after something like 70 years from the death of the author. Also, "public domain" is not a license you can use, meaning that you can't publish anything in the PD. Even if you say your work is in the PD that doesn't make it so under the law (in practically all western countries): You still own the copyright, no matter what you say.
People will tell you that something becomes PD if you say so (ie. you publish something under PD), but as far as I know this is just an urban legend which is not based on law.
For more information about this, read this extremely interesting article (written by an attorney specialized in copyright issues):
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6225
Actually we thought about this with Bisqwit some time ago, after watching some Zelda (I think it was for playstation) video with audio commentary.
Having subtitles as a separate file is certainly possible. There are subtitling codecs which can show subtitles (read from a formatted text file) over any videos. However, I don't know if it's possible to make a video so that it will show the subtitles only if the subtitle file exists. I once saw a subtitled video, but it did not work at all if the subtitle text file did not exist (ie. it required the text file or else the player was unable to show the video).
Of course one problem is the already mentioned timing issue. Timeattacks are fast-paced and it's not easy to comment on tricks and curiosities if they happen 0.1 seconds apart. It would be nice if the video could be interactive, that is, you could pause the video from the subtitle file and allow the viewer to read the file and then unpause the video. However, I think this is not possible.
One possibility would be to have some signal (eg. some blinking symbol in one corner) which tells the viewer "some fast-paced subtitles coming soon, prepare to pause". I don't know, however, if this is possible or if it's feasible.
Audio commentary would be a nice touch to some videos. However, not everyone is fluent in speaking english nor talking interesting things... :)
I don't like WMV's, ASF's or any of those Microsoft's video/sound formats.. I prefer DivX and Xvid over those anytime
Actually AVI, and seemingly WMV, are just container file formats which don't in themselves define what multimedia formats they contain. You can think of it as an empty box which just provides some handles and holes to access what is inside. When you have an AVI file that only tells you that it's a multimedia file, it doesn't tell you what is the format the multimedia data is packed with.
Xvid and DivX are, however, concrete video and audio formats (implementing parts of the MPEG4 standard). You can put a Xvid stream inside an AVI file (and probably inside a WMV file as well, if I'm not mistaken). The audio can be stored inside the AVI file in a completely different format, eg. mp3 or ogg.
The problem with WMV is that it's a closed proprietary format. I don't know too much about AVI, but it seems to be much more open and supported. Putting your video in a WMV is like putting it in a closed box which you can't open yourself but you need a specialized tool to do so. And at least in the past Microsoft actively pursued people making their own tools (I don't know how phanatic they are nowadays about that). For example the great video handling program VirtualDub does not support WMV because Microsoft explicitly demanded its author to stop supporting it. AVI is completely ok, though.
So the problem with WMV is that not many programs support it, and those which do (probably without asking permission from Microsoft) may not always do it very well (eg. I have big problems playing WMVs with Winamp5 even though it plays everything else without a flaw). An my personal problem with it is that, as I said earlier, my Win98 gets extremely unstable when I try to play one.
As for which codec to use to encode the video, I suggest Xvid or DivX. Using Microsoft's own codec is not a good idea because it's old, not of very high quality, and probably full of proprietary enforcements. (Another format which I strongly oppose is QuickTime MOV, which has even more problems than WMV. And let's not start talking about RealMedia... Urgh!)
Surprisingly, WMV is a container format like AVI, not limited to a single codec.
I probably confused it with ASF (or whatever the acronym was), which was Microsoft's implementation of MPEG4. WMV is probably more advanced than AVI (eg. it probably doesn't have the 2 gigabytes limit), but it still is a closed proprietary format, and I still have trouble playing it, no matter what they have inside...
If I didn't have any problem playing WMVs I suppose I wouldn't have so many problems with them... :)
Hey Lezard, can I make that into a wmv and put it on my site?
This is slightly off-topic, but I wonder why WMV is such a popular format among some people.
I personally have difficulties in watching WMV files because my Win98 gets very unstable when I try to (it tends to crash, and most often than not after watching a WMV DirectDraw doesn't work anymore and I have to reboot). I know this is an individual problem (my Win98 has got so rotten by all the hardware and driver updates that it's quite unstable on many things, WMV playing being one of them), but it's still a bother.
Besides, WMV is a proprietary closed format with only a few codecs/players available, and it's a quite old MPEG4 implementation, definitely not the one with the highest quality. Using some more open and modern MPEG4 implementation such as Xvid or DivX (packed inside an AVI) is in my opinion a better idea.
Just an opinion. Please don't take this as a flame.
Well it seems people have different definition of what a timeattack is.
The main goal of a timeattack is to finish the game as fast as possible. However, a secondary, though very important goal is to make an interesting video.
For example, suppose that a game has some so-called cheat codes, ie. key sequences which turn on invulnerability or whatever (for example Gradius has a code like this) and then you can just run through the game in a pretty linear fashion in half the time you could do it in the regular way. Technically this is "legal" (it uses an unpatched rom played by an fmv file...). However, personally I would prefer watching the twice longer version which does not use the invulnerability cheat, specially if it requires stunning acrobatics and other beautiful tricks to get through that fast.
I must admit, however, that disqualifying a timeattack because you can't hear the music (specially if allowing the music to be heard would mean the timeattack will be slower) may be a bit extreme... However, if the game can be played through equally fast without interfering too much with the music, then that's of course a big plus.
Me too, I'm not really a fan of "free registrations".
http://mailinator.com/ is a superb free service for avoiding giving away your true email address to dubious places in the internet.
How does it work? When a webpage or whatever requires a working email address (eg. to send you a password), just give it an address like whatever@mailinator.com (where "whatever" can really be whatever; you should remember what you put there, though). Then go to http://mailinator.com/ and look for emails sent to the 'whatever' user. (The server keeps the emails sent to that user for a couple of hours or something like that.)
This is a truely superb service because it's so easy to use and very secure. You don't need to register nor reserve some fixed name or whatever at mailinator.com (any name will do) and there's no risk of your personal information getting to the wrong hands because mailinator.com doesn't ask any personal information at all. (Naturally anyone can see the emails sent to the "user" you entered the email address for, at least if they happen to try the same user name, but you shouldn't use this service for very private matters anyways.)
I have been using it regularly and I recommend it to everyone.
Actually this isn't completely true: A timeattacker often competes against himself. When he has made the first version of the timeattack and he is not 100% happy with it, he tries to beat himself by making a bit faster version (and repeat this until he is mostly happy with the end result)...
Perfection is the goal, so you are your own competitor... :)
"The "cheats" of an emulator" - i might consider changing that to "features", since you will most likely write how the emulators weren't used to cheat.
You might also want a clear indication wether a movie on the site is a time attack or a pure speedrun, to keep the confusion away... Perhaps even post both a timeattack and a speedrun where applicable.
I suppose that what you call a speedrun is eg. what the Quake done Quick demos are, and a time attack is something which uses emulator "features" to boost up the playing capabilities of the player. I agree that the distinction between these two might need to be specified.
The Quake done Quick speedruns have very strict principles on how they can be made: The only aid they can use is that they can record each level separately and then join them into a single run through the game (but they must start the next level with the same stats as the previous one ended). About everything else is forbidden. This means that what you see is exactly what the player did in real-time, without using any kind of aiding tools or "cheats". Each level has been played completely from start to end in one contiguous run in real-time.
The NES time attacks are much looser in their requirements: The only requirement is that the game rom must be the original unmodified one and that the video is made as an fmv file (which contains basically just timed keypresses) or anything equivalent. It's completely ok to use the emulator features to make the play better, like quicksaves, emulator slowdown, autofire, etc. Since we are not trying to impress people with our skills but with an awesome perfect run, this is completely ok.
Perhaps Bisqwit could write something similar to the above somewhere in the nesvideos FAQ or whatever...
