Programs:
- 7-Zip for archives
- AegiSub for subtitles
- AutoHotkey for remapping/assigning mouse button functions / inserting text via hotkey
- Autoruns for system control
- AvsPmod for writing Avisynth scripts
- Animation Shop for creating GIFs (though a better one would be nice...)
- Bullzip PDF Printer for creating PDFs
- Calibre for ebook management
- CCleaner for cleaning up the system disk
- Drive Resue for restoring files
- DVD Decrypter for decrypting DVDs
- Fraps for showing the framerate of almost every game
- Frontpage Express for quickly creating dead-simple HTML that can then be easily edited
- ImDisk for creating RAM drives
- Imgburn for reading/creating/burning ISO CD/DVD images
- IrfanView for viewing pictures
- Lazarus for writing programs
- Media Player Classic Homecinema (also part of k-Lite or CCCP) + madVR for watching videos
- MS Expression Web (last version of the discontinued Frontpage series) for writing / editing web pages
- MKVExtractGUI / MKVCleaver for extracting resources from MKVs; MKVMergeGUI for editing them
- MSI Afterburner for graphics card overclocking / fan control / monitoring
- Notepad++ / Notepad2 for text editing
- Paint Shop Pro 7 for graphics editing
- Process Explorer for system control
- ReClock for watching anime / movies without stuttering (after setting my monitor to 50 Hz, it speeds up 24000/1001fps videos to 25fps)
- Recuva for restoring files
- ReNamer for renaming lots of files
- SequoiaView for file management
- ShareMouse for creating a single big desktop out of nearby computers
- Speccy for finding out a computer's technical specs
- SpeedFan for CPU / chassis fan control / monitoring
- Thunderbird for emails and RSS feeds
- Total Commander for file management (almost don't use Explorer at all)
- Universal USB Installer for putting ISO CDs / DVDs on USB sticks (great for Win7 installs)
- VirtualDubMod (+x264vfw) or x264 for encoding videos
- VirtuaWin for creating additional desktops
- Winamp for playing music files / streams
- WinCDEmu for creating virtual CD/DVD drives out of ISO CD/DVD images
- WinHex for low-level file editing
- WinRAR for archives
- xy-VSFilter for displaying subtitles
Browser addons:
- Adblock Plus for blocking 99% of ads
- Reddit Enhancement Suite for enhancing reddit
- (Chrome) APNG for displaying animated PNGs
- (Chrome) Hover Zoom for displaying linked pictures
- (Chrome) Image Search Options for searching the source / high-quality versions of a picture
- (Chrome) Lazarus: Form Recovery for recovering typed text
- (Chrome) Remove cookies for site. for removing a site's cookies
- (Chrome) Scrollbar Anywhere for dragging a website via right mouse button
- (Chrome) Tabs Outliner for a tree-style tab list
- (FF) Add to Search Bar for adding a site's search function to FF
- (FF) Download Statusbar for downloads display / management
- (FF) DownloadHelper for getting a site's media
- (FF) DownThemAll! for mass downloads of a site's media
- (FF) FlashBlock for blocking Flash with a button
- (FF) Grab and Drag for dragging a website via right mouse button
- (FF) gui:config for accessing advanced settings
- (FF) Image Search Options for searching the source / high-quality versions of a picture
- (FF) Nav Bar on Title Bar for making more usable space
- (FF) ScreenGrab (fixed version) for making screenshots of entire web pages
- (FF) Switch to Tab no more
- (FF) Tab Mix Plus for advanced tab options (like multiple lines or don't close browser when closing the last tab)
- (FF) Tree Style Tab for a tree-style tab list
For the auto fire isn't it technically possible for it to be always one frame off of the perfect time of hitting the button? Wouldn't this feature only encourage laziness?
Use the best tools available, in order to understand the basics easier, with no need to dive into technical details that can easily distract the beginner. Tools are being developed, as the masters figure out what disadvantages the old tools have, what they prevent them from doing easier, how they can be improved technically. TAS masters always try to exploit the existing tools to their maximum, they constantly come up with new methods, which become blueprints of future tools improvements.
[...]
Once you advance, you may wish adding LUA scripting to your toolset, because it provides an additional level of automation and abstraction.
Just a note that there are interesting developments happening in byuu's forum. This is what a Gameboy shader looked like at some point:
raw
shader
There's a standalone program here.
If the goal is to create realistic-looking encodings, maybe this could be incorporated somehow.
That's not how this version of phpbb works, imo - you open a thread and all posts in it are marked read.
Anyway, I logged out and removed the cookie and it seems to work now. Thanks CoolKirby!
Even when I read a thread, the "new posts" status (indicated by and ) doesn't get cleared. Only when I use the "Mark all topics read" link does it go away.
Is there any reason this run starts from a snapshot instead of power on?
I don't know. I mean, I recorded it with Snes9x v1.51, though I didn't see any issues, even though I downloaded a copy of the submission and I played it. It just went fine. So I don't see why it should be a problem
Starting from a snapshot means that some RAM / SRAM values could've been changed to give the TAS author an advantage.
So this falls in the category of don't know if it's a bug or if I'm stupid:
Bizhawk 1.5.2 in RAM watch, if I freeze the health in MM J 1.1 it changes the value. I uploaded the .wch here: https://mega.co.nz/#!iYRGSSbR!ZFBaIzw0aIUKsJkwh1rJpQlXymJ6bkp6Bef3J-419sM
Also for some reason Bizhawk doesn't seem to want to use all of my CPU when I uncheck clock throttle, which means I only get ~75 fps in clock town. Of course I don't expect multi core, but even Core 0 only gets up to ~75% as seen here:
http://i.imgur.com/yCHH4xf.png
What could be the limiting factor there?
I'll probably drop by IRC in the next few days... have to set up a client again and all that stuff.
Does the "Menu | Config | Speed/Skip" menu look like this?
I was aware that BizHawk and its ilk are very demanding, it just seems strange that it can bog down my computer where newly-released games on high-quality settings do fine.
These settings are mostly about the graphics, which are done on the GPU. The bsnes core will only use your CPU. The only way an SNES emulator will tax your GPU is by using a shader.
What system do you have? For bsnes the fastest Intel CPU is the best (note that it uses only one core, though frontends may use more).
Khaz wrote:
I know this is a really dumb statement so forgive me, but how hard can it really be to emulate an SNES?
Quote byuu: "It is possible for a well-optimized, speed-oriented SNES emulator to run at full speed using only 300MHz of processing power. You will also end up with hundreds of obscure bugs. [...] So although bsnes runs ten times slower than ZSNES, it is literally up to one hundred times more precise. In truth, it is actually very impressive that this is possible at a mere 3GHz."
The hard part isn't emulating what it does, it's emulating it at the lowest level so that all higher-level effects appear automatically - sort of like raytracing can do things like perfect spheres without any additional coding but it's very slow.
Emulating at the lowest level means that all components are updated at every step of the system clock. The NTSC signal has a frequency of 227.5 * 262.5 * 60000/1001 Hz (~3.5795 MHz) and the SNES system clock is 6 times of that (~21.47727 MHz). Depending on what memory region is being accessed in an instruction, that access can take 6, 8, or 12 master cycles. ZSNES is one emulator that skips keeping track of these cycle counts. (It also fails when a hardware component interrupts the CPU in the middle of executing an instruction...) So your CPU has to execute more than 21 million emulation steps per second. If the CPU is 3.2 GHz, that works out to a maximum time window of ~139.68 PC clock ticks for 1 SNES clock tick. (Given that I've heard the speed penalty of emulation is generally considered to be about 1:100, we're still in the limit.) Don't forget that the emulator has to emulate sound and graphics too, and that your PC runs other programs in the background, but thankfully modern CPUs can do several things per clock cycle, have advanced pipelines and branch prediction, and can even use multi-threading.
For most games, the graphics subsystem is where a SNES emulator will spend the most time on. Determining the color of a SNES pixel is very complex, because the hardware designers gave the game developers many ways to influence the "rendering" pipeline. This has to be done at least 256*224 times per frame; twice that if the game uses transparencies. Most emulators "cheat" by caching the state of the video processors at the beginning of a scanline and using that for the entire line instead of querying the values once or twice for each pixel. This is why we have the fast "compatibility" version of bsnes which does the caching, and the "accuracy" version which does things the accurate way.
If the game uses the hires-mode (512 pixels per line) and/or interlacing (2x lines per screen) then I'd expect that the emulator increases the window to show a screen of at least 512x448.
Watch the intro of Secret of Mana 2 (Seiken Densetsu 3) and look for changes when text boxes appear.
Fact is I can't really approach that kind of usage of the emulator 'cause the "re-recording" feature is not officially supported so I have to record the video via HyperCam3 and truncate it after the recording has been done.
Pretty much I modify a 504x480 video that can even last 40 minutes of footage and reach a size of 30-40 gigas. Wish me luck until a re-recording feature is added officially to PPSSPP emulator.
"maximum likelihood values as determined through adelikat's suggested test" means "closest to hardware".
And tasvideos does prefer accurate emulation, clean ROMs, etc.
Wait....does that apply exactly the same even for the NES? What about other consoles? If it does, to what extent? Because like for some games, there are runs that may never encounter such emulation problems since it's route doesn't involve any use of glitches/tricks that may utilize said problem.
NES and other consoles is likely similar for the parts of RAM that uses similar chips, though I'd trust only actual hardware tests.
And as Warepire said, those with BIOSes that initialize RAM won't be affected by this topic at all.
As a follow-up question, could someone explain how 0000 0000 0000 0000 would break a game? I would speculate this is what you get when you first plug the console in. Does that get modified at all by providing a power source?
See the two links to byuu's forum I posted earlier.
In this case, the first input (although not obvious?) is the power-on action, if we handpick a valid state of "uninitialized" RAM, wouldn't that be equivalent to powering on the console at "the perfect moment"?
You could see it that way, I guess, as long as the RAM state fits to what the real hardware does (patterns with a little bit of variation).
Personally, that still makes the TAS too different from authentic*, but I guess most people won't care much about that.
*There's the idea that you could take a TAS of one of the launch titles of a system (e.g. SMW or SM64), give it Data, who goes back in time to the launch event and completes the game in front of the audience. That wouldn't be possible with a TAS that requires specific RAM state.
I don't understand the desire to limit tases from doing things that could just as well be done by real time runners. I feel like that defeats the entire purpose of a tas.
Real time runners can't change the state of RAM at power-on to anything they like. At best they could reset the console (when they see through the game's actions that a RAM cell didn't have the desired value at power-on) until they get the values they want. Also, this only works for certain patterns; you can't get all values for all RAM cells.
hegyak wrote:
If the TAS sets the RAM values at the start and did not change them after power-on, except by player input, would that be OK? [...] Another way I could say it is, "Set Console's RAM to get best RNG."
No, it wouldn't be OK imo. A TAS is a replacement for human input (where "human" is "godlike"), and input alone can't do that even before the first instruction is executed. It feels conceptually wrong.
I'd be OK with a modified ROM that sets the values before resuming its actual code, or a completely separate category.
raw
shader
There's a standalone program here.
If the goal is to create realistic-looking encodings, maybe this could be incorporated somehow.
and 
) doesn't get cleared. Only when I use the "Mark all topics read" link does it go away.
