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I watched before reading any submission notes. I found this to be interesting because I didn't realize Atari 2600 graphics could be this good. The fly-in at the beginning looked genuinely 3D. It's over quick, sure, but I was entertained. Yes vote.
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heldtogetherwithtape wrote:
jlun2 wrote:
Dimon12321 wrote:
No, I use frame-advance! I just checked the speed of my running: on Mupen64's 10% speed I run faster than on Bizhawk's 12% speed, but on normal speed I run the same speed on both emulators! I just need to get accustomed!
If you're using frame advance, why would play back speed even matter? >.>
I know it does matter in at least bizhawk. I found when I was doing my Mega Man run that having the emulator set to a lower speed would cause a delay between frames when frame advance was used.
That's interesting. Question, though - why would you use slowdown? I do admit that there are some cases where frame advance is too slow and holding down the frame advance and going 100% speed is too fast but that seems like an atypical situation, not an all the time thing. This is probably the wrong place to be discussing emulator behavior, though. :)
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Dimon12321 wrote:
I tried BizHawk, but TASing this game is so confusing: the sounds are smashed and repeats for 4 seconds (on 12% as I need)!
As much as it will feel like you will never, ever be done with the TAS when frame-advancing, this is the only way to ensure that the input is optimal. It can take a while to get used to it (I know it took me a long time), but it will have a significant impact.
I also recommend going with BizHawk. While the N64 support does have some challenges the framework around it is worth it. If you have any specific bugs definitely post about it in the BizHawk thread.
Lastly, chin up - TASVideos has extremely high standards. I've submitted a run and had it rejected for not being as optimal as it needed to be and it wasn't fun but it goaded me on to do better the next time. Thanks for your work on this and best of luck!
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amaurea wrote:
Don't restart. Finish the current version and then start on a v2. It takes basically the same amount of time, but you learn more things from the endgame that you can use in your next version; you might get more feedback from the outside that reveals further improvements by publishing; publication renews interest and might inspire others to try to TAS the game; and this way we reduce the risk of nothing being published at all due to redoing burning you out.
I'm in favor of not restarting, but for very different reasons. One thing to keep in mind about our stated goal of lowest in-game turns is that anything that happens before turn 2,000 is malleable - while we don't want them to look sloppy, we have a lot more freedom than we do on the turns after 2,000 until the end of the run. What makes this look sloppy in ais523's eyes is that we were standing right next to two leashes (although we did not know that at the time) and we spent more time than needed reading spellbooks because we should have been a faster polyform (a reasonable statement).
Having said that, I seem to recall that we were reading the spellbooks to kill time while burning through the RNG so that we had more favorable results after that point, and even if we weren't actively planning on that at the time it's a very plausible excuse. :) I'd also say that while we know now that there were two leashes there the entire time it's not something that I think any audience would take us to task over - whether we mention it or not is a debate for later, but simply picking up two leashes (either those two or others) in some interesting way later could be just as entertaining. As it stands now we'll likely have "turns to burn" prior to turn 2,000 anyway because we were so careful with our turns earlier so I suspect this will all be a moot point.
As far as starting over / someone else doing a TAS, I suspect that this particular effort will never be attempted by anyone ever again. If we do the turns after 2,000 correctly, it will not be possible to beat the same category unless a substantial new trick is discovered, which is unlikely given the time ais523 and others have spent scouring the source code (a rare privilege not often experienced when working on a speedrun). I would definitely encourage others to try if they want to, of course; I have released the framework we're using as open source alongside ais523's modifications to NetHack (nethack-tas-tools) but I don't see it as being very likely. It's perhaps more probable if a late-game strategy is discovered and the input up to that point is preserved, I suppose.
At any rate, those are my thoughts - I definitely think we should keep going. :)
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hegyak wrote:
Do I even want to know what you are doing? I haven't played enough Nethack to know if I should be scared for the game or not. Still, it's great seeing how broke things have been so far.
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What ais523 said. :) I'm in a "crunch time" at work but can make some time short-term. One of the scheduling challenges for ais523 and I is the fact that we're 7 to 8 timezones apart (depending on DST; ais523 is in the UK and I am in California).
As ais523 noted, the egg setup is the only thing we haven't "rehearsed" (tried in wizard mode with all of the benefits thereof). There's plenty of other things we've rehearsed that we'll have to remember how we did when it comes time to do it the "right" way outside of wizmode but I think we'll be OK. We're still tracking for a 2015 completion date, although that'll be at risk of slipping if we don't start making progress soon.
Thanks for the continued interest!
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Patashu wrote:
Watched this after being referred from AGDQ2014 Tasbot block 2. It would be interesting to go for an 'entertainment' obsoletion of this run.
Thanks for being such an awesome supporter of my efforts! I would think the best thing to do is have a separate playaround with the freeform music maker mode and publish separately. This run is currently in moons which may make a playaround branch a bit more complicated to judge but I think it would be a better choice. I still invite someone else to come along and use the framework I created in the movie input itself to create different music; if that effort completed the game and was deemed more entertaining I'd definitely be in favor of obsoleting my run.
Just my thoughts. Thanks again for your interest,
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Nach wrote:
Is that demo part of the payload or part of the input sent in the movie file?
If the former, great. If the latter, then it should be as optimal or entertaining as possible.
If the judge demands it, I propose this movie as submitted be truncated to the frame that the payload completes, and a separate movie be submitted which completes the target game as fast as possible. There are two games here, so perhaps we would end up with three submissions in the queue. I would even be willing to create these two TAS's, but I feel that doing so would cheapen what Masterjun accomplished.
I'll leave it up to the judge to decide. Thanks for your thoughts,
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This is a precedent-setting run in one very specific way - after the initial game has been TAS'ed and total control is initially established the payload (in this case, the target game) is programmed; as soon as *that* controller input is complete and the new payload starts executing, the controllers can be completely removed in a physical console verification scenario. This means that whatever follows would be a new game in its own right which could then be TAS'ed. Now, if someone figures out a way to perform controller input on the game within the game that causes arbitrary code to be executed, you could then create a new payload to create a game within a game within a game (in the same vein as Inception).
For those concerned that the game-within-the-game (specifically Snake) was not TAS'ed optimally, please note that the primary purpose of this TAS was to demonstrate total control in front of a live audience during AGDQ 2014. During the development process we even talked about popping up an infobox along the lines of "Hi AGDQ 2014! We have total control of this console. Here is what we can do with it." The payload that Masterjun settled on was a good balance between providing a payload that was appropriate in length for the time we were alloted in our block as well as something that was clearly arbitrary code that crated a standalone game which could then be played.
The payload Masterjun crated intentionally included an "insert coins" arcade game style demo of the gameplay, which is what people are arguing about here; most of those style demos of arcade games from the 80's demonstrated "suboptimal" play much the way this demo did, but when the user takes control themselves (which *can* be done immediately after the payload is fully executed; perhaps Masterjun can provide the exact frame number for this) the human player can play as optimally as they like, as TASEditor appears to have done. In my opinion, the payload for AGDQ was perfect - being able to have Tompa, who had no idea what was happening, compete against micro500 in Pong was absolutely amazing and added to the experience. Had the movie been designed with only a TASVideos submission in mind, I suspect Masterjun would have presented the payload differently.
In conclusion, I feel that a TAS of the payload of a game-within-a-game is its own TAS and while the arguments put forth above have merit they should be argued within the context of what we now know is possible, not just for this run but for future runs with different payload. Thanks for reading this tome and I'd love to know what others think!
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So I knew about the contents of the run ahead of time based on testing runs on true's board. It was fun to see the first tests turn into what is in this final version. What was really awesome was hearing the audience's reaction behind us.
I've obviously voted Yes. Masterjun, thank you very much for allowing me to be a part of this.
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Thanks to help from micro500 and Weatherton we now have a very full TAS block. To sweeten the raffle, in addition to a true's NES/SNES replay device and a completely pristine ROB the winner of the raffle for the TAS block donation prize will win micro500's N64 bot as well. Please donate during the TAS block to help us raise $10,000 during the block. Thanks again to everyone for the support and see you soon!
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First off, I've been able to console verifyA Boy and His Blob. I may try to console verify a few more games but more than likely that will happen at AGDQ.
In other news, Up until now I've been struggling with the best way to present this "bot" - true was never picky on a name for his board and the entire process involves more than just the PCB. I was able to borrow a ROB and I've been cleaning him up over the past couple of days. I used Novus on the plastics to get him a lot shinier and after a bit of experimenting I've been able to get a good way to attach the PCB and the Pi to ROB. The result: ROBBerry Pi!
I originally tried putting the Raspberry Pi up around his neck, but it didn't quite look right to me.
I'm using zipties at the moment which don't look too bad but I might try to find a better solution. I admit that I really like the impression that this gives that ROB is playing the game in question. My next step is to hook up the GPIO pins on the Pi to the LED on the top of ROB's head to make it flash every time a button is pressed. This could be a bit more of a challenge than normal as from here on out I don't have home-field advantage; we're leaving to visit family for Christmas and won't be back home until after AGDQ, so I'll have to do the rest of this "in the field".
Thanks again for everyone's support!
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feos wrote:
How about SM64?
I'm working with micro500 to have him be present at AGDQ with his bot. I'm also bringing my own cartridges just in case. :)
As a quick update, I do have a ROB I'm borrowing. I put some batteries in him and he moves up and down just fine, but he's very, very noisy; I don't think it'd be appropriate to make him move around, but I think I can get away with hijacking his LED and connecting it to the Pi GPIO pin, and I can also have him holding the board. I'm not yet sure about the name ROB Bot, though. :) Thoughts?
Pictures to come,
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I have posted my slides with links from the presentation I gave at NBLUG. The presentation went somewhat rough in one sense - the projector I planned on using failed, I cut myself and was bleeding on everything without knowing it, I somehow ripped out the connectors on one of the SNES wiring harnesses I made, and halfway through the presentation I tripped over the power strip and unplugged everything which resulted in me performing an nmap scan to find the Pi's new IP address in the middle of the talk.
For everything that went wrong, the demos went extremely smoothly. I was able to demonstrate Gradius, SMB1, SMB3, and SMW total control. I I regret using knock-off controller ends for the SNES wiring harnesses I built. The wires don't want to stay in and they are very flimsy, and the "core" I used to pull all of the wires through the heat shrink tubing is a bit too thick and inflexible. I may rip them apart and try again if I have time, but I might be able to make these work as-is.
At this point I have reasonably reproducible results on the games we plan on demonstrating. I'll be repeatedly practicing setup and teardown to ensure everything is bulletproof, and I'll update here as the final set of games to be demonstrated solidifies. Thanks again for the support,
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Tonight at 7:30 PST I will be presenting at the North Bay Linux User's Group, which meets at the O'Reilly Campus in Sebastopol, CA. I'll be talking about the Tool-Assisted Speedrun community, Raspberry Pi serial scripting, PCB design using Eagle in Linux, PIC microcontrollers, and how a TAS can be an artform.
It'll be a good opportunity to test setting up the bot to see how quickly I can get it working and how smooth the transitions will be. I plan on practicing the setup and transition repeatedly so the TAS block at the marathon goes smoothly. Thanks again to everyone who has contributed so far - this would not be possible without the help of a large number of people.
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With a lot of help from true on the hardware front, help from Ilari on the lsnes front, and Masterjun on the glitched run front, I was finally able to get the SNES total control run to sync on my hardware. It turns out that true did all of his recent work using the GPIO serial header on the Pi while I was using the USB method and there is apparently a bug somewhere preventing that method from working right which is what plagued my testing on Monday. After switching over to the serial connection method, the picture got a bit more messy. It doesn't help that I never depopulated the old NESBot so the Pi is sitting right on top of the poor Arduino.
I at least have an excuse for why the SNES wires are a bit messy at this prototype stage, but even then, I had to get extremely creative to get the second controller DATA1 wire to stay in place by using a small screwdriver crammed in to keep the wire from slipping out.
The biggest problem I have is lack of proper jumper wires.
This is a good example of how not having enough equipment makes everything take so much longer to wire up. Between the Pi and the PCB, I have two old fan connectors hooked up to serial TX, RX, and ground, and the power is connected using two blue jumpers on a breadboard wire. The wire nuts prevent TX and RX from shorting to ground. Suboptimal is probably not a strong enough word. I'll be ordering a lot of parts later this week (after the US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow) so I can make this a whole lot cleaner. Everything has to be portable enough to make it through the airport in carry-on luggage come January so I plan on putting together a proper wiring harness for the two SNES controllers with a pigtail at the SNES end similar to how USB powered DVD drives are designed.
Having said all of that, I am very happy to say that I was able to get the SNES glitched run to complete on my setup, which makes me exceedingly happy. As long as wires are in the right places it's very reproducible, which along with getting Gradius to sync is exactly what I was hoping for at the beginning of the project.
I'll be doing a dry run of what I plan on presenting at AGDQ 2014 on December 10th when I'll be giving a presentation at the North Bay Linux User's Group. Linux was a key aspect of this process as I used FCEUX and lsnes Linux ports to convert the emulator-specific movie files to the correct format for the replay script which itself is running on Linux on a Raspberry Pi. With true's permission I plan on releasing the gerber files for the PCB as well as the PIC code and replay scripts as open source (likely with a simple attribution license) as soon as everything is cleaned up.
Again, thanks to everyone for the support!
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Someone local donated two knock-off SNES controllers so I've used their cables to connect two SNES controllers to my breadboard. I'm a bit short on wire so the PCB ended up floating.
It's a bit tight with the scope probes connected, and I'm not entirely certain I haven't crossed a wire here.
At the moment I'm not seeing sane controller input but as soon as I can sort out my wiring problems (hopefully by taking apart a third controller and using its connectors) I'll be able to get SMW going myself. Again, huge thanks go to true for his work on scripts, and for Ilari for his work on lsnes and assistance understanding how to work with its lua scripts. Back with more soon,
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Some extended family issues have been causing a great deal of distraction for me over the last week but I hope to have time to work on this more very soon.
I'd like to take a crack at getting a dumper script for lsnes that puts everything in the correct format unless true gets to it before I do. Once I get at least one of my games to sync (I have SMW and SMAS for the Lost Levels run) I'll ask around about other games. Mario Kart 64 would definitely be interesting.
More to come,
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Great news - true was able to get the USB firmware working on his setup and I was able to populate the rest of the components. There's an extra diode soldered in an usual place that you might be able to spot.
There were some tricky bits, such as needing to solder a jumper wire to short a populated resistor that was causing problems. I did this soldering myself at home with solder with lead in it and I haven't thoroughly cleaned the board yet but it still looks pretty good.
I was able to solder the NES cable onto a header (more specifically, this part was actually done by the same co-worker who helped me with the bulk of the soldering) and I used some glue to keep everything in place. After flashing the latest firmware I hooked everything up.
Linux (in my case, Linux Mint XFCE edition) immediately detected a "USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters" device so I crossed my fingers and attempted to run Super Mario Bros.
I'm happy to report that SMB synced to the end. This looks far cleaner than my earlier breadboard setup and is the first result that I'd be comfortable taking to the marathon. Next up, I need to figure out what the SNES controller pinout is and give that a shot, but that might have to wait until true can get an SNES of his own.
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So the PCB that true designed arrived this week and I got everything soldered up with some assistance from a co-worker. We have an awesome soldering station at work which made things much easier.
One thing I've discovered is that true has a lot of parts and I don't. This is something I need to fix, but in the meantime the consequence of my lack of parts is I end up devising some creative hacks (case in point, I had to build my own SD card holder using jumper wires when I worked on the NESBot, but I digress). I had to come up with a pretty messy setup to go between the PCB and the Raspberry Pi (which is acting as a UART serial data source containing movie files and a script to send them across said UART serial interface). I finally resorted to using pinheaders off of old fans from a neglected Pentium II, but this only got me three of the four wires I needed (+3.3 volts, ground, RX, and TX). For the final wire I ended up using a jumper and jammed a wire into it - it worked well enough. :)
I moved the NES connector over and re-used the same method of connecting it to the breadboard. I didn't bother depopulating everything from the NESBot, so it's still on the breadboard for the moment. I'm happy with how the blue wires fanned out, but I'll have to tighten everything up when I get to two players.
I'm very happy to report that this crazy contraption was able to sync SMB1. Next step - obtain a copy of Gradius and work on getting another broken SNES controller (I have one, but I need one more).
Again, thanks goes to true for the amount of time and effort he's put in to the PCB. Thanks for everyone's interest and support!
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Thanks for the tip. I got in contact with the seller and sent some bitcoins and the controller should be here sometime soon. If anyone has a copy of Gradius they could sell me I'm still on the lookout for that although I'll snag it from Amazon if I don't hear of anyone here with a copy.
I have the PCB now and I hope to populate it very soon, but my schedule has been packed this week. I'll update when I can. Thanks for everyone's support!
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When I set up the "virtualbox-rr" rerecording environment in Linux for the NetHack run, ais523 and I had a lot of discussions on how best to handle savestates. We eventually decided to implement unlimited savestates using a list structure with buttons to move forward or back in an ever-expanding list, a button to save a new state at the end of the list, and a button to set the current state as the one to load when the load state key was pressed. In other words, there are five buttons total, including load savestate from working slot, create new savestate, go to previous slot, go to next slot, set current slot as working slot. It can be a little challenging to figure out where you are in the list so we added a show list method and save screenshots of the savestates, sort of. You see, everything is text-based, so it's a bit.. er.. different.
Anyway, after using that method I don't like going back to only 10 slots. I always feel like I'm throwing away something I might need.
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mmbossman wrote:
...If anyone has a more useful way of getting a hold of him, please let me know. I'd still be happy to donate it (and the 10 or so games I sent to him) to the same cause, if anyone else is interested in actually working on it.
I will attempt to contact him by E-Mail; I also sent a TASVideos forum private message to him and did not receive a response which Adelikat said is not uncommon for him, so it's not just you. :) I probably won't worry about games until we've had a chance to test out the Genesis code, and as noted the emulators are not yet very accurate so I'm preparing for the reality that some games will not sync correctly.
Thanks for your offer and support of this project! I'll be sure to keep in touch.
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I originally tried putting the Raspberry Pi up around his neck, but it didn't quite look right to me.
I'm using zipties at the moment which don't look too bad but I might try to find a better solution. I admit that I really like the impression that this gives that ROB is playing the game in question. My next step is to hook up the GPIO pins on the Pi to the LED on the top of ROB's head to make it flash every time a button is pressed. This could be a bit more of a challenge than normal as from here on out I don't have home-field advantage; we're leaving to visit family for Christmas and won't be back home until after AGDQ, so I'll have to do the rest of this "in the field".
Thanks again for everyone's support!
A.C.
******
I at least have an excuse for why the SNES wires are a bit messy at this prototype stage, but even then, I had to get extremely creative to get the second controller DATA1 wire to stay in place by using a small screwdriver crammed in to keep the wire from slipping out.
The biggest problem I have is lack of proper jumper wires.
This is a good example of how not having enough equipment makes everything take so much longer to wire up. Between the Pi and the PCB, I have two old fan connectors hooked up to serial TX, RX, and ground, and the power is connected using two blue jumpers on a breadboard wire. The wire nuts prevent TX and RX from shorting to ground. Suboptimal is probably not a strong enough word. I'll be ordering a lot of parts later this week (after the US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow) so I can make this a whole lot cleaner. Everything has to be portable enough to make it through the airport in carry-on luggage come January so I plan on putting together a proper wiring harness for the two SNES controllers with a pigtail at the SNES end similar to how USB powered DVD drives are designed.
Having said all of that, I am very happy to say that I was able to get the SNES glitched run to complete on my setup, which makes me exceedingly happy. As long as wires are in the right places it's very reproducible, which along with getting Gradius to sync is exactly what I was hoping for at the beginning of the project.
I'll be doing a dry run of what I plan on presenting at AGDQ 2014 on December 10th when I'll be giving a presentation at the North Bay Linux User's Group. Linux was a key aspect of this process as I used FCEUX and lsnes Linux ports to convert the emulator-specific movie files to the correct format for the replay script which itself is running on Linux on a Raspberry Pi. With true's permission I plan on releasing the gerber files for the PCB as well as the PIC code and replay scripts as open source (likely with a simple attribution license) as soon as everything is cleaned up.
Again, thanks to everyone for the support!
A.C.
******
It's a bit tight with the scope probes connected, and I'm not entirely certain I haven't crossed a wire here.
At the moment I'm not seeing sane controller input but as soon as I can sort out my wiring problems (hopefully by taking apart a third controller and using its connectors) I'll be able to get SMW going myself. Again, huge thanks go to true for his work on scripts, and for Ilari for his work on lsnes and assistance understanding how to work with its lua scripts. Back with more soon,
A.C.
******
There were some tricky bits, such as needing to solder a jumper wire to short a populated resistor that was causing problems. I did this soldering myself at home with solder with lead in it and I haven't thoroughly cleaned the board yet but it still looks pretty good.
I was able to solder the NES cable onto a header (more specifically, this part was actually done by the same co-worker who helped me with the bulk of the soldering) and I used some glue to keep everything in place. After flashing the latest firmware I hooked everything up.
Linux (in my case, Linux Mint XFCE edition) immediately detected a "USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters" device so I crossed my fingers and attempted to run Super Mario Bros.
I'm happy to report that SMB synced to the end. This looks far cleaner than my earlier breadboard setup and is the first result that I'd be comfortable taking to the marathon. Next up, I need to figure out what the SNES controller pinout is and give that a shot, but that might have to wait until true can get an SNES of his own.
A.C.
******
One thing I've discovered is that true has a lot of parts and I don't. This is something I need to fix, but in the meantime the consequence of my lack of parts is I end up devising some creative hacks (case in point, I had to build my own SD card holder using jumper wires when I worked on the NESBot, but I digress). I had to come up with a pretty messy setup to go between the PCB and the Raspberry Pi (which is acting as a UART serial data source containing movie files and a script to send them across said UART serial interface). I finally resorted to using pinheaders off of old fans from a neglected Pentium II, but this only got me three of the four wires I needed (+3.3 volts, ground, RX, and TX). For the final wire I ended up using a jumper and jammed a wire into it - it worked well enough. :)
I moved the NES connector over and re-used the same method of connecting it to the breadboard. I didn't bother depopulating everything from the NESBot, so it's still on the breadboard for the moment. I'm happy with how the blue wires fanned out, but I'll have to tighten everything up when I get to two players.
I'm very happy to report that this crazy contraption was able to sync SMB1. Next step - obtain a copy of Gradius and work on getting another broken SNES controller (I have one, but I need one more).
Again, thanks goes to true for the amount of time and effort he's put in to the PCB. Thanks for everyone's interest and support!
A.C.
******