I'm really enjoying this thread, even moreso than I was before :) I wonder how many of these we could get to sync on hardware, especially if we get some ⚡️ in before AGDQ2017 ;)
It's worth noting that I will be adding e-Reader functionality to mGBA in 0.5, which will hopefully then make it into BizHawk or I'll finally get around to making the RR frontend for mGBA. I've already started work on it, but it's not been going that great so far. caitsith2's research has been invaluable, nonetheless.
I have neither of those, but they're both done in VBA, which is probably really bad news for syncing. If they could be redone in lsnes, that would likely be a lot better, but that would be rather time-intensive, I'd imagine. If they are, I'm sure I could acquire one.
As for what I've gotten working, well...the Castlevania run actually appears to be dead in the water. It fails to pick up one of the souls on real hardware, despite it having seemingly frame-perfect sync up until then, and it DOES pick up the soul in mGBA, so it'd be hard for me to keep investigating. I did get Sonic Advance 2 working, but that might be...too old hat considering we did Sonic Advance 1 last year.
It's worth noting that the Game Boy Player Player can in theory support GB games by virtue of being a GBA, but I've had no luck trying to verify any GB TASes. Perhaps I'm not using the right ones, though. I don't have very many GB games anyway.
I thought the other day about unusual controller hardware and realized it might be interesting to try to do something with Duck Hunt, but I'm not sure what could be done that's actually interesting.
I decided to work on verifying this movie. I'd previously tried verifying Kriole's movie, since it was so highly rated and I love AoS, but it uses way too old a version of VBA to sync well. This one, however, well, check it out.
Working on verifying a new movie, #4889: Fz-Last, Pike & alkdcY's GBA Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow "all souls" in 18:45.26.
Link to video
What's super interesting about this game is that mGBA (dev builds) and the actual hardware are in perfect sync, but VBA has completely different lag frames, so it took a lot of work manipulating the lag frames to even get this 4% of the submission syncing. However, given this, I don't have to replay it all the time on hardware when working on the sync, making this feasible to do in presumably only a few weeks.
And here I was assuming the game was unsyncable due to variance in how the hardware starts and runs. I guess if you modify the clocks you can do it, but at what point does it start being too intrusive into a hardware mod? Perhaps I'm getting to philosophical though.
So the other day I actually tested every region of that game (and II) in the nightly and they all seemed to work. So let me know if I missed something.
It basically turns off all the hardware and waits for an interrupt to occur. It disables all the interrupts except for keypad interrupts, so it waits until you press a combination of keypresses. I COULD implement this, but it would be a bit confusing to use.
MUGG wrote:
Would it be possible to take a savestate in the standalone with the latest nightly to see if I can look into it? It'd make things a lot more convenient for me.
In one of the older nightly versions, 0.4-2646-afb29ae, I have encountered a problem.
My cursor would turn invisible pretty much for as long as mgba was running. I could see it again when I paused it. I was livestreaming with OBS, but I think I had no other programs open that would have interfered with the emulator.
Not sure if this happens in the newer versions. I'm just saying, in case it's a problem with running OBS and mGBA at the same time.
Also, maybe we can rename the topic to reflect that this is "mGBA" discussion.
That's kind of intentional, although the cursor is supposed to come back whenever you move the mouse. If it's not...that must mean that something is stealing the cursor event I guess? Not really sure.
As for sleep mode, that's "intended" behavior insofar as I wasn't sure how to make that behave in an expected way, so when you enter sleep mode, it takes a savestate and exits the game. The savestate is then automatically loaded and deleted the next time you start the game. Which is admittedly very confusing and I knew it would be, I just wasn't sure how to make it not-confusing. I remember getting very confused with what VBA did.
I'm not sure that's true for the iMacs, but it certainly is for the Mac Pros. They are ludicrously overpowered for anything you want to do other than serious workstation work, and the pricing doesn't make sense for that, either. The Mac Minis, too, aren't competitively priced vs NUCs these days, and they only have integrated GPUs, which won't do Dolphin on OS X. (The OS X Intel drivers are shit.)
If you want a laptop, you're probably best off with a MacBook Air right now, although you won't be able to play Dolphin on it. You'll need a 15-inch MBP for that, one of the ones with two GPUs.
If Dolphin is a major criterion and you don't want do do Hackintosh, your prices START at $1500 and only go up.
So I know got4n was saying that current builds of Dolphin have TASing pretty damn broken, including stable. Can someone test thing WIP build to make sure I didn't miss anything when I tried to fix it? I haven't tested it on Windows. http://dl.dolphin-emu.org/prs/pr-2995-dolphin-latest-x64.7z
I was basically looking for a good name for YEARS, originally for a brand of some sort (I've wanted to make games for ages, and "endrift" was originally going to be the brand name for the games, not my personal username), and eventually stumbled on the name endrift, which is meant to evoke sort of a dreamlike fluid state, where things are up to interpretation and nothing is concrete.
The endrift logo, my avatar, went through about 10 revisions before I settled on this one. It's meant to be ambiguous in what it represents. It's supposed to look both like waves and clouds at the same time. (It also needs a bit of a redesign.)
Here are some early designs that didn't make the cut:
(Also if you tweak the logo a bit and rotate it, uh...)
It's also worth noting that the difference in mass between a neutron and a proton is close to the mass on an electron. An unbound neutron will naturally decay (via the weak nuclear force) into a proton and an electron (also an electron anti-neutrino, but most of the energy in the neutrino is kinetic).
(Also if you tweak the logo a bit and rotate it, uh...)
