Posts for eternaljwh


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I didn't know 娘娘 was a real name. Wonder how close to 100% kills you can get.
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Was going to vote no, but those're an impressive ASCII donkey and car, so some entertainment was had.
Post subject: Re: #7070: warmCabin's NES Mega Man 2 "Fastest Softlock" in 02:54.48
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
Let's define a softlock for the purposes of this run. A softlock is when you're stuck at a certain point in the game world with no way to advance and no way to die. So the only way out is to get up off your roommate's couch and press the reset button
Nah, death doesn't definitionally preclude a softlock, if the death doesn't put you somewhere you can resume progress of the game toward its ultimate conclusion. Typical AF concept, nice moonwalks but it's still ultimately MM2. Interesting new glitched attribute data, though.
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I gotta disagree on the no-p-bag (Mido-man) logic. Yes, it's possible to get an unlimited amount of 50 or 200 bags from drops, but the fixed-spawn bags have flags that save when you get them so they can't respawn, just like the link dolls. Which you can get an infinite number of from level-ups. …oh, it's already being published. Guess I was slow on the draw. e: Watching… good, you used a pauses during a fanfares to get a free spell selects. Lotta good deathwarps in cul-de-sac rooms. Hmm, wrongwarps in palaces. Are you sure you need Jumpspell for the P6 doll? or is the pit such that you have to slow down too much to have the conditions for an unbuffed 3-tile-high jump? …it occurs to me while watching that a fair number of keys are not "meaningful", since you can skip them and go get the Magic Key, and thereby get the things they block that are allegedly meaningful without them… Shame there aren't any appropriate enemies for getting 7 points in GP to end with 1337. Your prelim encode had outside sounds at a little after fifty minutes and also an hour. Entertaining.
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Run right for…no wait, left for…how about up… Meh vote. That sure is a bit of licensed drek. Finite attacks you can get pickups for, modest healthbar, only three main worlds.
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So where does the difficulty wrap/go back down?
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You missed a tiny spot on…Littlefoot? >In case anyone gets serious Well, they should at least use *all* the fullscreen erases. There's opportunity to. Oddly entertaining, though the mouse scripting is clearly a bit odd, and a few indecisions were clearly left in, this is still a fair technical achievement. Also, I was entertained.
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I take it framerules don't stop for score-tally, so all the time lost to score-tally decimal conversion makes it hard to just have every level end on the same value?
Post subject: Nobody ever looks at reply subjects.
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That's a decent joke. It even accomplishes what it claims to. Level-select cheat codes are generally banned. Choosing the latest level when it requires no cheat is not always (see: Wario's Woods vs. Com). The question then becomes: Do earlier chapters provide interesting TASing opportunities? I very much doubt it.
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Looks like you did notice b-button run… You don't have to stand south of a panel to activate it, though, and waste a few tiles' motion in a few places (such as southeastmost panel, the last puzzle in section A, and many times in section B) on this.
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
More info dump in no particular order. 0x80B3 is a function I'm calling DoStoredProcInBank1. There's also an entry point for Banks 2, 3, and 4 nearby (however, 3 and 4 are unused because there isn't a jump table for them.) At 0x18000 and 0x28000 there are jump tables for what I'm terming "stored procedures" for lack of better terminology. Essentially, this function allows the programmer to simply call a function from a different bank. Which, I'm not sure why this exists because JSL is a thing.
Especially when there weren't short jumps/JSRs on the 68k whence came Lagoon. But, this sort of indirect call is called a trampoline. (by analogy: jump, [bounce off trampoline,] jump somewhere else)
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Lookin' good. Glad to see a latter-day developed game TASed. Having played the demo, that first level looks most impressive.
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Here is a perfect example of Revenge and Luck-manipulation entertainment. Actual gameplay is a wee bit repetitive.
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Controller replay. (No "file". One does not have to call a BMP or GIF a file.)
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A curious game, run perhaps too-fast. I'm sure knowing the game would make it a better show. Being among the uninitiated…are destructible walls necessarily marked in any fashion?
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Very good explanation of how you're grinding the gears of the game mechanics. Might want to point out that the gaining of abilities is tied to which level you find Bettina the Fairy in, though? And I can't seem to find a simple display of the level interconnections anywhere, where the available paths fork…but that's only useful for someone not at all familiar with the game (like me). So…how far down in the ink is the kill-line? Is it just "fall off screen" as usual with graphical overlay? (voted yes)
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This looks pretty much like what I saw of a realtime run at a *GDQ…hence, the novelty is not present when I watched it this time. Thus, meh. (For a new viewer, though, it's "Whoa! Skipped to the final boss, with something so simple") Still, it seems similar to my memories of the real-time run, perhaps with a wrong guess as to which way Ripto runs elided.
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I have no particular objection to use of additional credits, when it leads to faster, or more particularly, more entertaining runs. The coin switch is an input exposed to the user, and thus fair-game. A free HMG does not sound like it would be particularly more-entertaining, particularly when Something like Chip'n'Dale's continuous balloon abuse would make for an odd test case, were the lives counter simply another input that could be arbitrarily extended. Of course, given that the game allows so much already with proper life-gaining… (similarly, Mystical Ninja (SNES)). Damageless, deathless, and 1CC stipulations have a small, game-knowledge-dependent entertainment value. There may be exploits that are only possible with TAS precision and multiple continues on coin-op games, and I feel it would be premature to foreclose against them.
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I feel that there are three(/four) portions to an ACE:
  1. Setting up the ACE
    • /Reaching where it may be set up
    • Actual setup
  2. Creating the bootloader[/s]
  3. Delivering the payload
Payload choice around here had tended to "[visibly] set game to finished state". This has tended to a minimal infraction against the norm "do not modify the game".
Nach's RFC wrote:
Each new post arguing for such a concept highlighted to me more and more reasons why the aims and reasons of these [technically oriented] users did not mesh with what publications are supposed to be about, and what the site rules for publications aim to accomplish. Doing something difficult and novel programming-wise with a game is not a substitution for entertainment. Certainly not for the average viewer.
It entertains me. Most TASes entertain in a speedrun style. This is entertaining from an "appears to be a player playing with godlike proficiency"--a value that, oddly, decreases the more you know about TASing, and may increase or decrease depending on whether one knows the game in question. Many TASes entertain in a vengeance style. This one is very-much based on knowing the game's difficulty; some may be recouped from the rest of the audience by a skilfully-written submission text/subtitles. Numerous TASes entertain specifically because they seem to be playing the RNG like a fiddle. Again, this is more apparent when game (or genre) knowledge is possessed. All of these knowledge-based entertainment values seem to have been acceptable. The technical demonstration is, again, an entertainment value that goes up with knowledge. I find a certain irony in that our "recommended for newcomers" icon is a question-mark block, when the goal is accessibility. (Devil'sAdvocate) Why not, then, its opposite, permitting and marking that which has specifically Arcane Appeal? An answer, of course, is that people wish to think of themselves as skilled; this runs right up into Dunning-Kruger territory. I am, of course, biased, being a programmer.
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It was a pretty blow-away [set of] demo[s], albeit not feeling very TAS-y… the Gradius revenge was neat and TAS-y, though. Loved the reveal that you'd used three consoles to cobble it together, though it felt a little…out-of-place. So…twothree main questions. How similar was what streamed video format to this? What video would the Nintendo side of the donation war have yielded? How much would video throughput increase by having the expansion port available, as shown in #5447: Masterjun's SNES Super Mario World "expansion game end glitch" in 00:41.75?
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Don't forget your citations. https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/CPU_power_up_state also useful. Now that I'm not time-pressured, I found where this had kind of been done, albeit not with strong analysis nor using audio to handle to-PC transmission. https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Talk:CPU_power_up_state has some results.
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A program for dumping ROM through PCM already exists: TapeDump. A modifier to make it RAM instead would not be all that hard, though I'm not sure if he's released source. as all source is bundled. I suggest running your cart-variables that aren't in registers through on-cart RAM. Don't forget: no interrupts nor subroutine calls until you've dumped stackpage.
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feos wrote:
also more accurate than PowerPak. Though, no flash cart is as precise and a real cart, so absolute levels of accuracy shouldn't be tested against them.
Uh…
NES (+PowerPak)**		29	42	 8	44	1	2	126
Famicom AV (+Everdive)	33	44	 7	43	2	3	132 [everdive sic]
Difference				 4   2  -1  -1  1   1    6
----------------------------------------------------
Gray cells on PPak		 5	 3	 0	 2	4	1	 15
Gray cells on Edrive	 4	 1	 6	 0	1	0	 12
Given that half the difference is "untested" (not marked pass/fail), that the untested groups are counted as failures, and that untested on EACH side > difference…I'm going to say "needs more data" rather than "Everdrive more accurate". I believe one could set up firmware so that it doesn't return to menu on reset, but I'd need to investigate further.
After lunch: The off-site link to the data on the powerpak tests is dead(404). It does not seem interesting that they fail the CPU test on a known-unstable (/machine-dependent) opcode $AB LAX. Register state rejiggering is probably among the easiest of things to change on a PowerPak mapper firmware file.
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Final Fantasy's real-time SS run relies on a "cold boot" yielding certain reliable RAM values on the chip, as it uses uninitialized memory to seed encounter RNG. For some reason, my suggestions to use a PowerPak or similar were not believe to be within the pale of non-TAS. SaGa(FFL) 2 uses RAM that is uninitialized …except that it is initialized by the bootloader, which varies by gameboy model (DMG, color, advance). A concrete example of "warp in game A using game B" (doable in realtime…albeit not on a frontloader, I hear) is Tennis/SMB1 cartswap, as the signature used to identify "initialized RAM/hiscore values" is the same, and score uses the same byte as continuable-world limit, allowing level-select to normally-unreasonable values in SMB.
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eternaljwh wrote:
eternaljwh wrote:
YARFU (yet another request for update)
I know DwangoAC has been basically nonstop busy with ?GDQ. How about you?