But that shouldn't excuse using an E ROM for the submission in the first place when there was a good dump U version available.
Depending on the core you may get the PC right before your address is written, but it would still be easy to find in the tracelog for the frame it changes at. And in the tracelog you can go up and see how the value affecting it is changing. You don't have memory view there, but you have affected addresses printed out anyway. I feel you'd be better of just implementing proper breakpoints, then debugger would instantly jump to the location your address is changed on. The problem with the current hawk is that debugger is a tool and tools don't update midframe unless it's a hook like in lua. But you seem to have solved that part. https://tasvideos.org/Bizhawk/LuaFunctionsLanguage: lualocal function print_disasm() local pc = emu.getregister("PC") -- or whatever the PC register is called for that core, check using emu.getregisters() local dis = emu.disassemble(pc).disasm -- not all cores have this, so you can just print the PC print(string.format("%X: %s", pc, dis)) end event.onmemorywrite( print_disasm, 0 -- or whatever your address is )
I'll agree with that. After all, we have the same standard for judging optimization in every other run. However, I still think the score should match or beat all known scores. There's not much of a point in calling the branch "maximum score" if somebody can just point to a higher score during judgment.
I did some research and I think I understand now what's going on with this game. The game itself runs at ~12 fps, which is resolved by advancing one game frame every 4 or 5 video frames (similar to the Prince of Persia NES movie I worked on), notwithstanding lag frames from excess of active objects in the screen. The difference between E and U is the number of lag frames introduced to keep the game running at 12 fps, even though the console runs at 50 or 60fps. The fact that the U version requires more lag frames to keep 12fps doesn't mean that the game runs slower or a movie for that version would be slower (as I mistakenly thought at the beginning). So therefore there should be no difference in look&feel between the two versions.
It's the fastest one I could find. Maybe someone could do better, with some more in depth understanding of the game code. Either way, it's not gonna be easy to improve.
To make things less onerous for judges, the proof that the score really is maximized could just be that it beats all other known scores and there are no obvious ways to increase it further.
My idea is accepting "easiest password" for Standard because it's the fastest, and accepting "hardest password" for Moons because it's more about being fancy with a self-imposed challenge (maybe it doesn't meet the Moons entertainment requirement, but I have a major "improvement" in the works, stay tuned 😉)
Regarding length of run: If a dummy movie file is going to be present anyway, we could make it from all blank inputs that was as many frames long as needed to show the appropriate time frame.
For something "beyond input" like #4947: dwangoAC, Ilari & p4plus2's SGB Pokémon: Red/Green/Blue/Yellow Version "Pokemon Plays Twitch" in 08:11.42, the closest real-life analogy is avant-garde or experimental films. The best example that I know of is Mothlight (1963), which is a short film that was created without using a camera. If a film can be made outside of standard methods, then a TAS can be as well. Publish it as an entirely separate class from other movies, and hold it to a high standard of artistic and technical merits for publication. I don't think we need 1000+ word arguments about breaking rules or whatever. If the sentiment favors including more experimental art, then create a new experimental class (not playground) and publish. Bada bing bada boom.
1. Should we allow "maximum score" as a standard branch universally? Currently, we allow it as a form of full completion, but this does not catch 100% of cases, which is a bit ironic for full completion, really. The proposed change to the rule here would just be to allow "maximum score" as a branch independently of full completion. We would likely lessen the rules on methodology in this case, maybe only disallowing unassisted infinite loops and ACE. This change would also apply to timed games where the only objective method of competitive play is score. This could mean allowing timed sports games as well, but the mere thought of having that conversation again is giving me PTSD. We'll see.
2. For infinite games, how do we define "maximum score"? Max score for timed games like Sharp Shot is easy to define, but what about games like this where play can be infinite? Some of the prior discussion in this thread has revolved around the nature of this game's score counter, and defining maximum score in relation to that counter is an important distinction for us to make, especially if we're going to broaden how we treat the category itself. In this case, the distinction is between the displayed score and the internal score counter. The display score is indeed maxed out and overflowed, but the game continues to internally keep track of score beyond that. Should we demand that a maximum score run max out the internal counter, or should we just stick to display score? My personal stances here are "yes, allow max score universally" and "stick to display score", but I'd like to see other opinions. That, or a bunch of people agreeing with me. That also feels nice.
How we branching it is the question? Do we follow the RTA community naming "N. Tropy" as "defeat N. Tropy" when translated to the site, or does "N. Trance" get a branch instead?
The movie must be complete
- If there's no clear ending, end after all unique content (enemies, level layouts, game mechanics, etc.) is exhausted.
- Alternately, after completing all unique content, you may end when the in-game difficulty (enemy speed, AI, etc.) stops increasing.
[1926] NES Contra (Japan) "pacifist" by Soig & zyr2288 in 09:29.08 After noticing that previous pacifist runs had only one player, I was thinking that we should let this one be part of its own branch. It's probably different enough from the main 2 player pacifist runs.
It can be made to sync with a very simple modification, simply remove the first 5 inputs with a hex editor (bytes 0x100 - 0x127). That along with setting the needed settings (no memcard, no dual core, no idle skipping, dsp lle) will have the movie sync fully.