I've started this run up again, and have switched to the unlicensed Gauntlet rom for certain legal purposes (I own the unlicensed game, but not the licensed one).
I've also switched from Famtasia to FCEU. On the up-side, FCEU's much more stable than Famtasia -- I've had no desynchs through world 1, whereas for Famtasia I would usually get 3-4 and would waste a few hours going through the same areas over and over again.
On the down side, either because of FCEU or because of the switch in ROMs, menu reaction speeds seem to be slower. Maybe it's because of the fact that FCEU only seems to do 25% and 50%, and not 30% (the speed I found best while running Famtasia)
As such, my test-run of World 1 is now at 2:46 on FCEU, whereas it was 2:42 on Famtasia.. even with a slight route improvement. :(
Thoughts? Comments?
Would this game go official and become AVI due to the ending not working? Otherwise, why'd you not kill the last boss in a regular way? Would it actually take that much time? Ah well. Glad to have seen it anyways. Cheers!
I think the game needs to reach the ending credits. Therefore, this run would not be suitable.
If the last boss can be killed normally, without the glitch, and then proceed to the ending credits, a minor adjust to the run would make it submission-worthy, I think.
Same company behind both games and they are both set in the same world.
I don't think they're set in the same world, but they DO share a number of similarities.
Anyway.. Thoughts about speeding up the Actraiser run, mostly untested, but based on fond memories of the game:
1. Instead of prancing around enemies in Sim mode, shooting them without movement _should_ allow you to kill them faster, thus letting them regenerate faster and be killed again, earning more and more mana. If you have full mana, does that allow the town to grow faster? It seems that way for Aitos, at least, from some cursory experimentation. If this is true, using angel arrows might also be of some benefit. I'm not sure if bombs restore mana for slain monsters, but it might also be something to experiment with.
2. Better paths. It should be possible to add additional space for living without requiring more than a second or two to add a path to that space.. an additional path or two here and there might alleviate the need for so many turns wasted later on. additionally, i've noticed that towns will grow on their own, so if you have a few extra undeveloped spaces when you leave, they'll be filled up with L3 houses.
In Bloodpool and Kasandora, once you kill the boss, you have to leave the lands before the "STOP" event is triggered (fighting and plague, respectively), so you might need to build out the path slightly before sealing the last lair.
3. Optimized item collection. Picking up items all at the same time, rather than when they become available. That reduces the number of trips to the menu, as well as the number of trips to the temple.
The people of Mahrana, of course, will disappear after the 4th lair is sealed, so you must pick up everything you want there before that happens.
4. Wheat. A country with wheat grows 2 additional walkers per turn (8, instead of 6). You can pick up 3 pieces of wheat (for Kasandora, Mahrana and Northwall) in Bloodpool. It might make a difference in the speed of growth.
I'm not sure if any of these would actually help, but it seems to me that they might.
Yeah, I know...not sure if it's an extraordiary enough glitch to warrant separate versions (in the FF6 thread the sketch glitch is, so a non-glitched run is strongly considered and even preferred by some.)
My gripe about the Sketch Glitch is that it seemed (to me) to be rather hard to control, and that it usually involved _saving and resetting_ the game to make it stable.
If there exists a set of conditions where the sketch glitch does not require the game to be reset to stabilize it, then use of the sketch glitch would be fine, IMO.
One part of that concern is related to how movies record: can a move be recorded to include a system reset?
Why only 97.5% enemies defeated? With better movement and shooting, I can't see why 100% defeated would be impossible.
Also, using a code to warp to level 23 skips over large parts of the game. I might be wrong, but I think precident for this site is that codes are only used when it can be used to increase difficulty and such.
Furthermore, you get hit quite a bit in the movie. It's really ugly and almost certainly unnecessary.
HOWEVER, having said all that, I don't think the game itself is worth publishing -- it scrolls at a fixed rate, and there's not much in the way of powerups (a la gradius) so it gets monotonous really quickly.
I'd say "No" to 1943 as a whole, regardless if someone made a better video of it.
So if there is work on FF6 and SMRPG, why not FF4 speed-running? GameFaqs says a sub-8 hour run is attainable, and I imagine a LOT of time could be saved with shortcuts and luck abuse.
We were talking about this some time ago. FF6's storyline lends itself to a few shortcuts of significance.. for instance, the game can be beaten shortly after Kefka destroys the world, once you get the 2nd airship. There's no need to acquire the remainder of the party again, which saves a good amount of time. Furthermore, FF6 has some oddities by playing "the numbers"; you can make characters nearly impossible to hit by raising their stats appropriately.
FF4 is much more rigid in its storyline, and there is very little you can do other than go from point A to point B. The biggest time-saver is cutting out the Sealed Cave (as you mentioned), which is a nice boost, but isn't enough on its own. You can't get significantly powerful items early (most of them are in the Moon). You can't abuse stats and make yourself unhittable (although you can make yourself get maximum boosts whenever possible).
There aren't even very many other glitches I'm aware of. I suppose it could be plotted out to see what could be done, but I doubt there's a whole lot going for it, in terms of shortcuts.
It'd be a decent walkthrough video, but that's about all, I think.
If/when these videos get released to the public, and if both versions are being worked on, don't you guys think there should be both a sketch-glitch and non-sketch glitch version?
No. I'd prefer seeing only a non-sketch glitch run. The sketch glitch gives you lots of items and stuff, but it's a massive buffer overflow, and the impact of which can be far-reaching and hard to predict.
Furthermore, can the game be stabilized post-sketch glitch, without saving and resetting? My experience with the glitch, although limited, seems to be "No", that if you continue playing after sketching (without saving and resetting) the game will eventually crash or lead you to a location that cannot be exited.
A movie that demonstrates various effects of the glitch might be nice, but seeing a full FF3 run with the glitch would not.
Exodus would be okay for a walkthrough video, but it'd be far too long to consider for a SPEED RUN.. even with luck manipulation, I can't imagine this would be very enjoyable or fast at all.
75% of the game is spent at level 1, because the monsters that appear are easy to kill with the cleric and wizard 0 MP spells. At level 3+ more difficult monsters appear, that can't be killed so easily. So you'd wander around (maybe going to the dungeons, since combat is easier to control there), acquiring gold and exp so that when you promote to level 5 (and you wouldn't want to promote before level 5), you can quickly hop in a pirate ship and visit Ambrosia to get your stat points raised.. at which point you usually want to raise Cleric WIS and Wizard INT to max (7400 for each, assuming you start with 25 points in their main stat), just so you can cast more Ascend/Descend/Rise/Sink spells to dodge traps and pick up more chests.
The fastest place to pick up treasure is probably Dungeon of Gold level 4 and 7.. but getting there is still rather difficult.. with proper movement, however, you might be able to ascend/descend there without encountering any gremlins or traps or anything.. Or maybe it would be faster to go to that one town with the huge pile of chests behind the weapon store..
You'd probably want 4 silver (or was it gold?) picks so that you can get the mystic armor (just so that you can survive Exodus' castle and the handful of encounters that you'll run into there)...
I always played the game with 2 clerics and 2 wizards, whose only flaw was that they couldn't equip the Silver Bow (the strongest ranged weapon in the game) so killing monsters that were strong took a long time, and was usually very painful.
It shouldn't be too hard to make an optimal path for this game, but it would be rather long, and very dependent on luck manipulation.
Pursue them in justice for menacing you. What do they think they are!? Is the word ''Speed'' copyrighted!? They sucks.
Unfortunately, the legal system doesn't quite work like that.
MPAA sent a C&D letter to the ISP, which basically says, "Cut this guy's access, or we'll sue you."
It acts as a -warning-, but is not something that is legally enforcable until someone actually goes to court and tries to get a judge to agree to it.
To secure his innocence, if MPAA took him to court, the guy would basically need to just show up in court with a CD rom of the file in question so that he could play it for the court. A matching file length would likewise be important.
Whichever automated program is sending these things out, it's horribly inaccurate; I recall seeing a C&D letter about a segment of source code, and a text adventure.
Further Misadventures of the MPAA and the ESA:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showwrap.cgi?case=idsa/DMCA-922932.casehttp://www.seebs.net/log/archives/000195.htmlhttp://gauley.ucs.indiana.edu/~cshields/dmca_letter
In level 6 you need to buy the pass, and in level 8 you need to buy that stupid book, both of which cost $980!
How about the lottery? IIRC you get $1150 per lotto win ($50+$200+$1000 - $100 for the ticket).. I don't remember where exactly the lotto places are, but I seem to recall one in level 2, at least. If you played through 3 times, that'd be more than enough cash.
Regarding Tetris: I don't know why the 800 level run is the most common movie online. It's certainly not the best one out there, although it is the only one which has the players hands visible.
On Arika's very own webpage, you can find a complete death mode run:
http://homepage2.nifty.com/arika_download/mpeg/Death-Gm05.mpg
Yes, March of the Black Queen is.. I prefer this Ogre Battle, however. :)
Did some more planning based on the maps of the levels (found at the URL linked above)... The results appear to be:
4. Jannenia is much smaller than Pogrom Forest. If you have a flyer + 3 wizards, you can just fly over the lake and avoid most/all enemies and beat the level quickly.
7 - 9. Diaspola, Kalbian Sea and Tundra is slightly smaller than Diaspola, Kaliban, and Antalia (although the latter might be faster, because enemies will probably detour around the swamp).
Malano is too big, and it's required if you take the Kastolatian route. However, it IS walled, so enemies will detour a fair distance away from the 'direct' route. It might be possible to use that to your advantage.
12 -13. Ryhan Sea and Shrine of Kulyn is a bit smaller than Dalmuhd and Shulamana. Plus, Kulyn is mostly water.
You should be able to get some wizards to level 10 in/around Diaspola, and thus should be able to turn them into Liches right away (thanks to luck manipulation on random items), at which point the game will really speed up. You can pick up princesses at pretty much any point in the game, so i suspect you'd have one or two in tow by then, as well.
For the early levels, you might want 1-2 additional flyer units to go pick up random items.
Also, what happens if the enemy captures the home fort, anyway? I've never had that happen.
You lose the map, get a gaint reputation smack, and return to the Zeteginea map without that territory liberated.
Okay, once again this enforces the minimum of 2 units to beat the game -- one to defend the fort, and one to trash the leader.
What maps are essential to beat the game? It -looks- like
1. Castle of Warren
2. Sharom
3. Sharom District
4. Pogrom Forest OR Jannenia
5. Slums of Zenobia
6. Island Avalon
7. Kastolatian Sea OR Diaspola
8. Valley of Kastro OR Balmorian Ruins OR Kalbian Sea
9. City of Malano OR Tundra OR Antalia
10. Shangrila
11. Fort Allamoot
12. Dalmuhd Desert OR Ryhan Sea
13. Fort Shulamana OR Shrine of Kulyn
14. City of Xanadu
15. Zeteginea
16. Temple Shalina
You'd need to check gamefaqs or this site for maps of all the regions, to see which ones are the smallest maps -- some of the latter maps take quite a bit of time to cross.
My strategy is very simple. My goal is to have one unit only. 2 liches, 1 princess and 1 wyrm.
Too bad that the hero counts as a troop.. and thus wouldn't fit in with this unit. You might be able to do Wyrm + Hero, Lich, Princess, I suppose, but that's 50% of your 'best' magic attack being replaced by a mediocre fighter.. plus you won't be able to have the princess as leader of your hero unit.
I guess the question is: Would a single hero unit be powerful enough to take out all the leaders, quickly? Recall that leader battles always have animation on -- it'd only take a few leader battles to level out the amount of time it takes to deploy a 2nd unit, if that unit can kill the leader significantly faster than the hero unit could.
Also, what happens if the enemy captures the home fort, anyway? I've never had that happen.
would you be doing this for pure speed? i think it would be incredible (if not impossible) if you could keep a good alignment the whole game through.
Speed and good alignment do not go hand-in-hand. A fast good aligned win (particularly the best ending, which is the only one worth aiming at) requires too much backtracking to pick up items and visit previously visited areas.
Add to that the necessary rotation of frontline units so that you don't kill your reputation too early, and the liberation of large numbers of towns.. plus the trips to unessential maps to pick up characters 'essential' to the best win...
no, a speed run with good alignment would take far too long.. it'd be more like a walkthrough of the game than a speed run. an evil-aligned run would be okay, though, because you don't have to restrain yourself or revisit old maps.
You'll probably need to buy joker cards to get past most bosses...
There should be two units, the Hero's unit, and an offensive unit.
Hero's unit should consist of Hero, 3 casters (2 liches and a princess/monk, or 3 liches) and a paladin (hero and paladin in the front row), rounded enough to take out anything that arrives at the base. There's no need to be concerned with it's movement rate -- it won't be going anywhere.
A second unit should consist of a princess (for the enhanced attacks), 2 liches, and a high-sky flyer. This unit will walk to the boss and should have no trouble... combined, it's something like 2 white attacks, 6 "best type" attacks and 4 physical attacks.
Initially, you'll probably need one more flying unit, to pick up crowns, staves and rings for all those liches and princesses.. but after that, it's just a matter of finding a quick and relatively enemy-free path to the boss. Still, you'll need to do some leveling as you go, or otherwise you'll never turn your wizards into mages. :p
I don't remember which issue though. Must be somewhere between 34 and 50.
issue 36, page 25:
If you've had it with Dr. Fred and his whole wacky mansion, you can blow the entire house into smithereens in one easy step. The steel security door at the top of the steps leads to a hallway. Enter this hallway and investigate the wall just to the left end of the security door. You'll find a keypad near the left wall. "USE" the keypad four times and you'll trigger an explosion that will make the mansion go up in flames. This is no way to win the game, but it's a quick and easy way to see it end.
As such, none of you have any rights concerning your FMVs.
This sounds like the same reason why food recipes are not copyrighted.. which makes sense.
So, the FMVs are both 'legal' and 'not copyrightable'. That still leaves the legal status of the AVIs, of course.
how this applies to software has never been fully explored in case law.
You sound like more like a lawyer than I do. Are you actually one (or a law student or something?)
I'm not, which is why I based my judgement on a previous C&D/legal attempts in (what I thought was) a similar set of circumstances. If you're familiar enough with any actual case law, then you're a better judge of this material than I.
When considering fair use, there are four factors that are considered
My understanding is that rulings are made based on all four criteria. If any one is grossly lacking, there is reason enough to deny fair use.
1) Purpose - Though never stated explicitly, one goal of Bisqwit's site is clearly education (through entertainment).
Not necessarily; a judge could also see these movies produced primarily for entertainment rather than education. The result would be determined by the skill of the lawyer for and the lawyer against the AVIs.
Furthermore, it is highly unlikely a correlation could be shown to exist between the videos and the market for GameCubes. In court, this factor would weigh overwhelmingly towards fair use.
As for #4, Nintendo has recently released several classic NES games for the GBA, ranging from Crystalis to the recently-released Zelda. As such, you could attempt to draw some corrolation between the videos and the current gaming industry. Whether the relationship is strong enough or not; I don't know.
I'm willing to agree that it could be considered be fair use, and that the case for these videos is stronger than that of anime fansubs, but without a firm precident established I personally would be hesitant to accept a legal challenge from Nintendo.
sean: As far as copyright is concerned, my understanding is that even if it's out of print for many years, the individuals and companies involved still hold their rights and can legally enforce them at any time (up until their copyright expires in ... what, 75 years?).. so, no, your argument that age has somehow reduced the 'harm' the videos might cause really has no impact on the debate here. Someone (such as Disney) can still object to illegal usage of old works (such as Mickey Mouse), even though the character is almost at the end of his copyright period (and has been, several times, before copyright was extended).
FODA: the "it's okay to make movies" reply probably wasn't from a person with any legal authority to make that statement. the legal owners are most likely the executives in charge of copyright management for the various Nintendo branches.
... although I do have to wonder: When Nintendo licensed the games from 3rd parties so many years ago... were those licenses intended to last forever? Or, does Nintendo have the option of maintaining those licenses every few years (and, do they choose to maintain all of them)? Or did they expire at some point?
If you think he's ripping *you* off, I have at least tried to argue why he isn't.
It may or may not be ripping customers OR the creator off; that's really a secondary concern. Businesses rip off customers all the time, and customers are largely unaware of it, or else feel rich enough that the extra money they pay doesn't contribute a significant loss to their own lifestyle.
What concerns me most is that it would be unauthorized reproduction and distribution, two rights clearly granted by copyright laws. The unauthorized distribution could also impact sales, if Bisqwit/etc ever decided to sell the product on their own terms.
If we truly adhered to this creed, then this site would not exist. Emulation is a *prime* example of users going against a creator's wishes.
Emulation is legal when it is created through "clean room" reverse engineering. Thus, anyone may use (or improve) existing emulation techniques, provided that all the work was entirely their own. That's a legal precident that supercedes the author's desires. You might argue that it's an arbitrary law, but so are all laws. Still, in this society, it means that laws (supposedly set into existance to preserve and continue to cultivate society) are more powerful than individual's rights. Heck, without laws there would BE no "rights" that could be licensed or sold. These rights are "inherent" only because there are laws dictating what those rights are, and where those rights begin and end.
As such, I have no problem seeing the authors wishes violated when a law says so; if the author disagrees with the law, then he/she must change the law to extend his/her rights.
As for this site in particular:
The FMVs are legal, as they are merely a listing of button presses with respect to time. If you took the time, you could make an FMV by hand. A FMV of SMB1 may be played on SMB2, or on Tony's Neat-o Demo 2000. Even if it only plays SMB1 "perfectly" it's still a generalized file format that can be used by (and for) other games.
The more I think about it, AVIs are almost certainly illegal. They use copyrighted audio and video. The technique of playing is legal, but the rom usage in their production is not. This would be similar to anime fansubs, which illegally use copyrighted video and audio with a translated script. The result, in the modern era, is videos which are distributed en masse, illegally, and usually comply only grudgingly with copyright holder demands.
Anime fansubs exist, of course, for one very simple reason: Lack of awareness from the Japanese industry. Almost no one reports anime fansubs to Japanese companies, and the companies don't hire people to just sit on the net and look for specific copyright violations. American companies receive more reports than the Japanese companies (for obvious reasons relating to the language gap) and so they'll act more often in defence of their legal rights. Fans re-interpret this unawareness as "tolerance" or sometimes even "preference", given the apparant prevasiveness of the videos. The ignorance found in the Japanese industry, however, does not legalize the videos. Thus, if Nintendo sent an e-mail to Bisqwit today, he'd have to comply by removing the AVIs, or else face a potential court battle.
So, the AVIs on this site would be removed, but this site would continue to exist without issue.
If people are willing to pay for something, then someone will be there to sell it to them. You could (try to) forbid people from paying money for your work, but I don't think you'll be thanked for it.
If that's the case, then Bisqwit and/or the FMV creators should consider possibly selling their work directly.. or else _licensing_ the right to do so to this guy. The original poster, however, has no right (currently) to take the FMVs and produce a DVD for sale (regardless if there's profit involved or not).
Those rights must be granted by each of the makers of the FMV, because they made the FMV itself.
FODA wrote:
in brazil it's very common to buy magazines that are actually cds full of demos. DEMOS. it's the work of collecting everything, making a nice selection, and put it all in one practical cd for easy access.
The same is true in America, but those demos are included on a "free" CD. You might only be able to get the CD if you buy the magazine, but the CD itself does not increase the cost of the magazine (i.e. if they published two versions of the magazine, one with and one without a CD, they should both cost the same amount).
What this guy offered was certainly not a "free" CD; it's a DVD/VCD being sold directly, and for-profit.
As I mentioned above, the players have created a good which may have some market value. If so, it's up to them to decide how they wish to market it. Some players here might staunchly refuse regardless of the arrangement, in which case their wishes should be respected.
Other players might be open to a licensing agreement, where they receive a few cents every time someone buys the DVD. Still others may want a small one-time fee, with no royalties.
Those players may also wish their FMVs to be displayed in certain ways; it's their right. If mfried wants his SMB1 run to be the first video on the DVD, and the original poster doesn't want to do that, then mfried can refuse to allow the poster to include it on the DVD. Simple as that.
If mfried wants the video played upside-down and the original poster can't dissuade mfried from such a silly request, then his only alternative is to NOT USE mfried's FMVs. If mfried thinks the SMB video is worth $500, and the original poster doesn't want to pay that fee, then the original poster CANNOT USE mfried's video. Now, I would hope that mfried isn't as silly as that, but it's his creation and he can make whatever crazy demands of it that he wishes.
In short, the author has *complete* control over his/her work, so he/she can choose who can and cannot use it, as well as the purpose for which it is used, and how he/she should be compensated for it. If the requests are outrageous, the product will go unsold/unused.. but just because the requests are outrageous doesn't mean that the author has somehow given up his rights to his work.
A lot of the claims made in this thread about CPU architecture are faulty at best, and completely wrong at worst.
But this isn't a CPU class, so I won't get into memory addressing and other things where the "bit" value actually has significant meaning.
A CPU could be 256-bit, but still only run at 1mhz.. the result? a very slow 256-bit CPU.
Likewise, a CPU could be 8-bit but run at 3ghz. the result? a very fast 8-bit CPU.
The "bit rating" of the CPU does not determine how fast the CPU will process data. It does, however, determine how much data it can "see", and how much data it can manipulate per cycle.
TYPICALLY as people developed more modern CPUs, they also made them more capable of handling larger amounts of data as well as being able to handle them faster.
for our purposes here, we usually talk about bits in terms of color depth; 4-bits is a selection of 16 possible colors. 8-bits is 256 colors, 16-bit is 65k colors.. 24-bit and 32-bit are millions of colors, and if you go much above 32-bit you would have more color depth than the human eye can differentiate.
However, even though the NES is an 8-bit system, the CPU architecture determines how many colors the CPU can use when selecting an on-screen palette. The NES CPU architecture allows for only 4 colors per sprite, and only 16 simultaneous colors per screen.. But it can select 16 colors from a palette of 256, however.
For the SNES, it could have 256 colors on screen simultaneously, and each sprite could have 16 colors, selectable from 64k different combinations.
That's usually the most visible aspect of the "bits" a CPU has. "Under the hood", so to speak, it affects how much data the CPU can see (whether it could see 256kb of ram, or 1024kb of ram, or 8mb or 64mb or whatever).... that limitation determines the complexity of the graphics (you can't have photorealistic models stored in 256kb of memory!), the quality of the sound (which would be based on the SPU, not the CPU), the size of the game, etc.
Carts were nice, because if you needed additional performance in a game, you could just add a chip to handle specific functions, like voices, 3d positioning/rendering, or other tasks. You can't just 'add a chip' for a cd-rom, though..
I guess it would be possible to make a FPGA CPU and 'configure' it every time you put in a game.. but it would never be as efficient as a real CPU (RISC or otherwise).
Anyway... it's not what the original poster was actually asking about... but if he/she wants to know what bits REALLY do, with regards to the CPU, he/she needs to go to a university where they teach Computer Engineering, and take a course or two in CPU design.
PS: I'm not a computer engineering student. Someone who knows assembly (blip_) could do a much better job of explaining than I.