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Updated FCEU:
- VS system now records coin inserts and stuff (it used to check IsPlaying instead of IsRecording, so that input never got recorded)
- FDS eject/insert disk is fixed. (it used to always call eject so you could never insert)
- Random timing/desync issues that were apparent in playback of Mario 3 movies were fixed (or, worked around, at least. The problem was in the sound code, of all places.)
- Made peripherals not capable of interfering with playback (I think)
- 800% speed and fast-forward now skip frames, and new speeds (1600%) were added.
- Made a .pal file for the palette, and threw in some others to choose from
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That's because it's not implemented at all - the joypad only works for game keys in that version. (Sorry, but at least I won't be able to fix it anytime soon.)
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nfq wrote:
after he watched the toolassisted testrun, that he don't want to try lower anymore (sub 18), he would feel stupid because he would do mistakes and couldn't do it as good as the TAS..
Hmm, that's a dumb reason to stop doing a speedrun, if he really wanted to do it in the first place. Nobody has done a perfect run in real-time - there's no point to giving up because you can't achieve that. They shouldn't be directly compared that way (unless the goal is to get other people angry).
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I'm surprised nobody noticed before now. I found out about this sort-of-recently but left it in as a "feature". (You can mess around with the movies of other people without worrying about overwriting them as long as they're initially opened in read-only, and if you like the result and want to save a movie of it you can still easily do that.)
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Does anyone know how long this is by SDA timing? (I'm just curious as to how much time was saved over the current fastest non-assisted speedrun of this game.)
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If your goal is to get the best ending, then getting Crono is worth it by definition; there's no need to test how fast it is except for the purpose of optimizing it.
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Why not watch the non-obsolete version of that movie?
http://tasvideos.org/movies.cgi?id=172
Anyway, actually I also had a trouble viewing this, but I think it turned out to be ROM troubles - there are several versions of this ROM and only one of them works. I'll edit this post with more info later if nobody else says anything more helpful in the meantime.
EDIT: After you open your Donkey Kong Country ROM in Snes9x, go to "File->ROM Information..." and you should see the following information:
Rom Info wrote:
File: Donkey Kong Country (V1.0) (U).smc
Name: DONKEY KONG COUNTRY
Speed: 31/FastROM
ROM Map: HiROM
Type: 02
Kart contents: ROM+RAM+BAT
Header ROM Size: 32Mbits
Calculated ROM Size: 32 Mbits
SRAM size: 2KB (16Kbit)
Actual Checksum: EF80
Header Checksum: EF80
Header Checksum Compliment: 107F
Output: NTSC 60Hz
CRC32: C946DCA0
Licensee: Nintendo
ROM Version: 1.0
Region: USA/Canada
If any of those numbers are different, that means you have the wrong ROM, and have to get the correct one that matches those numbers or you won't be able to play the movie.
Once you have the right ROM, make sure these settings are set in the movie play dialog when you play the movie:
ON: Use WIP1 Timing
OFF: Allow Left+Right / Up+Down
ON: Volume Envelope Height Reading
OFF: Fake Mute desync workaround
ON: Sync samples with sound CPU (unless it crashes, then turn it off)
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I considered making an "it is now!" post after making the other thread when I noticed this thread had been moved into this forum, but figured yagz/whoever cared would notice the other thread.
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Bisqwit wrote:
Hopelessly desyncs here. It doesn't pass the first menu.
I noticed this happens if you don't wait until you see a mask floating up from the water before starting to play the movie.
Phil wrote:
The video is desyncing where I think is the final stage.
Did you use fast-forward or increased speed anywhere? The game will desync if the transition between levels runs too quickly. (Maybe you had speed limiting off and the encoding got a lot faster when the screen went black... EDIT: uh, if you were trying to encode it, that is. More likely you were just trying to watch it, so never mind about that.)
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I'll just point out that it is Maza's own choice to not continue making this run for now. He can still obtain precision control by using frame advance, but apparently he is unwilling to use frame advance. That's fine, I guess, but confuses me a little...
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Couldn't you use the battery save [for Super Smash Bros]?
There's no support for that yet in this emulator, so for now it would be a save state of the battery save anyway. And in general, even battery saves can contain things that shouldn't be there (think of a game like FF3/6j where the character's stats can be changed to impossible values, or characters that aren't supposed to be obtainable can be added). That is unlikely in a fighting game such as this, but in that case, there is not much reason to trust a save state from immediately after a reset less than a battery save.
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hopper wrote:
Mipps can't be made to appear any earlier. He appears only twice in the game.
The rabbit's name is MIPS, btw.
Not to downplay how cool this movie is, but I am also looking forward to seeing 120 and possibly 70 star runs. (Well, maybe there's no point to a 70 star run over a 120 star one, but I think the extra complexity of having to choose which 70 stars are fastest would still be interesting.)
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Autofire, I don't know. It depends on how easy it is to bypass the input plugin to get the alternating input through directly. It's really functionality that the input plugin should implement, anyway - maybe there are already some input plugins that have autofire and you just have to switch to one of them to use it.
AVI splitting... is there any code available that does this? It doesn't sound too hard and I haven't tried very much, but I'm not sure how to check the file size of the AVI while it's being outputted (and AVIStreamWrite doesn't seem to tell me how much it wrote). Also, it seems like a lot of codecs crash when outputting directly with them, like ones with non-RGB formats or ones with quantizers - is this somehow the fault of the emulator's AVI code or are those codecs not meant to work directly from a source like this?
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So, who is actually actively working on / planning to soon work on a run of this game? Both Saturn and Graveworm? Some competition would be good, if cooperation wouldn't work better of course. Although... well, I don't know if I'm sick of Metroid runs, but I don't see how anyone could be sick of Sonic runs already (unless we're talking about motion-sickness here).
Graveworm wrote:
Saturn wrote:
Just a note: I spended more than 5500 rerecords on this damn station alone and hope the effort was worth it.
Hehe, I beat the station about as fast as you did (a little slower though) with 300 re-records
I don't think the number of re-records is that important to minimize/maximize or that it means much to have higher/lower. Well, it seems to be a measure of how much experimentation you did, but it's not very accurate, so a low re-record count could mean that you didn't experiment much because of already having a good idea of what to do optimally and/or or spending more time on each individual movement between re-records, or it could mean that you did experiment a lot but you just didn't do it during the recording.
Sometimes when making a movie I'll keep savestates around of things and use re-records just to look at them then go back to where I was, or I'll load a savestate 4 times in a row just to make really sure that I really loaded it - it doesn't mean it would have been that much of a difference in effort if the re-record number ended up much different.
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
If it didn't, then maybe the game took longer for the same amount of input on playback for some reason.
It looks like it simply saved the wrong count of input samples into the final movie. If you change the byte at 0x018 in the movie file from 78 to 7E, (adding 6 to the number of input samples), then it reaches the end correctly, so the input is still there.
The procedure the script should be following to get the time is: read the 32-bit integer at 0x0C, which here is 0x54E7 = 59220, and read the 8-bit integer at 0x20, which here is 0x3C = 60, and divide them (59220/60 = 987 seconds = 16 minutes + 27 seconds).
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spezzafer wrote:
for some reason it stops at 59190 instead of 59220 and doesn't play the last 30 frames
It's because the frames aren't what matter to it, it's the number of input samples (the count in parentheses). It says your movie only has 28536 input samples, did it go higher than this while recording and then it got cut down to a lower number on playback?
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Hey look, the auto time calculating thing is still buggy.
The correct numbers should be: 16 minutes and 27 seconds, which is 59220 frames. It got the re-record count right, but I'm not sure where it got 3:07 from.
Anyway... whoa! you did that impossible jump after all. The rest was great, too. There's only 1 big problem: maybe it was just something I did, but it looks like you don't pick up the big star at the end to actually end the game...
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Are you doing anything different when Mario gets past there? (You mean the airship, right?) Like, do you play the movie twice in a row and the first time it doesn't work, and the second time it does? I tried to get it to work past that point, but looking at the input, he just presses the jump button way too late to survive getting auto-scrolled to death, so I can't tell what's happening that shouldn't be.
(Also, this is news to me that anyone has managed to play it past that point. I thought nobody was able to get it to work.)
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Phil wrote:
Well, it isn't supposed to desync at tank(not airship) at all. The movie is played back fine sometimes not. That's not the movie's fault but FCEU. And this random emulation still occurs in your version.
Could you explain? This isn't helpful information at all. It always plays back exactly the same for me, which is the same as the non-left+right patched version plays it.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
I recall from the discussion that the black was mandated to be a bit lighter by Nintendo so that it wouldn't damage the TV screen, so it may as well be the same in the emulator to be authentic.
I know it's lighter. I don't have it at 100% black either, but that palette was still too bright for the black, and also didn't take into account that some of the other black colors are supposed to be slightly different from each other.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
And why not leave the default palette the way it is and offer .pal files in some other topic?
Because the way it was before was extremely inaccurate by any standards, fairly arbitrarily chosen (and not very consistent) RGB values that nobody bothered to look at changing for a long time. And, many people agree that BMF's palette is a quite accurate, and I don't see how it can be any worse a default than the previous one. I seem to recall there being complaints about how bad the FCEU palette was, as well.
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FODA: I fixed that region of the palette to be better - Battletoads doesn't look so weird now, and it made the red color for Mario look better as well.
Phil wrote:
FCEU sometimes change a valid savestate to another savestate that reset the game. This bug rarely happens, but when it happens ... :@
Does this bug still happen? I have never seen it but it might be fixed.
Phil wrote:
When playing a movie that can be played with an emulation that uses a mouse, ex. Arkanoid paddle, it just doesn't desactivate it, you can play while playing a movie. I have converted Genisto's Arkanoid movie by using Bisqwit's Nesmock, FMV to FCM, Arkanoid paddle emulation activated, this bug occurs. Evidently, all input must be desactivated when playing a movie.
Before or when playing a movie, if you select a device, config>input, other than gamepad, the video doesn't go well.
I think this bug is fixed. I haven't tested it, but these inputs should be disabled now on playback unless I missed something.
Phil wrote:
-Fix timing problem with SMB3 PRG1.
I've never heard of this... is it explained somewhere? (If you mean the desync problems Genisto was having with SMB3, I think this is now fixed. The desync at the airship unfortunately already got into his movie so he'd have to fix that manually. Also, the regular left+right version will desync on that movie where it shouldn't, because it doesn't have that bug fixed.)
Another bug that could be on the list: Gimmick (J) sound problems when you pause the game or die, this still happens. EDIT: No, actually it only happens if you have the sound set to "Low Quality". The sound in that game is fine if you choose the more-accurate "Highest Quality" sound option.
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FODA wrote:
wow very nice job nitsuja, but i think that palette is very different from the real nes, at least battletoads-wise.
Hmm, well I checked against actual video captures of Mario 1, 2, 3, and Cybernoid to make sure the relative brightnesses and hues of the colors match up. But, there is no way to get a truly accurate palette for the NES because it doesn't even output RGB and displays will vary, so there isn't really 1 most accurate appearance. You can always load whatever palette you prefer to override the default, anyway.
edit: I see what you mean, though. You must be talking about the bright red/pink "brain" rooms. That color is off, I'll try to fix it with some values from another palette. This is from BMF's palettes, btw. ASQ's palettes had major problems such as the color for "black" being very bright (to simulate how crappy the TV is or something, which probably shouldn't show up in the emulator).
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It's the same problem as mentioned in the Snes9x forum. The zip file is corrupted, and some programs like WinRAR will extract the corrupted zip (without any warnings) into a movie file that is complete garbage data.
mukka: Try getting a Mozilla browser if you don't have one already, and in that browser, left-click on the movie file to download it. Then unzip that (it should be a different size than before after you unzip it). At least, that's the only thing that's worked for me so far.
