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I don't think anyone's mentioned this, but one thing that really stands out to me (as being bad) is the way he starts walking - it's much faster to jump to accelerate to full speed immediately instead of slowly building up to full speed from a complete stop on the ground.
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Actually I noticed that hq2x looks pretty bad (for how expensive it is) in most GBA games - there are too many things that it should blend together that it puts a blocky edge between anyway.
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Atma wrote:
dont know if it's just my system or not, but it looks like both 2xSai and Super 2xSai dont work in v13, they both crash upon loading a rom with it enabled as the filter.
Hmm... looks like it's not just you. That's odd - I didn't change anything with filters. Well, 2xSaI is the main filter I almost always use so I'll definitely try to fix it.
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My only problems with this now are that you mostly just stand around after fights (I bet Nightshade can dance pretty well during that time instead), and the fights with Goliath and whatever those spinning enemies are look like they have a little room for more precise playing / manipulation of the enemies. But it's good enough now to get a Yes from me.
Oh, also, you should probably describe the game in your submission message; it's not exactly well-known.
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Thereisnospoon wrote:
Project, Mupen, and Nemu all have trouble with it. They flash almost every other frame either blue/black depending on the background color.
I think it's a graphics plugin issue, so it shouldn't matter which emulator you use. Try using one of Jabo's Direct3D plugins, and after starting up the game change "Direct3D Clear Mode" to "Only per frame" in the video settings (at least, this mostly fixed it for me in Mupen64).
FODA wrote:
mupen64 almost has it.... ...i'd rather have an emu with re-recording but no slow down, frame advance etc than having no emu. someone please please add it? :'(
BTW I looked into this a little, and it's going to take more changes than I thought. For instance, right now the playback relies on you having the exact same input and RSP plugins and settings as what it was recorded with. Maybe that can't be avoided, but it'll suck that it causes everyone desync problems if it's not changed or stored somehow. Also, it looks like there are some weird hacks to keep things synchronized. And of course there's a save state external to the movie file and no "from power/reset" recording option...
edit: Bugs in the emulator are making this extremely difficult. "Reset" doesn't work - I spent hours just trying to make the stupid emulator reset the game without crashing... I ended up falling back to: closing the ROM, waiting a second, going to the main GUI screen, waiting a second, then re-opening the ROM, and finally got that to work. So I'm moving on to other stuff, like fixing the movie format to be re-recording friendly and not access the disk every frame...
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feitclub wrote:
...movies which feature innovative, improbable or amusing deaths.
Glitches in MM1 that almost work but then result in death come to mind. Umihara Kawase would be a good candidate for amusing and improbably deaths, too.
Sounds also like a lot of deaths I encountered making a run of Gimmick!, for example, I'd be on a star that almost took a nice shortcut, then bounced slightly wrong, went at a crazy angle and suddenly vanished, causing me to almost land on a little platform but then get knocked away in mid-air by an enemy right into a pit.
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If they are going to be moved to a separate forum, they might as well also be unlocked (except for individual threads that become too obnoxious, as is the case in all the other forums). Sometimes people have still had things to say specifically about a run after it was cancelled, and had to either post in a different forum or wait for a new submission to say them.
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daniayaw wrote:
its desynching for me in different places -_- what configs have u used?
It played fine for me when I used WIP timing, Volume Envelope Height Reading, and Sync samples with sound CPU, and turned the other options off. Those are the standard settings to expect for most runs made with Snes9x 1.43 WIP.
About this run... I don't know. It can clearly be done faster but it's hard to tell by how much, and it's of decently good quality already. The boat-riding scenes were a little boring, though.
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Star Fox 1.2 should have a faster/better graphics chip in it than 1.0. So even if it starts up more slowly I'd suggest using 1.2, unless it turns out that Snes9x doesn't properly emulate the chip difference and causes 1.2 to be slower everywhere.
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OK, yet another version (v13) already:
- fixed the bug that was screwing up GBC games like Shantae and Crystalis (not just graphical - affects timing)
- made loading a save state (and various messages) appear immediately even when paused
- made GB/GBC/SGB save states load with their original appearance instead of 1 frame of black screen
- optimized "frame search" to have less delay when looking many frames forward and to show results more immediately
As usual, it can be found at the first post of this topic.
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I think I just found a major timing bug that's been in the GBC emulation core (in the FF55 - HDMA5 - Mode=0 case) since VBA 1.7. Fixing it not only makes Shantae run perfectly, it also fixes the bugginess / invalid opcode crashes of Crystalis (so that was an emulator bug after all). It affects the timing of all GBC games, I guess I'll add a flag to the movie format for backward compatibility and upload a v13 sometime, already after just putting up v12...
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If you really want to clear all the hotkeys, paste this after the 1st line in your vba.ini file:
keyboardCount=0
keyboard=00
Also, you can type the name of a hotkey to go directly to it; you don't have to scroll through the list to find it. (Maybe you knew that already, just saying it in case you didn't.)
The way key assignment works internally in VBA is too confusing for me to make non-trivial modifications to it. And by non-trivial I mean just about everything, including things that would be trivial anywhere else such as resetting the keys to their defaults...
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spam wrote:
if only the "save in earliest save point" worked properly...
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this, but I also fixed this bug in v12, and changed the menu item (File -> Save Game -> Oldest slot) to show beforehand which slot it will save on.
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Then, see the second part of my previous post. In my experience FCEU has been 100% reliable with this sort of thing, unlike other emulators like Snes9x and Gens where weird synchronization problems aren't uncommon, and I haven't heard of anyone else having this problem with it (any FCEU movies) either. That's the reason I'm so sure you must be doing something wrong or very unusual and that it's not just a random problem of the movie or emulator, in case you're wondering.
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
It's great that you're adding all these features! Just don't forget to make the capitalization of the filenames match up to what you actually uploaded to filespace.
Oops, ok that's fixed at least. When you get a chance, let me know (BoMF, Omni, and whoever else wants to try it) if you find the frame search useful or have any problems with it or suggestions for it.
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kooz wrote:
No matter what combination of settings I try, any attempts at playing back my old movie result in an instant desync.
This happens for me even if I do disable sound emulation and use a previous version of the emulator... seems a lot like what happens when the ROM it was played on was bad, although apparently some people got it to work somehow. Anyway, the WIP you posted looks good to me. I'd hope to see more limbs flying around, maybe there aren't large enough groups of enemies for that to happen without missing with some but then again it probably won't look so bat if it looks like you're juggling your limbs around.
edit: I just noticed this game does something really strange with the animation if you press left+right and then jump (you turn into a lumpy fireball thing with arms and legs attached).
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I would have suggested that you manipulate devils to come out of enemies that you're walking through since they push you very fast for a few tiles in the direction you're walking. 1 spirit point isn't that much, so maybe in the cases where you can't manipulate a 5 it's better to get a devil for a speed boost. Also, bombs/pots can be made to explode instantly by putting them down then immediately firing a fruit.
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I remember this game... The US version is called "On the Ball". This is way faster than I would have thought possible, but now that I see how broken the game is, I wish it was broken in a more interesting way, because spending 2 seconds in each level going straight to the goal through a wall isn't terribly entertaining to me.
EDIT: Truncated wrote:
Rejected in favor of this submission which is faster.
Not entirely true; this is much faster for playing many more levels, but unfortunately the way it achieves this (by heading directly to the goal in a few seconds through everything that's supposed to be in the way, over and over) makes it not very entertaining to watch, so it probably shouldn't be published anyway.
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Rick: You are using Phil's patched FCEU to watch it, using 100% speed, not using fast-forward, using a not-too-old computer, playing the right movie file, and not assuming that he doesn't die, right? If so for all of those, then I still think the problem is your ROM. It is possible for a ROM to be different enough to cause a desync and yet not different enough to seem different or even have a different checksum. (Although that shouldn't happen with FCEU using MD5, I've seen it happen once or twice elsewhere.)
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kooz wrote:
Of course, I now realize that you can't play back a movie with sound when it didn't have sound emulation enabled during recording, so I've learned from that, too.
Actually now something made without sound can be played back with sound using the "fake mute" mode. That came about because some SNES games had to be played without sound to record reliably.
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It starts when you press ], and stops when you either press L or when you load another save state. There's no separate dialog or settings for it. (The buttons like ], [, and L are configurable, of course.) The only setup required is that you have the button you want to be holding during the wait pressed before it. So for instance to open a door on your right, you would first pause, then hold right and frame advance for 1 frame, then hold up and frame search until the door opens. Then you'd frame search back with [ if you overshot it, and (probably pause then) press L when done. (If you forget to press L then it will think you're still extensively verifying the results of the last frame search until you load a save state.)
BTW, after you press L, it still works to press it again to go back to the instant after the last frame searching (L basically just loads a hidden save slot).
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New version:
- added a concept of current save slot, increase/decrease/load/save actions, and make-current-on-load/save options
- added a "frame search" feature that lets you search for which frame to press a button after holding the previous buttons
- merged in the shared memory code of Ike Gingerich to allow for interfacing with external tools such as VBARead
- made the hotkey customization slightly easier to find things in, rearranged some menus to make more sense
- fixed "save on oldest slot" feature to actually work
- I forgot how to make bulleted lists on these forums
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I tried implementing this "frame search" feature into VBA, and it works pretty well. I hold the button I want to test, then use ] and [ to scroll forward and backward through the frames of waiting, then when I find the result I want I press L to continue from where the button gets pressed. Saves a lot of tedious reloading. (Haven't quite uploaded it yet, but I thought I'd mention it here in case anyone already has comments/questions about it...)
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FODA wrote:
boosting doesnt move the screen faster, it just moves the ship forward but then it goes back?
Booda wrote:
Yeah, boost and brake don't actually change the speed at which the level scrolls.
I just tested this and found that boosting does in fact decrease the amount of time it takes to reach the end of the level (by somewhere between 10 and 20 frames per boost).
