TASVideos

Posted: 3/15/2005 8:55 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Of course that would be better, if it's possible. But I don't think it would hurt to have some settings in just in case. VBA seems to have a bunch of emulator type settings that are very confusing (what's it mean to select "GBA" mode when playing a GBC game, for instance? And is "Open..." any different from "Open Game Boy..."?) which seem like they could be a problem if not cleaned up. Snes9x movies allow for the saving of the game's SRAM into movies that are from reset, which could conceivably be hacked and also sometimes leads to accidentally recording movies with undesired SRAM save data in them. Also, "reset" for Snes9x is different than "power on"; some things inside the game transfer after reset even for games that don't have any SRAM at all. So maybe recording from "power on" and/or with clean SRAM should be a separate option than "from reset", and part of the file format so they can be easily verified to have been used. For movies of games that support super game boy, do you think the SGB border should be included in the movie (for when it's converted to AVI)? EDIT: Oh, and I almost forgot, something should be done concerning the VBA BIOS. Runs recorded with the BIOS in use probably can't be played back without it, and vice-versa, and some games play better (less graphics/sound glitches and crashes) either with or without the BIOS, so maybe BIOS info should go in the header too.

Posted: 3/15/2005 8:21 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

If the header format hasn't been finalized yet, could some additional things that weren't in Snes9x's movie header be put in? Having ROM CRC's and relevant emulator and sound settings in the file format in the first place would probably have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Also, the removal of the left+right and up+down restrictions should be optional unlike shanedudddy currently has it, because for instance left+right makes some games crash which is pretty annoying and makes it seem less stable for general use.

Posted: 3/15/2005 7:30 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Nach wrote:

Any chance you can break up what you did into various patches and post the links to them and explaining what each one is on the Snes9x forum? It would be nice for this to get integrated into the main tree.

Sure, I'd like to help with this, but as I'm sorting through the >150kb of file diffs I'm realizing this is a little hard to do, so it would help if you could tell me which things you want in separate patches, if that's OK. Also, what about the 0snes9x.rc file, will a full diff of that or just the file itself be sufficient?

Posted: 3/15/2005 5:55 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Saturn wrote:

The leveling up is a MUST in Terranigma if you don't do that you lose much more time in the result, my promise. Just see my 100% speed run on www.freewebs.com/saturnsmovies/zsnesmovies.htm for a perfect example for leveling up to the best times.

Is there any way to tell this version of ZSNES to resume playing a movie partway through (with save states) or a way to increase its fast-forward speed higher than 9 skipped frames per frame? As it is it's too long for me to watch in one sitting. (Plus the sound is wretched and the speed fluctuates a lot, especially in dialogue.) But from what I saw so far, there must be at least an hour or so of pure leveling up, and I'm not convinced it really saved any time compared to the time spent on it. If leveling up is really necessary, then I think it would be faster to skip some weaker enemies and level up only on the stronger enemies when necessary (even though it takes longer to kill them, they do give more EXP). I'm pretty sure that leveling a lot is not the fastest way through the game, even though it seems like it and the game was designed that way.

Saturn wrote:

No collecting magirocks or use magic definitely don't help to make the run faster in one situation a bone pin is usefull (in Norfest Forest to escape from Storkolm quickly) but this needs only 1 magirock which you will have anyway. But for a 100% run you have to find all.

Personally I don't think collecting useless magirocks (and other things, like armor) just to make it 100% is very entertaining. But, whatever. Actually, for bosses that need strong hits to beat like you mentioned, maybe magic would save time (if there are any spells that do large damage). Magic damage doesn't depend on your level, right? (I wouldn't know, I never used magic when I played through the game myself.)

Posted: 3/15/2005 5:29 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

You probably know this already, but there are a bunch of glitches listed at: http://kontek.net/davidwonn/snesm.html#S I doubt there are many glitches missed between the list you posted and the ones there, but it's hard to know for sure.

Posted: 3/14/2005 5:05 PM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Zurreco wrote:

What is a GD3 file?

I dunno, I think GoodSNES named it that, but maybe not - I'll change it to say smc. (It's the same ROM as before.)

Posted: 3/13/2005 10:08 PM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Actually it looks like this is over 12 minutes faster than the WIP on the SNES threads, based on the frame number at least. Tha's more impressive than it would seem from the total length of the movie given that there are so many unskippable cut-scenes. (I'm about to watch it.)

Spezzafer wrote:

The movie MUST be played with this improved version, or it WILL desync. For correct playback, under the emulator sync settings only have checked the 'Use WIP1 Timing' and 'Fake Mute desync workaround' boxes.

Note to whoever encodes this in case it is published: Actually, Fake Mute doesn't seem to be necessary for playback, in which case it's better to leave it off since it might sometimes cause missing sounds. This game does seem to require a fresh restart of Snes9x and maybe the 10 second warmup to play back, though.

Posted: 3/13/2005 8:04 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Viewer wrote:

Very interesting idea here, but when I try to download it from your site I get a "security alert" saying I'm not allowed to download it; using GetRight to attempt it yields nothing as well. Is there another location I can find this?

There's nothing wrong with the site (at least it works for me), so it's probably just your settings. If you mean a bar appears at the top of the window saying the download was blocked, you can click there and tell it to really download. If it's a security zone thing and it doesn't give that option, you can go to internet options -> security and either take the site out of restricted sites or customize the restricted settings to enable downloads.

Posted: 3/13/2005 5:00 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Oh, well I'm interested in seeing both runs so that's ok. But, I wonder, how would a minimalist Terranigma run go? I seem to recall some of the bosses taking a long time to kill unless you're leveled up enough, but on the other hand I think leveling up was a really slow process too, so maybe low-level is the faster way to go. (Fortunately, leveling is a choice, unlike Crystalis.) And, are there any situations where magirocks/spells would be worth the time it takes to get and use them, or anything else that needs to be bought in the game?

Posted: 3/13/2005 1:25 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Does 100% in this game include getting every alchemy formula? I'm not sure how much stuff that seems unnecessary is being done in order to satisfy this 100% completion. Fabianx, the synchronization problems do remind me of the Zelda desync, but it could be unrelated also. Good luck with finding its cause, as you did successfully with Zelda 3. (By the way, I thought Secret of Evermore was programmed similarly to Secret of Mana, so I find it a little strange that this has sync problems where SoM doesn't.)

Posted: 3/12/2005 11:49 PM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

I'll look at your patch. But it seems like what would be best is to save a snapshot every minute or so, then any frame can be jumped to in less than a fast-forwarded minute, and rewind also becomes possible. All this needs some place to go in the GUI though...

Posted: 3/10/2005 10:14 PM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Here are the best settings for preventing desyncs: WIP1 timing: ON Volume Height Envelope Reading: OFF Fake Mute desync workaround: ON Sync samples with sound CPU: ON Also, use the latest version, which is now v6. If you try playing back your current movie with these settings and that makes it desync, that means having the wrong settings before made your movie itself go out of sync, and you'll have to start over with the better settings set, or hex edit corrections into the movie. Note that not all of these settings may be necessary, for instance in this particular game I doubt that the fake mute workaround makes a difference, but it's a good idea to try changing them one at a time with an existing movie to see which ones change anything.

Posted: 3/10/2005 10:02 PM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Fixed the problem. The Fake Mute workaround should have fixed it, but that workaround was incomplete. Made a change in apu.cpp to return as if channel state is silent, and now there are no longer desync problems even when using fast-forward. (Tested past tower 1 with zero desyncs.) This may possibly fix some other games besides Terranigma but I don't know what.

Posted: 3/10/2005 9:57 PM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

New version (v6) is up! Newest change(s) in this version: * Terranigma desync bug fixed (incorporated into Fake Mute option) * Added "Clear SRAM" option to recording dialog, so you can make sure you're starting from a totally clean state. * Added alternate save state system (increment/decrement/save/load current slot, as new hotkeys). * Made "save screenshot" a customizable hotkey. * Moved frame counter display to not overwrite other messages, changed messages and message timings a bit. Making frame counter work when not in a movie would require changing the save state format, so I haven't done it yet. The source for this is up too, and it should be compatible with MinGW (unless I forgot something).

Posted: 3/9/2005 1:40 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

OmnipotentEntity wrote:

I don't know if you can rapid fire arrows on this boss, but I'm pretty sure that the invincibility time is absolute. If I could somehow come up with a way to make them always come directly towards me, I might concievably kill them all in 2 sets. But so far, I haven't been able to sucessfully land two arrows on a single worm without sacrificing more hits than it's worth on another worm. I actually dread doing this boss again, because it's so difficult to do correctly. But if I can save even 30 frames, I'll be more than willing to do the second half of the dungeon over again.

Then you should definitely do at least the sandworm battle again. I just had some time to give it a shot, and it is actually quite possible to double-arrow each one every time. The time I got was 581 frames faster, and could probably be further improved a bit. See: http://nvdata.pilif.ch/loz-sandworms.smv (Everything before the frame it starts at is identical to in your movie.) The sword swing turned out to be unnecessary, but it would've sped up the battle by 1 arrow shot if I could've gotten a second swing in (which I think is possible using the wall somehow - edit: nevermind about the wall, but I'm pretty sure it's possible to hit that one twice after 2 arrows by using 2 really fast swings in a row at a better angle). Also, maybe it's worth mentioning that the worms have a much shorter invincibility time than they appear to, apparently just as short as all other regular enemies (the continued glowing is purely visual - the weird groaning sound is the most reliable cue for if the hit counts).

Posted: 3/8/2005 10:11 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

OmnipotentEntity wrote:

this would probably not be advisable in a console run because of how much health you lose and how exact the timing has to be. The only reason why I discovered it is because I was messing around with frame advance.

Maybe it's not good advice for a normal playthrough, but for someone speedrunning the game I think it's quite possible with a little practice; I've been able to do it several times in real-time (losing the same amount of hearts), and if you grab the heart container in the sanctuary then even if you completely mess up the timing you can still hit the switch and get away alive.

Truncated wrote:

The antlion can be killed with one arrow or one spinattack. Switching to arrows is slow, but did you try to spinattack it?

Well, I tried this, and... http://www.filespace.org/nitsuja/loz-spinkill.smv it's 1 whole frame faster! But, I didn't try very hard at all to optimize it, so I probably don't start charging or start swinging at the optimal times/places, although for some reason it still looks faster. If it can't be improved a decent amount more than that it's probably not worth it though, since who knows what would've been necessary to wait for luck manipulation purposes anyway.

Posted: 3/8/2005 5:13 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Oh, I thought you'd decided it wasn't faster to kill yourself, at least it sounded like you tested it out pretty thoroughly. I think Deviance was talking about a speedrun, and something that saves time in a human speedrun may actually be slower in a time attack. In the sandworm battle, sometimes you shoot an arrow while spin-slashing, while other times you don't shoot the arrow - what was the decision based on each time? Also, it's obvious from the previous boss fight that you can fire arrows pretty quickly, and I think each arrow does just as much damage as a spin-slash, so maybe it would be faster to just unload lots of arrows and screw the spin-slashes? Also, keep in mind that some enemies only take half damage from spin slashes, not saying that these do but it's probably worth testing whenever you use them.

Posted: 3/8/2005 2:25 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Actually, I think I was able to watch this run on the official 1.43 WIP just by turning off volume height envelope reading and sound sync. This game apparently does not need "Fake Mute" to work after all, at least for the playback. Monthenor: if you weren't using my build, what 1st, 2nd, and 4th boxes were you checking? There is no "sync settings" panel in any official version.

Posted: 3/7/2005 5:51 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

I agree about the wheelie rider, but less wheelie rider means slower... I'd love to see a run whose goal is to put every ability in the game to good use for roughly equal amounts of time, or at least a "no wheelie, except where it belongs to the plot" run... could be a separate category or something. Actually, as a less-crazy idea, maybe runs of individual games within this game could be done and published? (They each even have their own credits and everything.) I think this game has way more than enough variety to warrant multiple categories of runs. About the Arena, I considered it, but then I realized that if I was going for speed I'd still use only wheelie rider for all the battles, and there's already enough of that in the run.

samurai goroh wrote:

BTW, how do you climb the stairs so fast?

I assume you mean the ladders. What I do is alternate jumping for 3 frames and climbing for 1 frame since 1 frame of climbing is enough to reset the jump acceleration to max. You can turn "show input" on (with a hotkey, default is comma) and frame advance through parts of the game if you want to see what input made them happen, for things like this.

Posted: 3/7/2005 4:00 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

OK, I didn't know what it's called, that's what I meant. It's working now, looks great to me...

Posted: 3/7/2005 3:36 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

You need to use the right ROM: it's the 1.0 (US) version, not the 1.1 version.

Posted: 3/7/2005 1:52 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Is qmt.ath.cx down? I get a 404 error trying to download sonic2b.zip.

Posted: 3/6/2005 4:24 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Burning Death wrote:

Nitsuja who replied to the desync problems in this topic is one of the programmers of the SNES9x

Actually, no, I'm just a programmer capable of modifying some parts of Snes9x. About Terranigma, I haven't tested this further than getting to the box, but so far the game never desyncs for me unless I use fast-forward or set the speed really high. Also, I've noticed that if you turn the sound off (set playback rate to No Sound, but leave sound emulation on) it doesn't desync even with fast-forward. Seems like the exact same problem that "Fake Mute" fixes, except for some reason fake mute doesn't work for this game.

Posted: 3/5/2005 10:20 AM

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

Zurreco wrote:

If you have seen my attempt at the Arena, you will see what is wrong with Nova reactor. You can cut out almost all of the backtracking by not destroying the second to last reactor core one forward approach.

Ah, that's it, thanks. (I haven't been able to find any arena runs to watch that didn't have their hosting abandoned long ago.)

Posted: 3/5/2005 10:07 AM
(Edited: 3/5/2005 11:56 AM)

Quote

nitsuja

Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1301)

Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687

I'm through the Great Cave Offensive (was able to swallow 2 plasmas near the beginning to get wheelie), got the Jet and Wheel in SkyHigh, and went from there to HotBeat, which I'd forgotten how much I hated (it's hard to get good use out of wheelie when almost everything's lava). About 7 (edit: I miscalculated before) minutes faster so far... (over half of which is probably from boss fights, which are laughably short now). Oh, I'm wondering if there are any other abilities besides Jet and Wheel that might be worth getting for the sake of variety and possibly faster movement, since switching abilities is actually quite fast and it only has to be picked up once, assuming it's not out of the way. I'm thinking one of: bird, rock, parasol, cutter, or maybe ninja, if any of those are quick to pick up (note: I haven't used cutter or ninja anywhere in the run yet). I tested Copy and it does let me copy anything including abilities I haven't learned, but I think it takes too much time to get.

Zurreco wrote:

There is a major flaw with the fight with Nova Reactor. That is all for now...

Uh, do you mean the space-shooter fight at the end? I don't see what's wrong with that. If you mean the reactor in The Revenge of Metaknight, I think I saw one of the lasers miss...

Posts for nitsuja