TASVideos

Posted: 11/20/2025 8:26 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

This is probably fine, but I'm just doing my due diligence. I was trying to run Commander Keen 5 in BizHawk and encountered some pretty bad stuttering. Apparently this is a known issue even on many real hardware setups. There is a .conf setting that was added in DOSBox-X that fixes this. My .conf file for the movie would only contain this:

[video]
ega per scanline hpel=false

The setting is explained here. The game runs perfectly with this .conf file on the 1994 preset with the Video Card Type set to EGA. I'm in way over my head on the technical aspects of this, is this setting okay to use for a submission? Even the documentation for it seems unsure what the correct behavior should be. It doesn't seem to have any effect on the gameplay other than making the game not run like garbage. The only alternative fix I found was to set the cycle count very low, to the point where loading times take a while and the game even lags when you pick up a bonus.

Posted: 11/10/2025 8:29 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

I examined the combat I have done in my WIP and found that the damage I do is one of the numbers located somewhere in the prediction rolls. So I guess, the logic is to see the outcome of a shot, go back and do manipulations, assuming that RNG index will change in the same way. Right?

Yup, that's the right mindset to have for using this. It won't tell you what damage you'll roll first try, but it will at least let you see how much you need to adjust.

Also, the script revealed some weird detail that on some frames, like during my movement within the last room, I don't move at all. Did you see anything like that in JPC-RR while your were making TASes? Because, I noticed this with Intel 486, now Intel Pentium shows this. Might this be dependent on CPU power or it's about the engine?

That's probably just lag frames. I didn't have to deal with them in JPC-rr for some reason, but I don't see anything wrong with your input so I wouldn't worry about it.

Posted: 11/10/2025 4:24 AM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

I converted the Wolf3D map script to work with your Spear of Destiny setup in BizHawk. Let me know if you have any questions, or if something breaks. https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638983452815894769

Posted: 11/3/2025 5:59 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Just a few additions: 1. It's very rare to find pre-installed games already on an ISO, almost always ISOs you find online are official CD distributions and come with an installer, although sometimes you can get away with running the game files directly from the ISO. 2. If you're not submitting a TAS you can just use your favorite ISO creator to make the image. Otherwise these instructions should be followed closely. The bash script will dump a list of files and hashes, you should copy this list and keep it for your submission notes so others can sync the movie. 3. Installation is not just limited to floppy disks, CDs were distributed as well. Use redump to find known good CD dumps and goodolddays to find known good floppy disk dumps.

Posted: 10/19/2025 4:21 AM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

I fooled around with ZZT a bit a few years ago, and I was thinking about doing one of the worlds in the new BizHawk core. There is a glitch to move faster: choose mouse movement instead of keyboard, and hold P and the right mouse button while moving in a direction. Some of the old ZZT speedruns use this.

Posted: 10/6/2025 7:08 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Oh hell yeah, I played so much of this game when I was a kid. This is a difficult game (especially the jungle and city tracks) and it's satisfying to see you blast by everyone right away, I voted Yes. In my opinion this goal is the most sensible option for a watchable TAS. For those not familiar with the game, once you beat each track, you unlock the next level, which adds a new section to the end of the previous level's tracks. IIRC this goes up to 7 levels, although it has been a while. Since you'd be rehashing the same track sections repeatedly I do agree that a movie would get very long and repetitive if it reached the last level. I also don't remember there being any proper ending or credit roll, although I can't confirm any of this since there's no full playthrough online. Also as a side note, the middle track on the selection screen (with the blue dashed border) is just a practice track, which does get extended with each level, but doesn't affect progress at all.

Posted: 4/20/2025 4:17 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Hey this is cool, I had no idea about the speed tech. Thanks for the credit.

Posted: 3/8/2023 7:30 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

I can confirm sync on this. The only hiccup I had was that you need to change mem_size to 8192 in the cfg (and also the hard drive/CD paths like usual), otherwise this is pretty straightforward.

Posted: 1/19/2023 7:25 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Just as an addendum to my sync issue, the reason my desync was happening is that my PCem was pulling the default NVR file from ~/.pcem/nvr/default/. Normally this folder wouldn't ever be there, but I must have manually put it there at some point during the PCem testing process. This folder is not present in the PCem-st build but is there if you download the regular PCem v17 Linux source code, and the default NVR file is indeed not zeroed out. If I remove tandy1000sl2.bin from this folder then the movie syncs with no issues. Also, I like this Tandy config so much that we might officially adopt it.

Posted: 1/13/2023 9:14 PM

Post subject: Early 80s config?

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Thanks to Sand's recent Mixed Up Mother Goose submission, it brought to our attention the Tandy 1000 SL/2. We are missing an early 80s config and I think this would be perfect for it. It has MS-DOS 3.30 built directly into the ROM, so it doesn't require any bootable drive to work. It should be able to run any game that can run directly off the floppy, and I've confirmed it also works with the self-booting IBM PC game disks. This would be a much simpler setup than the other configs, essentially only needing the config file and the game disk(s). Here's what I'm thinking, based on Sand's config and the SL/2's specs: Machine: [8086] Tandy 1000 SL/2 CPU: 8086/8 MHz Memory: 512 KB Display device: Built-in video Sound device: None (would just be PC speaker) HDD: None (unnecessary with ROM) FDD1: 3.5" 720k FDD2: 5.25" 360k (did not come with this, but can be added) The only thing we would need to supply is the .cfg file. There is some NVR (/nvr/tandy.tandy1000sl2.bin) but it isn't really necessary for what we're trying to do, and can be deleted.

Posted: 1/8/2023 9:15 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Thanks, I'm getting it to sync now. It was indeed the .bin file, it doesn't initialize with all 0x00 for me for some reason.

Posted: 1/8/2023 7:35 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

I'm unable to sync this, can you please post the contents of your cfg file? I also suspect it may have something to do with ~/.pcem/nvr/tandy.tandy1000sl2.bin - this is the contents of the Tandy's EEPROM that contains personal BIOS settings. I don't think it would be a bad idea to share that either, since the NVR can cause desyncs on other systems as well.

Posted: 1/1/2023 3:52 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

These ones strike me as going particularly off the rails. [4780] GBA Dark Arena by tapioca in 04:55.48 [4881] Linux VVVVVV "20 trinkets" by Elomavi in 13:25.19 [4831] NES Alwa's Awakening: The 8-Bit Edition by aiqiyou & J.Y in 05:55.87 - Not on the "heavy glitch abuse" list but still worthy imo.

Posted: 1/1/2023 3:22 AM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

[4730] DOOM Doom II: Hell on Earth by almostmatt1 & Zero Master in 10:19.40 - Relentless manipulation of enemy behavior. [4834] INTV Tower of Doom "The Fortress" by Winslinator in 00:12.55 - A pretty clever way of instantly winning with an extremely unlikely setup (reading the notes is recommended). [4800] PSX Final Fantasy VII "no slots" by Lil_Gecko in 6:10:51.06 - RPGs normally have a lot of RNG manipulation, but this one stood out to me due to some of the manipulation being planned hours ahead of time.

Posted: 1/1/2023 3:10 AM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

[4809] GBC Donkey Kong Country by DeathKontrol in 41:47.66 This one stands out to me, not only from the entertainment value but also the sheer technical prowess that went into it.

Posted: 1/1/2023 3:02 AM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Both of the Alwa's Awakening runs are great. [4831] NES Alwa's Awakening: The 8-Bit Edition by aiqiyou & J.Y in 05:55.87 [4776] NES Alwa's Awakening: The 8-Bit Edition "inbounds" by Darkman425 in 28:08.62

Posted: 1/1/2023 2:58 AM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Aside from some of the ones already posted, some of my favorites this year: [4730] DOOM Doom II: Hell on Earth by almostmatt1 & Zero Master in 10:19.40 [4881] Linux VVVVVV "20 trinkets" by Elomavi in 13:25.19 [5036] Linux Cyber Shadow by keylie in 42:24.12 (just in time!)

Posted: 12/21/2022 11:25 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

This synced for me on the GoG version of 1.04, using the executable /game/bin64/CyberShadow. All I did for prep was opening the game natively and setting it to windowed, although it doesn't look like that makes a difference. It's absolutely necessary that the working directory is set to /game/, otherwise it won't even launch.

Posted: 12/9/2022 4:07 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Upload it to userfiles please, from there I can manually change the movie file.

Posted: 12/5/2022 6:05 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Pontus, if you'd like, you can truncate your movie file to the last input needed to trigger the credits - I believe this should be at VI 171847. This would let the time better reflect how long it takes to beat the game. We can still keep your current movie and use it for the official encode, since there is the small bit of dialogue after the credits.

Posted: 12/2/2022 10:36 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

This syncs for me on ScummVM 2.6.1 with files from this good dump.

MD5: 538b8c45297a3c340217c2c18ebbd7d8	
SHA1: dab71c3435f5c74ad45df4099cf28690dece6511

The CD is a little weird because it's dual-use for the Mac version as well, so it has different files depending on how you open it. But I can confirm that opening it through Archive Manager gets you the Windows files.

Posted: 11/14/2022 4:50 AM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

Have you tried this? Apparently you can snipe the guy, it looks like it might be faster. Link to video

Posted: 11/13/2022 8:45 PM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

I think in any case, the window at least needs to be resized to use this. This run clicks outside of the game window without resizing it, which is obviously not reproducible on an embedded or standalone player, and only works when fed as a mouse coordinate through libTAS.

Posted: 11/13/2022 4:50 AM

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

So, like the current Hedgehog Launch submission, this movie also uses mouse inputs outside the bounds of the intended game resolution (550x440) for several holes. Maybe this is possible if you resize the Flash Player standalone window, but we will first need to resolve whether we should allow this or not. Personally, I think we need to limit the mouse to the native resolution of the game. While this input might be possible in the standalone player, the reality is that 99% of Flash games were intended to be played in a browser where the mouse cannot move outside the intended area. This capability can be exploited in many games, and the game's author often won't account for this happening.

Posted: 11/13/2022 2:55 AM
(Edited: 11/13/2022 8:45 AM)

slamo

Advisor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2737)

Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 421

I got curious and looked at the decompilation, and I found the formula for the countdown.

Language: java
enemy_count_to = int(Math.random() * 3) + enemy_round_ko * 3 + 10 * (enemy_round_ko == 3) + 10 * (opponent == "bowl");

Where enemy_round_ko is the number of times the enemy has been KOd in that round. You can see there is indeed a random element to it, with the minimum for the first KO being 4 (I think they're rounding up) and the minimum for the second KO being 7. I think the audience animations are random so this should be manipulatable.

Posts for slamo