I have never created a TAS myself, but if I wanted to create an improved TAS of an already-TASed game, I would surely watch the existing TAS and borrow many techniques from it.
I am going to guess that almost every TAS author does the same thing. Clearly, a TAS is not composed solely of original ideas.
I propose a solution to recognize previous version authors: Post their names in the download area. For example, the most recent movie entry looks like this:
Download AVI file via BitTorrent (size: 38 MB, length: 25:08)
Download FCEU movie (.fcm) (date: 2005-08-02)
Read author's comments in submission #767
Discuss this movie
Previous versions by: Phil, Genisto, Bisqwit <-- add this line
Previous authors could also be recognized by some text in the first few frames of the AVI file along with the "this is a tool assisted video" stuff.
By the way, TAS authors don't borrow from the previous version authors alone. They also use ideas from TASes of other games (for example, the idea of taking damage to boost yourself forward occurs in many games), suggestions from posters on the board and in the IRC channel, and even ideas from outside of the TAS realm entirely (for example, BisqBot likely borrows many non-original algorithms discovered by computer scientists and mathematicians to create its TASes).
However, it feels silly to give credit to hundreds of tangentially related people. One must draw the line somewhere and give credit to the few who most deserve it. In my opinion, these people are the authors of previous versions of the TAS in question and, in rare cases, the most prolific helpers from the forum (Legend of Zelda is a good example where some forum posters deserved some credit).
The missing piece of the solution: 1. c7+ Ka7 2. Ra6+ Kb7 3. Bf3+ gxf3 4. c8=Q+ Kxc8 5. Rg6
Now, white is threatening to play Rg8+ followed by Rg7 with an immediate draw. None of black's king moves or queen moves away from the h-file help. For instance, 5... Qe7 6. Rg8+ Kd7 7. Rg7=
This leaves black with 5... f2 or 5... Qh5.
5... Qh5 6. Rg5 and again, black's only choices that avoid the Rg8-g7 draw are 6... f2 and 6... Qh6.
6... Qh6 and white continues to give chase with 7. Rg6. Now, for the usual reasons, black must play either Qh5, repeating the position, or 7... f2.
So, basically, black must play f2 at some point. When black plays f2, there are three possible configurations for the white rook and black queen: g6 and h7, g5 and h5, or g6 and h6.
No matter how the queen and rook are placed, white draws by simply checking the king with his rook forever. He must be careful not to allow the black queen to take the rook with check. He must also be careful if the black king tries to hide at g4. For example: 6... f2 7. Rg8+ Kd7 8. Rd8+ Ke6 9. Re8+ Kd5 10. Rd8+ Ke4 and not 11. Re8+?? Kf3 12. Re3+ Kg4 13. Rg3+ hxg3 and black wins, but instead 11. Rd4+ Kf3 12. Rxf4+. White must also not take the f2 pawn with his rook, as then the stalemate will be lifted.
However, if white avoids those pitfalls, black cannot escape the rook checks.
And yes, Fritz is even worse at this one than it was at Deviance's pawn ending! It keeps giving scores of -12 because it can't see that the rook checks can't be escaped.
That's a very nice pawn ending, Deviance! I like when counterintuitive moves are successful in situations with very few pieces. It shows how complicated and beautiful chess can be sometimes.
1. Ke6
If 1...Kxh7, 2. Kf6 and white simply takes the kingside pawns, leading to a draw where white is the one with the extra pawn!
1...Kg7 2. Kf5 Kxh7 3. Kf6 transposes to the above. If 2...Kh8 3. Kg6 stalemates black's king, leading to 3...h5 4. Kx(either pawn) with a draw.
The tricky line is 1... h5.
2. gxh5 Kxh7 3. Kf5 Kh6 4. Kg4, and again, it's white who's a pawn ahead, but black draws.
2. gxh5 Kg7 3. Kf5 is essentially the same as 2...Kxh7
2. gxh5 g4 3. Kf5 g3 4. Kg6 g2 5. Kh6
Now, black must promote his pawn. Rook and queen promotions are stalemate, so he must promote to a bishop or knight.
5... g1=N 6. Kg6 Ne2 7. Kf5 Nc3 8. Ke5
Now, black can either take the pawn on a2, or he can try to set up a "fortress" with the knight on b1 guarding the pawn on a3 while he slowly brings his king to the queenside.
8...Kxh7 9. Kd4 Nb1 10. Kd3 Kh6 11. Kc2= (the knight is trapped)
8...Nxa2 9. Kd4 Nb4 10. Kc3 a2 11. Kb2 with a well-known theoretical draw (black cannot stop the white king from shuffling back and forth between b2 and a1)
5... g1=B Now, black will have to win white's a2 pawn in order to win the game. It is on a light square, so the black king must try to take it. Thus, the black king must reach b2 or b1.
6. Kg5 Kxh7 7. Kf5 Kh6 8. Ke4 Kxh5 9. Kd3 Kg4 10. Kc2 Kf3 11. Kb1 Bd4 (trying to keep the white king out of the corner, where it will be stalemated) 12. Kc2 Ke2 13. Kb1
And white will be stalemated anyway if black ever plays Kd2.
By the way, you are right: I just let Fritz take a look at this position, and it thinks black is winning for a long time. In fact, even if you play the moves out, it still thinks black is winning after the bishop promotion (but it sees that the knight promotion is a draw). It gives a score of about +3 for black.
Sorry, folks. I forgot to check this board during the last week or so. Deviance and Saturn: I've sent you the games.
About my rating: Yes, ybbun has it right. Sometimes I write unnecessarily long and complicated sentences. What I meant was this:
I had a 1531 rating at age 17. I then stopped playing in tournaments. 7 years have passed since then. In the meantime, I kept improving.
Unfortunately, the organizers of big money tournaments were watching me, and now I will have a rating floor of 2000. I was hoping I'd be able to win a nice prize at an under 1800 and maybe even an under 2000 tourney as well.
So, basically: Age 17: 1531. Age 24: 2000+
Hopefully that is simpler to understand and a bit less impressive :)
Were you the one who won the U1600? Do you have a pgn of your games?
I tried signing up for FICS, but they wouldn't accept any email I would give them. I still play on chess21.com though, so far without any problems.
Yes, I was the U1600 winner. I sat on a 1531 rating (obtained from my first few years of chess play) for 7 years (while continuing to study and improve) waiting for a tourney with prizes this size. Now I'm very glad I did that :)
PGN with annotations and analysis should be finished today. PM me your email address and I will send you it if you like. If more people here are interested, I'll put it up on a webpage somewhere instead.
Also, I'm an administrator at FICS, so I can set you up with a FICS account if you PM me your desired handle, email address, and real name (if you don't want to give out your real name, that's OK, but I must put something in the "real name" field, even if it's a fake name). My handle on FICS is "toddmf".
Angerfist, that's cool. I just logged in to chess.net and read your finger notes. I shared the account "obwan" (no relation to Obi Wan) there with a friend until they started charging. He played the blitz and standard games on that account and I played the rest (lightning, bughouse, wild, crazyhouse).
I usually play at FICS, though. It's too bad we all seem to play at different places. It makes it more difficult to get together for a game.
Deviance, how did you do?
Did anyone here go to the HB Global Challenge last weekend in Minnesota? It had the largest class prizes ever. I was fortunate enough to win one of them.
How about this weekend's Chicago Open?
Lots of big events are going on this time of year.
I'd like to see a run of this game. I'd prefer to see the Turbo CD versions of all of the Ys games done, because those versions have fantastic soundtracks. Unfortunately, a rerecording emulator doesn't yet exist for that system. Therefore, I agree that the NES version is the best second choice.
There is an entertaining Life Force video played by CCC-Shiner and hosted at sdkess's site. http://www.vortiginous.com/vids/shiner-lifeforce-done.zip
I like the music in this game, and I enjoyed how CCC-Shiner occasionally rocked his ship back and forth or shot his lasers in time with the music :)
A long, long time ago, I bought a copy of Rad Racer for the NES from a local Toys"R"Us. I got a sealed Rad Racer box, a Rad Racer instruction booklet, and a Rad Racer label on the cartridge. When I put the game in my NES and turned it on, I got Rygar :)
Some games have a "slaughter rule" that would make it possible to finish the game even faster. In those games, if one team is ahead or will be ahead by 10 or more runs at the end of any inning, the game ends immediately. There are probably a lot of entertaining ways to score 10 runs, but I suspect the fastest in most games would be 9 beanballs followed by a grand slam that just barely clears the wall and is just barely fair.
Also, I think either a quick line drive back to the pitcher or a low popup to the catcher would probably be the fastest ways to make an out in most games. Perhaps in some games it would be fast to bean a couple of batters and then go for a triple play. It'd be entertaining even if it wasn't fastest, though :)
I mostly play limit hold 'em. Now is a good time to be playing any kind of poker, though. There are tons of very profitable games filled with people who saw poker on TV and figured they'd give it a try.
I love chess variants! My favorite is bughouse, a fast-paced 4-player game played on 2 boards. Your partner sits next to you, and your two opponents sit across from you. If you are playing white, then your partner plays black, and vice versa. The fun begins when your partner captures some pieces. These pieces are now yours, and you can drop them almost anywhere on your board!
A neat thing about Suicide Chess and Bughouse is that communities of dedicated players have formed, and they travel long distances to meet in real life. I've probably travelled across the US more than 10 times just to play bughouse!
I haven't been active in tournaments for quite some time, but I do still travel to over-the-board tournaments to play bughouse and blitz. I plan to return to tournament play at the HB Global Chess Challenge (a new, $500,000 prize fund open tournament: see http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1913) and Chicago Open next year. I think it would be neat to meet people from this community in real life! Until then, maybe we can play online. I usually play at FICS (http://www.freechess.org - I'm toddmf), but I can be spotted at almost every chess server on occasion, including the ICC mentioned by xebra.
Check the first line of the "configure" file. The first line is often used to specify an interpreter. It may say something like #!/bin/sh. If it does, make sure that the file /bin/sh exists.
Also, in Windows, lines of text end with \r\n. In Linux, they end with \n. So when you move a file created on Windows to Linux, you'll see an extra \r character at the end of each line. Then, the first line would look something like #!/bin/sh\r. Since you probably don't have any file called /bin/sh\r, you'd get a "No such file or directory" error.
(somewhat off-topic reply to Ramzi):
Heh. I hope we someday have the computing power to attempt to exhaust the entire "game tree" for a NES game. If I'm not mistaken, there are 256 (2^8) possible NES controller states (each of up, down, left, right, A, B, select, and start may be either pressed or unpressed). In 25 minutes, there are 25*60*60=90000 frames. So checking exhaustively for sub-25 minute solutions for Zelda would require traversing a "game tree" of size 256^90000. That's a big number :) To compare, chess's game tree complexity is a mere ~10^120. Go's is probably a few hundred digits more, but still absolutely puny compared to even one minute of NES play.
I wonder if it's even possible to do 256^90000 computations without causing a universe-destroying entropy increase :) (by destroy, I mean something along the lines of making the universe a very boring place devoid of life where almost nothing happens)
Anyone interested in downloading large collections of NES and SNES (and even other types of game music not often discussed here, such as C64 music) should have a look at what's available on the P2P networks. I've found a lot on the E2DK network. Try searching for "goodspc" or "tosec nsf".