Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
Place: Hilton Mark Center (5000 Seminary Rd./Alexandria, VA) - just southwest of Washington, D. C.!
Time: January 1st through January 4th
Websites: http://www.magfest.org / http://twitter.com/MAGFest
So anybody planning on attending the upcoming Magfest? For those who haven't heard of MAGFest, it is the "Music and Gaming festival", formerly the Mid-Atlantic Gaming Festival. It is host to 24 hour gaming, concerts, and a host of panels and other interesting things. In addition, it is chock full of people connected to the speedrunning and VGM remixing communities.
It would also provide a perfect opportunity for a meetup.
I already have tickets booked, and I'm looking forward to meeting and hanging out with people from SDA, OCR, and TSC. Now I'm wondering if I can get enough people from TASvideos interested for us to form a contingent, as well.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
Under US law, whether or not you make money off it makes a world of difference, in terms of damages, and determining whether or not the circumstance qualifies as "fair use".
If you make money off it, it becomes commercial usage, and inelligible for the "fair use" exceptions to copyright infringement.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
I... don't think it's really a good idea to advise potential new players to use the less sync-stable emulator just because it has rewind.
What would probably be better is to write a lua script to make rewind in snes9x, and post it, with instructions.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
Warp wrote:
upthorn wrote:
Warp wrote:
It's easy to blame God
Yes it is. God made everything exactly the way it is. If anything behaves badly, it is God's fault for making it that way.
Or maybe people behave badly because they choose to behave badly? Is it God's doing if people choose to do the bad thing?
Why did God make them want to behave badly?
If they didn't want it, the question of choice would be irrelevant. And people don't have control over what they want. So they are born into a world where they can choose to behave badly in order to obtain satisfaction, or behave well and have their wants going unmet.
If God created the situation, God is to blame, for making bad behavior desirable. If God did not make bad behavior desirable, and the devil did, God is to blame for creating the devil and bestowing the devil with power. If God did not make bad behavior desirable, but it is desirable as a logical consequence of the state of the universe, God is to blame for creating the universe in its current form, and not one where only good behavior would be desirable. Unless God did not create the universe at all.
Either all evil is God's fault, or God did not create the universe.
Bisqwit wrote:
I'm surprised at the lack of moderation in this thread.
Perhaps other people have different views about what requires moderation than you. And perhaps you should the people to whom you have left the site are administrating it in the manner they see most fit, providing moderation against genuinely harmful forum activities, and allowing harmless and interesting discussions to continue without interference.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
The problem with the current system is that it is actively repellant to people who are anywhere in between those two extremes. There should be a more community-interactive way for new users to get introduced to TASing, for people who want to learn how it works beforehand, and have difficulty with the site FAQ.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
Yeah, embedding videos from youtube/dailymotion/wherever doesn't really add to the bandwidth cost, because the video and even the flash player are still being served from the external site, so the only bandwidth increase is the size of the actual html code.
Granted, 425 bytes (for youtube) is larger than most standard html tags, but it's also smaller than the size of a torrent file, or an average forum post. For instance, it's less than 1/3rd the size of the html for forum post.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
What would be nice is if we could somehow negotiate with youtube to get an official tasvideos account without the 11 minute limit. I know commercial entities have done this successfully, but I have no idea how one would go about it, especially a broke noncommercial site like ourselves.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
Wait, are you trying to compile gens 10a, or gens 11a?
The gens with lua is gens 11, you can get the source package from http://gens-rerecording.googlecode.com/files/Gens_Rerecording_11_Src_Win32.7z
You seem to be correct about the included x_to_y.bat file not working. I'm going to correct that, now.
In order to fix it on your machine, just open that .bat file and add a "-i " after the "-p0 ", but before the name of the .diff file.
Edit:
Oh, I misread the thread title. Somehow I saw "10a" as "lua"
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
Huh, interesting. It's a shame it's viddler, though. As has already been mentioned, viddler's flash player is a huge CPU hog. But also, viddler has recently been inserting advertisements at the beginning of every video that hits a certain threshhold of popularity.
There's one thing that helps a bit with the flash player, though. If you go to http://polsy.org.uk/lp/vidviewer/ paste the video url, and check "use simple player", it's not quite as bad.
Unfortunately, it's still nowhere as good as Youtube or Daily Motion in that respect.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
marzojr wrote:
Hrm. For now, I think I will skip mapping Sky Sanctuary and go straight through to Death Egg. It turns out that those clouds are sprites, and will horribly pollute the map. Further, disabling the sprite layer they are on also disables all monitors and rings, defeating the purpose of the map. It there a way to disable those clouds? Maybe a way to edit the sprites to be totally transparent?
file->game genie
add these codes:
057BF6:4EF9
057BF8:0001
057BFA:ABB6
then select all three and click ok.
This makes the cloud object code into a nonconditional jump to "deleteobject"
You could also do this with a hexeditor, but since the required change is so small and only needed once, game genie makes more sense to me.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
If it makes any difference, the "speed up" cheat in shining force 2 only affects the cursor scroll rate in battle, and the text display rate. Characters all still walk at the same speed, etc.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
marzojr wrote:
By any chance, is there a similar hack for the big rings? Sure they are fewer and farther apart than monitors, but it would still help.
I never found the giant ring animation scripts, so no, there is not. But it actually shouldn't be that difficult for me to go try and make one right now.
edit:
At 0x0619C2, change
04000001020304050607F80C060B0A0908
to
04080808080808080808F80C0608080808
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
marzojr wrote:
Uff... it was quite a bit of work*, but I finally managed to get Gens maphack to work as I wanted!
The first map is for Launch Base 1: here it is (warning: it is 0.97MB in size).
This is great work.
The bitmap size thing wasn't really a bug, exactly. It was a limit set because mapcap.bmp is always generated at the resolution specified, and the machine I was working on at the time was running out of memory even trying to open files that were more than a little bit larger than that.
The main reason I never did Launch Base, though, was because I couldn't figure out how to deal with the tileswapping for those inside/outside areas in an easy way.
Also, there's two last things I forgot which should be really helpful for future maps, but I don't think should make too much difference for the one you already did.
1. Make a copy of your S3K ROM, and open that copy in a hex editor
go to 0x01DB50, and replace
to prevent monitors from ever showing static.
2. Before dumping maps, enable graphics->layers->sprites->sprites always on top. This will cause rings and monitors and enemies to show even when they would normally be obscured by scenery.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
Oh right. If you have caps-lock off, you have to hit S after B to get it to actually dump. I forgot about that. For some reason the code logic only lets it dump on the same frame that it takes a new screenshot.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
marzojr wrote:
Does numlock have any special effects? I am finding that I can't scroll the screen if numlock and capslock are both on, but capslock on and numlock off scrolls automatically (including "correcting" any initial downward scrolls with k) scanning the level from left to right, top to bottom. Moreover, this automatic mode end up resetting the game partway through Launch Base 1 (even if I force Sonic to remain in the center of the screen).
Err, yeah, numlock disables it all for some reason (it was like that when nitsuja first made it).
I didn't think I'd commited the capslock -> autoscroll changes to the svn...
It will stop doing that and let you scroll manually once it's done a complete sweep, and the game resetting doesn't make it lose its place, but loading a savestate before it finishes will, so just fastforward for a while once that happens. I think you should be able to keep track of the camera position by watching FFEE00 and FFEE04.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
marzojr wrote:
A quick question (probably for Upthorn): how does the Gens maphack work (SONICMAPHACK from hackdefs.h)? I ask because I assume that several maps from the Sonic Center were made by Upthorn with it, but there are several maps still that are not...
It's kind of awkward to use. Not so much because the of the hack, but because of how finicky the game is about camera scrolling, and how incredibly many moving objects there are in levels.
And, in S3K, the scrolling code is entirely level specific, so the cap on how many pixels the camera can move per frame (which currently requires recompilation to modify), can vary significantly from one zone to the next.
So, with all this in mind:
in sonichacksuite, set the #define for SCROLLSPEED to how many pixels you want the camera to move per frame, and POWEROFTWO to the scale factor.
POWEROFTWO at 0 makes a 1:1 map, at 1 it makes a 1:2 map, etc.
once you've got it compiled, use the following keys to control it:
Scroll Lock: toggles maphack on and off, and has the opposite effect on camhack so that (maphack and camhack will never be active simultaneously).
I: moves the camera up half a screen.
J: moves the camera left half a screen.
K: moves the camera down half a screen.
L: moves the camera right half a screen.
,: teleports sonic to the center of the screen.
.: scrolls the camera to center on sonic.
S: takes a manual screenshot to the map.
B: dumps the map to mapcap.bmp
Caps Lock: toggles automatic screenshots after every time the screen is scrolled.
Because certain events can be triggered by the camera position, and the game can be very uncooperative with forced-backwards scrolling, I suggest the following procedure:
Go to level select
Enable the maphack
Hold J for several seconds, then hold I for a similar amount of time
Make a save state in slot 9
Enter the desired level (maphack should still be active)
When the level is finished loading, make a save state in slot 0 (the camera should be all the way at the left edge of the level, and a half-screen above the top)
Turn on caps-lock
Hold L until the scenery starts to repeat
Wait for the camera to stop moving
pause
load last state
hit K once
Wait for the camera to stop moving
save state 1
Repeat from step 8 until you have scanned the bottom of the level
load state 0
hold K until the screen stops moving down
press B
scroll the screen once in any direction. The game should pause and the sound should become choppy for several seconds while it dumps the map.
turn off caps-lock
Load state 0
review the map
manually deal with any situations that it did not capture well. (like bosses)
press B
scroll the screen once in any direction. The game should pause and the sound should become choppy for several seconds while it updates the map.
repeat from step 21 until the map satisfies your needs.
close the emulator to free memory
open the map in your preferred image manipulation program (I use paint.net)
crop to the level boundaries and save as png
Once you get a good rhythm, it should take around 45-90 minutes per act.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
Kuwaga wrote:
Ah, I see.
Anyway, I've now got save states, frame skip, slow mode, pausing, etc synced up. Frame advance doesn't work yet though for some reason. Do you know if pressing the frame advance button does not send a window message like most (if not all) of the other function keys?
That is correct. Frame advancing doesn't utilize a window message. Neither does the fast forward key.
The reason for this is because it has to be continuous if the key remains held down, and hotkeyed window messages are only sent on first press.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(388)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
Kuwaga wrote:
Warp wrote:
How about instead of using a logo in the gap, you used an actual clipped photo of that part of the real device there? Probably less bothering than the logo.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
But hey, why pass up a chance for easy advertisement?
How about combining those ideas and put a photoshopped photo of a DS there that has some leet TASVideos spraypaint on? XD
I... actually sort of like this idea.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
