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Titus Kwok wrote:
So, this looks like the kind of thing that's going to require an entirely new emulator to be written? Dang.
No, just substantial cleanup of the existing one, and a good deal of research into how the Sega CD communicates with the main Genesis, as well as how data transfers reads are requested.
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CrazyTerabyte wrote:
Submission text should have said that, despite being a 100% run, it does not try to complete bonus stages with perfect scores (i.e. 100% of the rings at bonus stages), but tries to collect as few rings as possible, without changing the route. Perfect scores would just add 50K points (and, thus, an extra life) and also one continue. Since this is a TAS, these "bonuses" are not needed.
I can see why people might expect a 100% run to get perfects in every special stage, but this was discussed greatly in the Sonic 3 & Knuckles thread before I even started this TAS. The conclusion was that the perfects don't appear particularly superhuman to get, and they take way too much time, also. Additionally, it was much less work for me to determine the shortest route through each stage without the additional factor of the fastest way to collect each ring group.
Also, collecting the fewest rings was just done to minimize the time spent at the score tally afterwards. It is possible to finish each special stage with 0 rings collected, but changing the route to do so takes much more time than the 1 frame per ring at the score tally.
CrazyTerabyte wrote:
Hum... Maybe a quick run showing the fastest way to reach the top of that glowing-light-balls bonus stage could be cool. (the stage from a starpost, when the starts glow red)
This might be an interesting extra to link from the submission text when i get around to improving this run.
CrazyTerabyte wrote:
At the first emerald from Marble Garden, just after Knuckles starts walking backwards, he rebounds at a star sphere before continuing walking backwards. Can't he just jump it, like the other spheres? Or was is faster?
In the special stages, it is impossible to jump two star sphere's in a row. It's faster to hit the star sphere in front of knuckles and continue backwards to jump the next sphere than it is to hit the next sphere, rebound, hit the earlier sphere, rebound again, and then jump.
CrazyTerabyte wrote:
How do you get those purple elastic things bounce you so high so fast? Let me guess: you jump at the exact moment you touch them.
I assume you're talking about Ice Cap zone. There are actually two tricks used there: the first is, as you guessed, jumping and quickly gliding for a frame to land immediately, so they go down farther, because they're impacted twice.
The second trick is that jumping just before the pad would normally launch me causes Knuckles' jump strength to be added to the pad's launch strength.
CrazyTerabyte wrote:
I miss the music from Mushroom Hill Zone Act 2. :)
Don't worry, it starts anyway right after the special stage ends.
CrazyTerabyte wrote:
At the last super emerald, looks like you land, after a jump, 2 squares away from the second 4-blue-ball+4-star-sphere+1-ring thing. Couldn't you land just 1 square away (like in the first of those things), instead of 2? This could improve the TAS just a bit.
The short answer is "no." I spent quite a while trying, but eventually I realized the cause. Jump duration is fixed, but until the stage has sped up to full speed, knuckles doesn't move every frame. On the first set, knuckles is moving slowly enough to land exactly one motion increment before passing the turn "hotspot". By the time he reaches the second set, though, this is impossible.
CrazyTerabyte wrote:
Any reason to lost all rings at Sandopolis 1? Just to reduce the bonus or to manipulate something else?
It was a (bad) style choice, the idea is that because, Knuckles would die if I was even one frame slow with the final hit, it would be impressive.
As it turned out, though, it's just confusing.
CrazyTerabyte wrote:
Do I ask too much questions?
No, it's nice to know you were paying attention.
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Well, unlike with ROMs, Gens doesn't load whole ISOs into RAM when it starts them, so it's not even a matter of how much memory you have.
And if you're playing from an actual CD there's actual CD-Rom seek time to worry about.
But even if that issue is taken care of by sticking the ISO onto a RAM drive, there are several Sega CD related variables that don't get reinitialized properly when gens resets, or changes discs, even.
Though when I tested playing from a RAM drive, desyncs were noticably lessened, it was only just enough lessened to be noticable - a 10% decrease at most.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Well the thing is, what joint stereo does is make the left and right channels have the same data.
If you're encoding in joint stereo you might as well be encoding in mono.
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Shadow Byrn wrote:
So what does cause the inconsistent load times? It's obviously not enough for a human to really take notice of, but around here we're doing superhuman feats!
Partly hard drive seek times not being constant, partly gens not properly reinitializing variables on segaCD reset.
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nfq wrote:
roflmao. ok, first of all... most of einsteins theories and big bang are illogical nonsense without any real evidence that tries to sound smart and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Relativity has been proven repeatedly in experiments. As have all of Einstein's other theories that remain accepted.
If this were not the case, those theories would not be accepted, because that is not. how. science. works.
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DDRKhat wrote:
Titus Kwok wrote:
I've been thinking about that, and it seems to me that the only way to make a TAS on a CD-based game would be to have some kind of flag where the emulator pauses the movie when it's loading from the disk, and restarts when the loading is done, so the emulator would have to be designed with that in mind.
Now meanwhile I admit im not terribly advanced at coding I have some grounds, so surely when GENS does a call to the function loadCD() or something.. you could make a branch right at the start.. ?
loadCD();
{
recpause();
//Rest of cdloading code here
}
Or perhaps a branch for the function that is handling the data that is being cached by the CD?
Perhaps you would like to examine the gens source code available here to find such a function.
Believe me, if it were that simple, we'd have had sega cd recording since 2005.
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My only complaint is that, after the first boss, the autoscroller is a huge letdown with no dancing whatsoever.
But damn. This movie should be published on the merits of the first boss alone.
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Notice how there's only one level per video?
That is because of the massive issue of desyncs during loading.
Furthermore, each of those times has been beaten in unassisted speedruns.
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DarkKobold wrote:
Actually, the hold up is that the movie desyncs for DeHackEd right before the last frame. I'm not sure what he is using to encode, but I can't seem to help at the moment, since I'm having a problem dumping AVIs in Gens.
Actually if you look at the edit history of this submission you'll see that DeHacked had overcome that just about an hour before you posted. He was already in the process of encoding goldeneye, though.
PS: The problem is that older versions of gens had an off by one error in the movie playback routine, causing them to end just before the last frame of input. It is fixed simply by appending FFFFFF to the end of the gmv in a hex editor.
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Enhasa wrote:
Thanks to this thread, I learned that it is cool to say SMB2 is boring. Thanks guys, I'll keep that in mind!
Also I love how tmont is being ignored because his postcount is too low. It's a great feeling, my 2nd favorite part of this site. ;)
Actually I have it from a reliable source that he is ignored because he has been harping at people to do that for 2 years and never actually produced an fcm himself to test and/or demonstrate whether it actually is faster.
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Solon wrote:
When I started emulating the SNES about eight or nine years ago, I used SNES9X for a while, and (in my opinion) it was not good. ZSNES was, so I switched to that, and I've never had a reason to consider switching back.
ZSNES movies aren't accepted by the site, tend to desync for the viewer and even the player, and I think have a few other bugs I can't recall at the moment.
But most importantly, ZMV files aren't currently accepted by this site.
Try the TAS modified SNES9x, it's come a long way in the past nine years.
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Bisqwit wrote:
EDIT: Indeed, all of the following four ROMs match the identification in the movie file:
― Castlevania - Circle of the Moon (U) [t1].gba
― Castlevania - Circle of the Moon (U) [f1].gba
― Castlevania - Circle of the Moon (U) [!].gba
― Castlevania - Circle of the Moon (U) [f1][t1].gba
Now, how would NVA distinguish them and pick the correct one for the movie?
It should check against [!] roms first, because these are the ones that most commonly have the end brackets removed.
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Though, unlike some others, I enjoyed the first SMB2u movies I watched, this is the first new SMB2u submission that has entertained me in quite a while.
Mainly because it's not just mimicking the movements of the prior movie, with tighter timing.
Definitely yes. Nice work, fellows.
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I think the only times there have ever been complaints about ending input early is when it causes the ending to be significantly delayed. Like if there is a slow text box between the movie end and the credits starting.
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Okay, finally finished watching through this and Dark Kobold provided satisfactory answers to all of my questions about spots that looked like possible improvements.
Yes vote.
Also, if possible, I would prefer to see the old submission published with no AVI and then immediately obsoleted.
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mmbossman wrote:
Generally, the "publication" process not only includes putting the movie on the front page, but also encoding the AVI for those who cannot (or chose not to) use an emulator.
There have been a few prior cases where movies were published with no AVI made, and the prior submission was already accepted for 3 months several weeks before this one was made... So there is no real excuse for it not to have been published already, and no good reason to refuse the request to publish it now since he doesn't even want an AVI made.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
