Posts for zaphod77

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Posted: 7 days ago
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
The psp one (ver 4.5-X) has a checkbox. i JUST tested this. the ps3 one currently has a thumbs down. the 3.0A has a flower. I certainly agree with the ruling that "it's not a real ps1 bios," and it's what i expected. The only reason i was even wondering is that, as I said, the one from the ps3 can be obtained without dumping it yourself or breaking any laws i know of.
Posted: 7 days ago
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
The bioses are accepted by bizhawk. I tested myself. As i said, they skip the white screen, and have the memcard manager and cd player removed, and apparently replaced with compatibility logic. They are specifically reprogrammed by Sony for emulator usage. The one from the PS3 firmware update is also obtainable by using the "install firmware" function of RPCS3 with a Sony provided ps3updat.pup from the internet firmware download page, and then copying the ps1_rom.bin file form the emulator directory. This makes that version special.
Posted: 7 days ago
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
Version 4.5-X (found inside of the PSP) and 5.0-X (found in later ps3 firmwares) function with emulators and skip the white screen. this would significantly affect TASing PS1 games by allowing them to start faster. are these allowed, or are they not allowed, because they aren't found on actual PS1 hardware? I'm guessing no. They do not contain the memory card manager or the CD player function they just give a black screen if there's no CD in.
Posted: 8/21/2024 5:10 PM
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zaphod77
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Posts: 343
I want to see a full bestiary TAS. A full bestiary means all drop information filled in. Yes this means lotsa luck manipulation.
Posted: 8/20/2024 4:33 PM
(Edited: 8/20/2024 4:42 PM)
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
honestly, the explode afterwards feature was just to show off the little tune for that failure condition. :) You can play indefinitely with perfect 10x landings, so a maximum score tas would be very boring. I'd say 100% is perfect landings on each platform.
Posted: 7/21/2024 2:08 PM
(Edited: 7/21/2024 2:25 PM)
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
Gumball. This game provides a unique opportunity to showcase superhuman skill, and is quite interesting, with the ability to control the gumball release rate. It also exists for Apple II, and should probably be TASed on that platform. Naturally, the TAS would raise the rate as high as possible to help meet the quota for each level. The multitasking requirements for each level increase. Level 1 is two colors plus rejects, and is fairly trivial for humans. quota is 8 Level 2 is three colors plus rejects, and a bigger quota. quota is 18 Level 3 is all four colors, and a bigger quota of 29, but you can still do it in one trip. Level 4 adds a quota of 40, too big to get all in one trip, and the explosive gumballs, which must be disarmed to avoid a game over by shooting them with a pair of crosshairs, which freezes up the rest of your controls. even if they are sent off the screen down the rejects tube, they will explode when the timer hits zero. if they reach the ground or a cart, they will explode. Explosion is instant game over. Level 5 has more bombs and a quota of 50. beat that and you win. If you send anything but a reject down the right garbage, or let any gumball hit the ground, the quota may be increased by 1. video of the apple II version, where someone gets to level 4, and then looses to an exploding gumball that's sent down the rejects area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myApVAyeRRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b72a6kSTKCA beaten, but not perfectly.
Posted: 6/16/2024 2:20 PM
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
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Since the game has no rng at all, if the game were fixed to properly cap the speed of the cars, beating the toughest level would count as a win anyway. Were i coding the game, i would have level 10 be the final level, with the maximum car speed of 255, and a congratulations screen upon beating it. The existing TAS is a probably perfect win.
Posted: 6/13/2024 8:18 PM
(Edited: 6/13/2024 8:24 PM)
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
nymx wrote:
GJTASer2018 wrote:
The error message indicates something wrong at line 260, this controls advancing the level number variable "LV" after beating each level according to the code listing at the end of the magazine you link to. Perhaps it doesn't work properly when going from 9 to 10? (E.g. Treated as going from 9 to 0 or 255 instead, which causes rollover errors and places unintended values in the variable...)
Yes...that is my conclusion...even though I haven't looked at the code. I'm just surprised that it was from 9 to 10 though.
the error is probably here. 260 LV=LV+1:POKE 830,LV:POKE 171,PEEK(17l)+2:POKE 54276,0:GOSU8 460 at level 9, PEEK(171) is probably 254 or 255, and the +2 goes to 256 or 257, which is bigger than one byte, and can't be POKEd into a single byte memory location. the increment from 9 to 10 isn't what did it. that said, the game probably breaks either way at this point, even if the crash is dodged. Either that or fixing it will make the game endless.
Posted: 3/30/2024 9:04 PM
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
btw, if you are wondering why speed 20 was not picked, that's because the snake goes clear to the wall in one frame and will crash unless you hit a star. speed 20 was deliberately unplayable.
Posted: 12/18/2023 2:35 AM
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
nesrocks wrote:
About the vault code: You don't need to hack the game, break the vault code combination or look it up online. You can play the game several times, find all the notes yourself and write it down. Afterall, it's just 31 possibilities. Or, more easily, you can do it once and restart until you get the same, and then speedrun it. This is acquired knowledge on the game, and don't we all do that before speedrunning any game?
I still think it's bs, but speedruns.com seems to agree. they define 100% as actually getting all the clues instead of restarting until you get a password with the right starting letter to get the fastest to enter password. This is all because they couldn't spare four bits in the password to store the number of clues collected to make sure you actually got them, even though two bits were wasted in the password scheme (no password goes past the start of world 5, meaning the 5th room bit never gets set, and the most significant treasure bit will never be set in real play, and is unlikely to be set with password hacking, because you can't start with over 1998 after first treasure room, and would need an infinite loop that gains health.
Posted: 12/4/2023 12:56 AM
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
the simplest rule is does the poke have any affect outside of the game at all. if NO, then the poke is fine. note that there are pokes that while they do not have immediately observable effects, it doesn't mean they have no effect outside of the game. If it does have an effect outside of the game, then it should be disallowed on general principle, with the only exceptions allowed being directly manipulating time of day, or manipulating the seed for a built-in RNG/
Posted: 12/3/2023 11:48 PM
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
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The loader on the disk is unchanged. you are still using the loader to load it. you essentially poked in a modification to the system libraries. Pokes can be used both to create and execute arbitrary code. its also possible as i said to add a wedge. something interrupt driven that can modify things later without actually changing the code at all. And this would beat the rule against using the unmodified loader My point is that there's no distinction between data and code in early computer memory, and no matter how cleverly you try to write things, the only way that actually works is to whitelist specific POKES as okay, as the poke command is just too powerful to list what you can't do with it, so you have to instead list what is okay to do with it. Messing with the system time is specifically allowed, so doing that with a POKE is fine. Most other uses of pokes simply wouldn't fly. Messing with uninitialized ram is also arguably okay, provided no ram that IS initialized is POKEd. And quite a lot of RAM on the c64 IS initialized by the bootup process. so messing with it is not fair. If it has a consistent default state, then changing this default shouldn't be allowed, unless it's the TOD clock. For example if Cheatmen 2 was a c64 game, POKEing some ram to let you get past the crash would be okay, specifically because it's unintialized RAM. And if a game is really silly enough to use uninitialized ram to seed the RNG, then poking to take advantage should be fine.
Posted: 10/14/2023 12:15 AM
(Edited: 10/14/2023 12:20 AM)
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
How the game actually works. The 100% goals are 1) beat all environments. 2) get the square pinballs 3) beat the default high score. 4) drain all balls The real truth. To get the ball changed, advance to sun. to do this, either go through the left inlane and hit the advance target on the right, OR complete the left 3 bank of drop targets. Once you've reached the sun and collected its special, the balls will turn to triangles. To beat all environments. collect the solar value. to do this, lock both balls, relock one ball, and shoot the other up the ramp. This takes you to the next one. If NO chest lights are lit (true at start of game(, the lights will light in rows and columns one at a time. if you hit the lit one, that instantly completes the chest, and opens the visor. provided you do NOT strike any targets after opening the visor, you will get the same opportunity after the visor closes again from scoring the solar value. First solar value takes you to green/blue board. second one gets you to orange board. third gets you to blue board, fourth gets you to white board, and fifth gets you to green board, and upgrades the ball from circle to triangle, or from triangle to square. Sixth solar value collected brings you to back to purple/blue board. Unlike real pin*bot, you CANNOT just keep shooting one back into the visor to collect the next solar value. you must complete the visor, and relock both balls to re-enable the solar eclipse from locking a single one in the visor. However, you CAN do the fast open, provided you avoid hitting *any* visor targets after you open it, because you will get another fast open skillshot, even if you still have both balls.
Posted: 8/26/2023 12:28 AM
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
I will give a real example. Jumpman has a simple ml loader inside basic that uses the kernal routines to load the main program, and then jumps to it's start address. But you can write a small M/L routine to copy the kernel to RAM underneath. You can do it with pokes (easy to do rapidly under TAS conditions), then do another poke to change the vectors to make it start automatically without a sys command, and the routine can restore the vector you just poked. Then you can bank out the kernal with another poke. now kernel is in RAM, and you can directly modify it with pokes. Now you patch the load routine so that after the load is finished, and before the routine returns, it JSRS to another bit of code you poked in that changes the RAM of the game. say, to disable sprite to sprite collision checks. it just patches blind. The code runs after the first load, but does nothing. it also runs after the load of the main program, when it's there to modify. and this time it does something. Now you are cheating, and everything you did was BEFORE the load that kicks off starting the game normally. Alternatively, you can create a TSR with POKEs that messes with the loader to do some similar cheating. For a basic game, you can copy BASIC to ram, and then modify the basic interpreter itself and use THAT to cheat in a BASIC game. Pretty much the only thing that is far is messing with the rng, though if a game is silly enough to make assumptions about the starting background and text colors and not set them by hand, i'd say those are fair game to change.
Posted: 8/9/2023 6:04 AM
(Edited: 8/9/2023 6:08 AM)
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zaphod77
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Pokes can be used to do many things that are not okay. for example you can poke in a small ML routine, and then redirect a vector to it and that could affect the game later. It's very possible if you are clever enough to add a cheat before load by pure POKEing. For c64, the only thing that should be acceptable is messing with the time of day clock before load, and adjusting the random seed before load. Anything else is either cheating or will lose time. Poking in a trainer, messing with the games program with pokes, and messing with system vectors is right out.
Posted: 4/19/2023 2:39 PM
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zaphod77
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I investigated the copyright for this game, and the company that owned it got out of the video game business, so i figured it was sufficiently abandoned to be safe. The only protection the game had was against typing LOAD followed by SAVE. I take it sending direct messages to TAS authors is the proper way to do it?
Posted: 4/19/2023 3:06 AM
(Edited: 4/19/2023 3:27 AM)
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zaphod77
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here's the actual original disk. converted to .d64 format. yes, its' actually the original. direct from c64pp. Mod edit: Link to ROM removed.
Posted: 4/16/2023 12:33 AM
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zaphod77
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The game is confirmed at c64pp to have no protection. so that disk is most likely the original after all.
Posted: 10/3/2022 11:37 PM
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zaphod77
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The RTA Speedrunners have now supposedly TIED the Human Theory TAS all the way up to 8-1. once someone does that, and gets world 8 correct, there's literally nothing more to improve.
Posted: 5/11/2022 7:50 PM
(Edited: 5/11/2022 7:53 PM)
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zaphod77
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Don't forget to use the .d64 image i said to use, as it loads fastest of all originals. btw, use the following commands to load it. this will knock off a few seconds. pO43,0:pO4,64:lO"1",8,1 sY2049 this will save a few seconds. :) you can type the sys command as soon as LOADING is printed to the screen. (this moves the start of basic to $4000, which prevents the computer from trying to relink it after loading to the USUAL basic start place, loads the main program, and starts the game) yes, this works when a real person does this, but a TAS can type fast enough to actually save time this way. it does not affect gameplay.
Posted: 5/11/2022 6:53 PM
(Edited: 5/11/2022 7:09 PM)
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zaphod77
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Joined: 1/13/2007
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Btw, it my be possible to improve the time by collecting more diamonds. The extra life sparkles delay end of level. Ideally you wish to get them early in the level, instead of during the countdown, but as long as it stops sparkling before the end, you are good. On cave B, you get sparkles during the countdown. but if you collected two more diamonds on that level, the sparkles would be before the cooldown, and if the last gem was taken far away enough from the exit, you could avoid the delay. This may or may not save time immediately, but... With the 100 extra points, there will be no more delay on cave C at all. the sparkles will stop in time, and not delay that level. Cave D would likewise trigger the sparkles before exiting, and thus save some more time there. Keeping an eye out for opportunities to manipulate the score by collecting extra diamonds to time your extra live animations may save time overall.
Posted: 5/10/2022 1:51 PM
(Edited: 5/10/2022 2:30 PM)
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zaphod77
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I can max out the difficulty loop much faster unassisted. You see, difficulty is determined by score. and there's a glitch that can increase score very rapidly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qdX-R0-M6U naturally, under TAS conditions, the glitch can be set up a lot quicker, and abused to get the score much higher. The video i linked appears to max things out with two repetitions of the glitch, maxing it out on level ONE. this may be an illusion, but i'm pretty sure the actual dificulty depends purely on score, and the glitch is the fastest way to get score. the intermissions routine is separate, and gives up at a specific number of levels.
Posted: 4/12/2022 6:53 PM
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zaphod77
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Awesome movie. Now we need to make a new VVVVVV version that patches this, and see if someone else can STILL credits warp.
Posted: 1/4/2022 2:23 PM
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zaphod77
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Okay. that was seriously awesome, and hilarious. This ranks right up there with a boy and his blob for crazy brokenness.
Posted: 12/17/2021 8:12 PM
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zaphod77
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also, you may want to try TASing Supaplex in DOS. this has a ton of different levels, and the smooth motion for everything allows lots of crazy stunts that are easy for a TAS.
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