This topic is for the purpose of discussing #1450: xebra's GBA Wonderboy in Monsterland in 13:23.17

I have absolutely no idea what the policy on emulated emulators is, but the run is solid. If this doesn't get accepted, I'll take to on the project of fixing up an SMS emulator for rerecording. PS: Yes.

Very entertaining movie, even though it's 2 AM and I'm really sleepy, so that's a plus. I voted yes, but the emulation problems give me doubts whether to publish it. The movie itself was creative and had it's funny moments. Nice glitch too.

First SMS game I've ever seen. This is a colorful game, but I didn't like the sound. The movie seemed well played, with some good damage boosting. It also wasn't too long to get repetitive, so altogether that tilts me to a yes vote.

The sound is emulated very poorly. It's not annoying at all on the original console :) .

Big respect to you for picking this marvellous and fantastic classic game. This is a top notch run but its a damn shame about the sound :( If this gets accepted, can we somehow fiddle with the sound to make it actually sound as its supposed to? Nice work xebra.

Emulating a Sega Master System on a Game Boy Advance emulator so you can TAS not just any game but THIS one. I've been waiting for an SMS TASing emulator just to give this game a shot, but you found a way to get it done with what we have. SO awesome! I never thought of it for TASing. I use SMSAdvance to play these on my GBA or DS instead, though when I play it in VBA it gives some kind of BIOS error before it runs the game. Sound is perfect, though, and pressing L+R gives a menu where you can change the display to Unscaled (Auto) which will make the game much easier to watch as well, though it'll cut the top or bottom of the non-status bar part of the screen that's farthest from the player. --edit, Auto causes annoying flickering when the character gets damaged, you might want to use Unscaled instead and manually shift the screen using L and R (which means you might need to keep R from counting as Start, fixable in the in-game menu also.) Just a suggestion to look into, but I definitely did not like the sound emulation in Dr SMS, and it seemed like the graphics weren't spot on, either, with feet sticking out under columns and bridge pieces. Everything else about the movie is great, though. You showed effective planning with the boots buying, shield glitching, gauntlet grabbing business, and that falling through floors glitch definitely gave the run some special flavoring. I love this game and you made a good run out of it!

Good shit young man. Yes.

Voted yes, hope this becomes an "approved hack".

It's ... not a hack.

Uh, it kinda is. It's a Master System game hacked to be a Game Boy Advance game. Why don't you get a Master System emulator fixed up and approved instead if you're so intent on running this game?

It's a Master System game hacked to be a Game Boy Advance game.

This is true in the same way that it is true that Final Fantasy on snes9x is a SNES game hacked to be a PC game. See, DRSMS is an SMS emulator for GameBoy Advance. When you run DRSMS on an SMS game, it wraps the emulator around the ROM, without modifying any of the SMS game code, this can then be written to a GBA flashROM and played in an actual GBA. Or it can be loaded up in Visual Boy Advance and TASed, as Xebra has done. However, there is no precedent for TASing a game that is being emulated on a different console, so there's really no way to tell what Bisqwit's reaction to this will be.

Well yeah, using just one emulator is bad enough! Two emulators is unacceptable, I say.

My thought is assuming this is published, is that if we ever have a real SMS emu with rerecording and this game is done, it should obsolete this one.

if we ever have a real SMS emu with rerecording

Haha, good one :) .

My thought is assuming this is published, is that if we ever have a real SMS emu with rerecording and this game is done, it should obsolete this one.

It could be like the "obsoleting famtasia runs" project. only it would be "obsoleting DRSMS VBA runs"

>This is true in the same way that it is true that Final Fantasy on snes9x is a SNES game hacked to be a PC game. Upthorn and xebra are right. It's no hack, it's just an emulator for a different platform than PC. However, I find it unlikely that we would accept an emulator this poor if it had been for PC. It removes more than a quarter of the scanlines, misplaces graphics on the screen, and garbles the sound quite badly. There are advantages of course, such that VBA has very good tools already and a good file format. But no matter how good Dr SMS gets in the future, the first problem (with the resolution) will never be solved. Perhaps the others will be fixed, is Dr SMS development still active? I consider this a makeshift solution at best. Are there really no suitable SMS emulators we can modify to include TAS tools?

summary : upthorn tested all the open source emulators, but only Meka gave good emulations results (read : many games were badly emulated on Dega and gens+). then the author of Meka (Bock) came (invited by xebra if my memory is good) and proposed to include rerecording (since savestates are already good at the job). satisfied by this response, upthorn trusted Bock, and denied any proposition to take the job since, because someone was already "doing" it. this was 9 months ago. the long story. upthorn, if you would change your mind, you would be very welcome ;) until then, we will stick with DrSMS. it's poor but it's there.

I think I may have mentioned to Upthorn on IRC that Marat Fayzullin has open source emulators for all of the various chips found in an SMS, as well as a library for handling SMS ROMs. He also used his own code to actually make a full blown SMS emulator (which is not open source.) I don't know how accurate his emulators are, but they may be worth looking into. Meka is nice but I seem to recall Upthorn saying the source code was a mess. Plus, the interface is a bit over the top. (It's sexy but not practical for tassers.) Interesting quote from Marat's website:

Because MG source code is highly portable, it runs on many different platforms, from Apple Macintosh to Sony PlayStation (see MasterGear Ports section below). While the source code is not available to the general public, I do share it with people every now and then, when they ask nicely and if I like their projects.

I think I may have mentioned to Upthorn on IRC that this guy has open source emulators for all of the various chips found in an SMS, as well as a library for handling SMS ROMs.

You did, but if I'm going to be ripping an emu core and adding it into Gens, I might as well rip code from an emulator with some other features implemented to save myself more work.

Meka is nice but I seem to recall Upthorn saying the source code was a mess. Plus, the interface is a bit over the top. (It's sexy but not practical for tassers.)

I looked at the source again recently, and I have less conviction that it's too messy now. But the question remains whether it would be easier to implement SMS emulation in Gens using Meka's core, or to add movie (re)recording to Meka, and learn how its GUI works.

I don't like this concept of emulating an emulator. Because if we take that approach, and later we have a real SMS emulator, we will have to redo every SMS run made on that emulate-an-emulator approach. Or alternatively, have SMS runs on the site that require different emulators to play.(*) I am rejecting this submission. In any case, it is an unauthorized hack (drSMS is not an approved hack here). *)Yes I know we have multiple NES-emulators and multiple SNES-emulators. It is not a preferred situation, and in any case there was that second reason.

>Because if we take that approach, and later we have a real SMS emulator, we will have to redo every SMS run made on that emulate-an-emulator approach. Or alternatively, have SMS runs on the site that require different emulators to play. We have had this situation with Famtasia in the past. It might be that we don't want to make the same mistake again, but without Famtasia this site wouldn't exist, probably. A bad solution can be better than no solution. >In any case, it is an unauthorized hack (drSMS is not an approved hack here). If you replace hack with emulator in that sentence, I agree.

I don't see how being able to see more games that have a demand to be TASed = a bad thing. I agree with Truncated about the no solution thing. Sure DrSMS doesn't emulate it perfectly, but you have to start from something. Maybe if we have some DrSMS runs up here someone will finally work on a real good SMS rerecording emulator. Also we starting taking VBA runs when they lagged all over when it was first introduced when we shouldn't. Just citing a past example. Mupen is complete crap as well, yet we accept movies on it. DrSMS at least on the games I've tried works way better than Mupen.

If this doesn't get accepted, I'll take to on the project of fixing up an SMS emulator for rerecording.

Well then, I guess it's time to start reviewing the options. I'll get started on SMS soon -- either adding tools to Meka, or adding SMS to Gens. Don't expect results right away, though.