Ok, let me tell my story..:
I started to mess up with memory addresses way before, back in 2002/2003 ... SMSPower, the (I believe so) official SMS site, was in need of a bigger and more complete music archive, and I was happy to start recording/dumping musics in VGM/VGZ format...
But when we talk about music in video games, we usually have a soundtrack, some games on Mega Drive/Genesis had official OST, but on SMS, very few games have a sound test screen, the most basic feature for vgmusic lovers,... so I was a newbie, and started playing the games and recording a lot of save states, to get everything I needed to dump, places where I could start in any part of the game that has a unique music or jingle... (even the story of my nickname speculates around this word,.. jingle)
I found out the biggest problem on SMS dumping, the SFX, they get in the way, they play when we don't want, and 99,99% of the games have no option to turn them off... I asked the guys on forum for help, and got the first tool ever to assist me: the Game Hanger hack. It consists on paralyzing the game with the pause button, and having the music keeps playing... it helped a lot, even with games that had awful lag issues and could paralyse even the music (I was the first one to dump Black Belt music without any bugs/glitches)
The time passes, and my second tool assisting soon appeared, in 2005: Meka's RAM editor. I started to quickly check the in-game variables, and checked for the magic 80, the one you write 81, and plays the title screen music immediately.. (it was usually DE03, DD03, or D003, which made the quest real easy) ... this trick made most SMS games gain extra unknown or unused music tracks, some very interesting and related to other versions of the game... and when I finished working on all games I could, I got bored and went to do something else =P (the SMSPower archive was more than doubled around that time)
In the middle of 2009, I discovered TASvideos, and was over-interested again, wanted to start working on SMS videos, and maybe other consoles, but I didn't know Dega yet, was using Meka for more than eight years.. (2000 to 2009), .. I saw that Dega was 1.15 and had no editor, no tools, only the frame advance and save states, but.. I was in the theory of 'just do it and polish it later, learn on the work' ... which doesn't consist on RAM searching, instead it consists on trial and error... x_x
And so I lived my story in TASvideos, from the day I played all After Burner all in frame advance, to the day I gained 4700 frames improving my Master of Darkness WIP, and decided to submit it officially (I did it more because I kind of naturally get the need of feedback, I had a lot of it in my MIDI sequencer times, but wasn't receiving any in my TASer attempt... I kind of knew already that if we gain 4700 frames in one WIP version, it's probably just the start of optimization yet...)
And now, I decided to change my approach by using more careful and precise tools, because the Y position managing on Kenseiden is really painful without exact numbers.... watched all tutorial videos on the site, and tried a little more RAM editing on Meka, and concluded that I should be watching my WIP's RAM instead of a different emulator.. I got a lot of RAM addresses for Kenseiden but just seeing them in frame advance would really help, in the same game ... got stuck. I really need a tool I don't have now.... +D
(RAM editing is completely not allowed in a TAS, but... it kind of IS fun to do for playing/fooling around....) xP
(subpixels are a little rare in SMS games, but I can think of some games with speed acceleration that would probably have it..) xP
(I hope this is readable, my country language is not english, maybe I get hard to understand and don't really know how to explain better....) XD
EDIT: wow, klmz's version already saved me from 2 big problems... 1: not being able to see the screen right after quick load, and 2: that awful green counter, hard to differ 3 and 8 =P
*Jungon*/*Johnnyz* smilie weirdo =P ^^ o.o @__@ +D
