Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Snes9x v1.51 has been rather stable for a while now and it seems people have not been flocking to it, or for the most part, even bothering to try it despite noticeable improvements in sound (compare this and this), and other areas.
It seems Snes9x v1.51 has a bad stigma associated with the initial release which had some determinism issues which have since been fixed.
In order to push people to v1.51, I originally set a deadline. Which didn't seem to go over too well.
gocha has informed me, he'd prefer to stop working on the older codebase, as it is becoming a hassle to do so, and the newer code base has many emulation improvements.
So I'm hereby informing the community that we are looking to phase out Snes9x v1.43, in favor of newer versions of Snes9x, be it v1.51, or v1.52 when it comes out.
If the latest build of v1.51 has issues which prevent you from switching to v1.51, please report it here so it can be fixed.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to have the entire site drop v1.43 by 2010, if at all possible.
I'm sorry if the old announcement has caused anyone any undue stress.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
upthorn wrote:
The better way to do this is to stop supporting 1.43 with upgrades
That is indeed the plan.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
upthorn wrote:
The better way to do this is to stop supporting 1.43 with upgrades and let people change to it as they see a need.
Benefits to doing it this way
Gocha no longer has to work with an old, messy, codebase.
People aren't forced to stop using the version they prefer.
Nobody is making unilateral policy decisions for the entire site,
People have a chance to try snes9x 1.51 again to make sure all the kinks are really gone before they use it.
This is an excellent idea, but I'd also like to suggest that people are informed why 1.51 is better than 1.43. Specifically, people did not use 1.51 sooner due to new bugs and problems. Do you know what these problems were, and more importantly, have they been addressed?
Information encouraging users to change should be the goal, rather than forcing hand.
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
upthorn wrote:
Nach wrote:
upthorn wrote:
The better way to do this is to stop supporting 1.43 with upgrades
That is indeed the plan.
It really looked like your plan was to stop accepting snes9x 1.43 records in site submissions.
Oh, stop living in the past ;)
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Nach: "Now that v1.51 is a completely viable option, older less accurate versions of Snex9x will no longer be allowed. Get your build here.
As older versions are harder to maintain, unwittingly violate our rules, and produce bad sound for certain games, we will be rejecting all runs submitted that were created using v1.43, starting next year."
Upthorn: "The better way to do this is to stop supporting 1.43 with upgrades."
Nach: "That is indeed the plan."
Might need to think this one over Nach.
Edit: Guess I'm living in the past. Apologies.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
For the record, I used a pretty new version of 1.51 when it came out. Phil and I tased Super Castlevania 4. Midway through our run, we suffered a numbers of desyncs. We addressed this to the snes9x community but nobody really bothered to listen or deal with the problem. But then, a hero entered the arena, his name was gocha! A sneaky little japanese fellow who actually fixed (!) the desync issues. We are very happy and delighted to have you onboard mr gocha-san.
Nitrogenesis wrote:
Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!
Arc wrote:
I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.
natt wrote:
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
The better way to do this is to stop supporting 1.43 with upgrades
That is indeed the plan.
It really looked like your plan was to stop accepting snes9x 1.43 records in site submissions.
Oh, stop living in the past ;)
Do you have any idea how inappropriate it would be for you to decide something like that without discussing it with adelikat or any of the general community that would be affected by it first?
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3585)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee
Raiscan wrote:
This is an excellent idea, but I'd also like to suggest that people are informed why 1.51 is better than 1.43. Specifically, people did not use 1.51 sooner due to new bugs and problems. Do you know what these problems were, and more importantly, have they been addressed?
Information encouraging users to change should be the goal, rather than forcing hand.
From what I am hearing, the desync issues have been fixed in the latest versions of 1.51. But yeah, NO effort has been made to publicize this fact. Maybe the first step is to get the word out. Then start talking about phasing out TASVideos support for 1.43.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
upthorn wrote:
Nach wrote:
upthorn wrote:
Nach wrote:
upthorn wrote:
The better way to do this is to stop supporting 1.43 with upgrades
That is indeed the plan.
It really looked like your plan was to stop accepting snes9x 1.43 records in site submissions.
Oh, stop living in the past ;)
Do you have any idea how inappropriate it would be for you to decide something like that without discussing it with adelikat or any of the general community that would be affected by it first?
I already discussed this over with gocha and certain prominent members of the community. I'm told any issues which did negatively affect people have been fixed.
The reason I initially wanted a hard deadline is to find any issues that would negatively affect people to be found, instead of putting it off any longer.
I'm sorry that this didn't sit well with people. So The hard deadline has been dropped. But now that I have your attention, please do look at the newer builds.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
The only discernable difference I'm hearing between those two samples is an extra brass note on the 1.51 recording. But I'm also without my old sound system, currently restricted to laptop + headphones. Take that as you will.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Sonikkustar wrote:
Well this screws me over with. I have two runs I'm making on v1.43 and they might be long. But I'll see of I can get them running on v1.51 soon.
If you already started making those two runs by all means, finish them on the version that you started with, instead of redoing things you don't have to.
However, if you didn't start them yet (or didn't do much), then please see if you can make the run with v1.51
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1057
Location: United States
Snes9x v1.51 had more issues than simply desyncing. There were many timing issues, where it interpreted lag differently than the real console. So much so, that I think v1.43 had more accurate timing overall.
What really does not make sense about transitioning to v1.51 is that there is a new INCREDIBLY accurate emulator known as BSNES, which is what we should be transitioning to after it obtains rerecording capabilities.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
hero of the day wrote:
Snes9x v1.51 had more issues than simply desyncing. There were many timing issues, where it interpreted lag differently than the real console. So much so, that I think v1.43 had more accurate timing overall.
Is that still the case? Has this been compared with several games?
hero of the day wrote:
What really does not make sense about transitioning to v1.51
I'm not asking to transition to v1.51, but to drop v1.43, as it really is that old.
hero of the day wrote:
there is a new INCREDIBLY accurate emulator known as BSNES, which is what we should be transitioning to after it obtains rerecording capabilities.
Yes, indeed.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
The only discernable difference I'm hearing between those two samples is an extra brass note on the 1.51 recording. But I'm also without my old sound system, currently restricted to laptop + headphones. Take that as you will.
The lack of the extra brass note also seems to effect the timing:
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
True wrote:
Raiscan wrote:
The lack of the extra brass note also seems to effect the timing:
How so? Because the samples were cut from the original arbitrarily? Nobody said anything about there being frame boundaries on these samples.
Because the brass note is missing in 1.43, the whole sound gets played earlier and ends earlier. I'm assuming that the 143 and 151 are at an identical time index, meaning 143 starts slightly earlier and ends sooner, where 151 starts slightly later and ends a bit later. I'm not sure what OmnipotentEntity's wave difference shows, since it looks like in that picture the waveforms have been aligned (which is not the case in reality).
This would be a more accurate overlay:
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Another reason to use 1.51 is that several games can't really be TASed in 1.43, and 1.51 makes it possible (by adding support for recording peripherals and/or fixing bugs that would obscure gameplay). I'm not sure why people haven't been TASing those games, though. Maybe it's because they don't realize that it's possible because they're still using 1.43.
I'm a little pessimistic about people completely switching over for all TASes though. A lot of games lag more, so the version switch really gets in the way of comparing to previous TASes. Even if you don't need an exact comparison, people are still reluctant to work on a TAS where at the end all they will have to say for themselves is "This should have been X seconds faster, but because I also switched to Snes9x 1.51, it's actually Y seconds slower than the previous version instead... but please accept it anyway."
AngerFist wrote:
But then, a hero entered the arena, his name was gocha! A sneaky little japanese fellow who actually fixed (!) the desync issues.
Hey, I fixed a whole bunch of desync issues in Snes9x 1.51 too (in gocha's branch). Sorry this happened later than it should have, but I didn't have a good technique for fixing them at the time 1.51 first came out. Not to downplay all the great work gocha has done (and is doing (and, understandably, would not like to have to keep doing for 1.43)) to maintain and add so many features to both versions, of course.
The lack of the extra brass note also seems to effect the timing:
How so? Because the samples were cut from the original arbitrarily? Nobody said anything about there being frame boundaries on these samples.
Because the brass note is missing in 1.43, the whole sound gets played earlier and ends earlier. I'm assuming that the 143 and 151 are at an identical time index, meaning 143 starts slightly earlier and ends sooner, where 151 starts slightly later and ends a bit later. I'm not sure what OmnipotentEntity's wave difference shows, since it looks like in that picture the waveforms have been aligned (which is not the case in reality).
This would be a more accurate overlay:
I was assuming that they weren't, and I lined up the wave forms. The blue sound (1.43) still winds up being played faster though.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
The blue sound (1.43) still winds up being played faster though.
This is probably related to the overall clock-speed decrease in 1.51. Aside from increasing the amount of computational lag that games experience, it would also slightly affect sound timings.
Maybe the sound timings were the primary reason for it? (I ask this having not read any of the changelogs, but having worked out that the clock speed must have been decreased from various people's observations from using it)
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
If someone could write a tool to convert 1.43 movies to play in 1.51, that would probably help the transition, especially for those of us who have runs in progress on 1.43 versions.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Solon wrote:
If someone could write a tool to convert 1.43 movies to play in 1.51, that would probably help the transition, especially for those of us who have runs in progress on 1.43 versions.
It is not possible to "convert" a movie created on one emulator with certain timing to a different emulator with different timing.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
