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I'm not familiar enough with the game to find this interesting, but I seriously want to see someone try to run this on console, that would be impressive.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/51269910871841142
Here is a new WIP which includes the first 2 levels of part 2 (in the castle.)
I went back and redid many of the earlier levels, saving a few frames here ad there and resyncing as needed.
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the_kov wrote:
Hey, this is fantastic! I was just talking with my community about trying to learn to TAS using Cowlitz 2nd Adventure, and I am even more excited to try it since someone else is already working on one.
I'll be starting a 1P TAS but having the 2P to compare to will be great while learning what I'm doing.
Cool!
Honestly I think 1 player is going to be more interesting. Two player has some close calls here and there, but overall the levels are a bit too simple and the strategies a bit trivial.
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Bizhawk doesn't like that the movie starts from SRAM apparently.
If I ignore that and create a movie anyway, I get this:
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/51115175536913401
I don't know how hard it would be to extract the SRAM itself from the movie so it will actually run, but hope tat somehow helps.
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I just made a pretty big commit to GBHawk to improve accuracy fairly significantly. A bunch of tests from Wilbert Pol (which are variants of Gekkio's tests but also a lot of cool original stuff) now work for GB. CGB is a bit behind still, but I hope to catch up a bit as I sort things out and clean everything up.
There is a little work left to do for sprite evaluation, but it's now much more accurate. Also everything is much more fine tuned as the overall maturity of the core goes up.
If anyone finds any regressions please let me know.
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feos wrote:
I've been gathering info on the details, and here's the actual situation we're facing.
Authenticity of the environment
We also require our emulators to stay true to the original consoles they emulate. This feels implied, because consoles have locked and known once and for all specs, with exception for cases when some quirk was undocumented or documented wrongly. We don't allow emulator settings that don't correspond to something the original consoles had.
It's important to note than in cases when a console behaves non-deterministically, we don't require emulators to inherit this aspect, quite the opposite: we enforce determinism even if it didn't exist on the actual console! With that one exception, we don't allow to emulate a hacked console, including its hardware and software it's been officially shipped with.
I think part of the problem here is in dealing with different ideas of 'authenticity.' We don't really require emulators to be true to hardware, 'passably plausible' would be more accurate of what we require. This usually comes down to easy to identify and understand metrics. We don't overclock a NES CPU for example, this is something that is easy to understand and easy to check. Beyond that it if looks and sounds right it's given a pass. I haven't ever heard anyone say 'Hey that emulator is doing DMA instantaneously, that's not authentic!' I don't think this gives much of a platform to build off of for 'authenticity' in PC games, where the dynamic nature of hardware is just part of the landscape.
My two cents would be to leave it up to the TASer and just make a judgement call as cases come up, probably based in large part on audience enjoyment.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/50978662357332331
here is a cleaned up WIP expanded to 15 levels. Apparently the game only checks collision every other frame, so you can duck/unduck under certain enemies and save some time.
While some of the routes are pretty tight in terms of timing, there are unfortunately quite a few times where an enemy or the other player is holding up progress. Overall it looks pretty smooth though.
EDIT: also anyone can jump in and contribute if they want. It's a simple and not too serious game with just enough optimization choices to make it interesting.
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I'm curious, what else is known about he roadkill spawning glitch? Are any memory addresses associated with it known?
Is it possible other entities in the game (enemies or bosses) could have spawns favorably manipulated if the glitch is better understood?
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I can agree that sending fake and precise times to a game that is supposed to be reading real time is not an ideal solution, but it's better then nothing, and we surely already accept worse nonsense then that from emulators.
Also yes vote for this TAS, it was a fun fast watch.
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Interesting. That would be a cool run to see done on console. Have you tried running the resynced run on hardware? If it doesn’t perform the same as BizHawk then maybe emulation just isn’t ready to handle it.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/50954041211353444
Here is a WIP of the first 10 levels. I don't think I made any major strategy mistakes, although probably some frames can be saved here or there.
Overall, it's pretty straightforward. A one player or 'all diamonds' run might also be interesting.
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
Alyosha wrote:
EDIT: CUTEDEMO still has what appears to be some BG color latching behaviour that needs to be implemented in the 'zilog inside' scene. I would need to see it running on real hardware to make sure though.
Does it need to be a monocrome GB or is GBC also fine?
It has to be in GBC. That particular demo is GBC only.
EDIT: Also I implemented HuC1 support if anyone wants to test out those games. I don't know how they are supposed to use the infrared port. I can add it in as a control if necessary.
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
BizHawk colecovision power on / reset...
Galaxian has a hidden message after powering off and on a few times (https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/colecovision/585496-galaxian/cheats).
I believe the hidden text should be "I LOVE YOU, JENEANE" considering it's offset is much deeper (0x4645 in ROM) than the previous one (0x0302 in ROM)
I looked at this a bit, but gamefaqs seems to be the only place where you being able to display the message is actually mentioned. Other sources just say that the message is in the ROM and can be seen with a hex editor. Are you sure this works on a real console?
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I made a few more timing fixes that fix some issues with a few of the more sensitive tech demos out there.
Oh! and CUTEDEMO relied on latching behavior of x-scroll which is now corrected.
Oh! also relied on sprite evaluation not happening in DMG when sprites are turned off. This is actually an easy to see hardware difference between it and CGB, where sprites are always evaluated.
GBVideoPlayer is now working as well, which relies on careful timing between STAT interrupts and y-scroll latching. So it's pretty cool to see it working. It will crash at the end though since the ROM is not padded to a standard size. I'll make a fix for that eventually.
At the same time I am being careful to make sure all the various test ROMs still work, so overall these are small but important accuracy improvements.
As a bonus, the notorious dycptest2 test ROM now looks correct:
So things are moving forward pretty well.
EDIT: CUTEDEMO still has what appears to be some BG color latching behaviour that needs to be implemented in the 'zilog inside' scene. I would need to see it running on real hardware to make sure though.
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The end result here isn't that interesting in terms of bot potential, but I'm pretty surprised to see a couple desyncs in there. I can't recall another example of something on FCEUX desyncing. Too bad it's too rare to reproduce reliably, might be something important.
So things are moving forward pretty well.
EDIT: CUTEDEMO still has what appears to be some BG color latching behaviour that needs to be implemented in the 'zilog inside' scene. I would need to see it running on real hardware to make sure though.