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Alyosha
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Hurray an actual A7800Hawk submission! 8D I actual tried playing this game manually during development, I barely got by the first obstacle. Voting yes.
Alyosha
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feos wrote:
If you guys see nothing common between these, you're being ignorant. If you don't see any difference between these, you're being ignorant.
I think what you are seeing feos is more apathy then ignorance. We've been down this road before and there is nothing at the end of it. I think we all trust you to make a suitable definition.
Alyosha
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Sour wrote:
I'm actually in the middle of adding support for over a dozen of the controllers missing from Mesen at the moment (including keyboards, barcode readers, etc.), rewriting the movie file format and allowing every kind of input device to be recorded or used via netplay. The new format is essentially the same as bk2, it's a zip file containing text files for configuration & input log. After that, I still need to make some sort of TAS editor, but that may still take a while (I personally haven't ever used one and don't really know what features people want/need from one)
Cool! Good luck with development! As feos already linked, the TAS editor in FCEUX is the best place to start. Also, since you are thinking about it from the ground up, it would be a good idea to keep in mind being able to do sub-frame inputs natively. there is a lot of potential and demand for this right now that BizHawk can't meet.
Alyosha
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Enough OOB an other antics for a yes vote from me. You all have a good eye for funny stuff to do in down time.
Alyosha
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smellyfeetyouhave wrote:
On the title screen for Kirby's Dream Land, I get around 370 in GBHawk and around 3000 from Gambatte. I know scaling isn't perfect, but I doing the math, that's around 5.6x faster for you and and 8.1x faster for me. That's a pretty significant difference in scaling.
Ah, yeah results will vary by game. Kirby's Dream Land is pretty intense with sprites. I only get 260 on the title screen in GBHawk (Gambatte is hardly bothered at 1650.) GBHawk does everything one cycle at a time, so things take significantly longer if there are sprites to process.
Also, would you be able to expose more memory domains from GBHawk at some point later on? I know my use case is pretty specific but it'd suck to lose all the domains that Gambatte offers over GBHawk (especially the ROM domain as File on Disk doesn't work for my usage).
Of course! I'll be adding all the bells and whistles as things progress. That's part of the point of going in house with this. Having said that, if anyone is interested in jumping in and helping with development, there is still tons of stuff to do. Despite the lack of audio, the core is fairly mature and robust from an architecture standpoint, and really it's matter of building up capability, so now is a good time for people who want to try their hand at development to give it a go.
Alyosha
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adelikat wrote:
DO we want to keep Gambatte around as the "performance" core, similar to snes9x/bsnes, quicknes/neshawk ?
I don't know. I think Sameboy would serve this purpose better then Gambatte, but we'd need to set it up for GB support to see. I doubt it would approach 1700 fps since Gambatte is a speed machine, but it might be worth it since it would be maintainable and has a comprhensible code base. Plus we don't really need 3 GB cores.
Alyosha
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nice! Hopefully this run will work on console like the previous one did, that would be cool to see.
Alyosha
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smellyfeetyouhave wrote:
What kind of performance can we expect at an unlocked framerate compared to Gambatte?
Currently I can get about 300 fps for GBHawk and 1700 fps for Gambatte. Once audio is added I would expect it to be closer to 270 fps.
Alyosha
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feos wrote:
Guys are you serious? You're telling me the complete collapse of the branching system due to unapproved mass renaming, as well as this whole thread, which caused all site staff members to unite their mental efforts and come up with a solid approach, happened over something completely meaningless?
Yes. "One can argue endlessly about anything," afterall.
Alyosha
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Warepire wrote:
Will the GBHawk core require BIOS?
Initially yes. Down the road I might add an option for BIOS skip for casual play, but BIOS enable will be enforced for TAS.
Alyosha
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I also agree with Radiant. It's un-necessary.
Alyosha
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Posting an update since I'm back to working on this. I've cleaned up MBC1 emulation and added multi-cart support for Bomberman collection and Mortal Kombat I & II. Next step will be finally tackling audio which is the last step before the core is nominally functional. Going forward, GameBoy emulation will be disabled from Gambatte and and switched to GBHawk. Color GameBoy emulation will continue to be provided by Gambatte. This should allow time for bug fixes and improvements to the core before I add CGB support to GBHawk and remove Gambatte altogether. Also I have removed BIOS support from Gambatte since I don't think it's worth the time to sort out the bugs. I expect I'll be able to start making Dev builds within the next month.
Alyosha
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feos wrote:
Kangaroo (1983) (Atari) [!].a26 from Good2600 v3.14 (Missing 16) doesn't leave the core busy loop. CRC32: 1D961D5A MD5: 35AE38B0DCA275C89C565355CCEBD7AC SHA-1: 982B8016B393A9AA7DD110295A53C4612ECF2141
This was one of those games that had banks swapped internally. Added to the internal list with the others like Congo Bongo fixes it. The failure actually occured at the function that tries to differentiate between NTSC and PAL. Probably I should do something so silent crashes like these are avoided. EDIT: Done. Now the core will throw an error when a frame seems endless instead of just looping forever.
Alyosha
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PikachuMan wrote:
loading 2-player Game Boy tasproj file crashes the emulator. In fact. 2.2.1 might be unstable when it comes to Game Boy TASing with TAStudio.
Indeed. Ok I'll set aside other stuff and prioritize finishing GBHawk. Obviously my attempts to add BIOS support to Gambatte resulted in too many bugs to be useful. It's about time anyway, Gekkio has done so much new research that Gambatte now looks really outdated.
Alyosha
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The movie time is longer though, due to more accurate emulation
I see this line in the publication (and looking up I also see it in the judgement.) This is not the case. The movie is longer because StarvinStruthers was able to end input sooner without costing an in game timer tick. I on the other hand had to hold the fire button until much later. Emulation accuracy is not at issue here, it is purely game mechanics. This might seem counter-intuitive, and well, it is, so maybe the assumption was that it must be due to emulation differences. But no, this game is just weird.
Alyosha
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smellyfeetyouhave wrote:
One 100% reliable way to trigger a crash is:
    >Enable bios in Gamebatte >Load a game and create a savestate (bios enabled) >Quit Bizhawk >Restart Bizhawk >Load the game up again >Load the state
This should result in a crash. The settings all match so it's not a setting mis-match. Another 100% reliable way is:
    >Load the game with bios disabled >Savestate >Enable bios >Reboot core >Load the state
This one has a setting mis-match (loading a non-bios savestate with the bios setting enabled) so it may be a different crash. Maybe one of those crashes will be able to get you a lead.
Thanks for the repro steps. I suspect these errors are different from the original one though. Still an error none the less.
Unhandled Exception: System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
Hmmm, that sounds bad. I'm surprised this wasn't reported earlier. I'll try to sort it out, or maybe I'll just buckle down on GBHawk so we can deprecate Gambatte, at this point it's quite outdated anyway. Either way I'll put this on the issue tracker since it seems pretty serious.
Alyosha
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Good on you for deciding to step away and let some things go. It can be difficult to stop doing things you feel responsible for, even when the alternative is crashing and burning. Hope you find a good balance and get rested!
dwangoAC wrote:
TL;DR: I believe the so called "limited" opportunities at AGDQ 2018 are a result of my own shortcomings/life situations rather than a reflection on the site itself
dwangoAC wrote:
I can't emphasize enough how much the "limited" aspect of AGDQ 2018 TASBot content is a result of me. This is largely because no one else really wanted to actively share in or take over leading the effort
I think maybe you are being a bit too hard on yourself here. Perhps aside from DKC2, I would say that we really didn't have anything to offer, and I don't think that would have changed if someone else had taken your place. I would offer up the opinion that TASBot, much like TASVideos itself, has more or less run it's course with what's currently possible. We need some serious R&D before we are in a position similar to 2014 where there was novel and exciting stuff to offer. Anyway, good luck with the prep!
Alyosha
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Ford wrote:
Yes vote from me. Hell, even the scores are the proper colors now!
What the.... 0_0 I must have watched that movie a dozen times and never noticed that!
Post subject: Re: SMBall EXP 1-10 console verified, SDW2 confirmed in
Alyosha
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dwangoAC wrote:
This is a long overdue update but it's still going to be a bit rambly, I have a lot on my mind right now. That's it for now, I need sleep as I haven't been getting enough of that
Yeah, it's extremely obvious just from your uncharacteristic posts. Take a break man. D: As for the actual info, cool stuff! Nice work to team TASBot for making the most of limited opportunities.
Alyosha
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/42857093323881631 I managed a 32.69, only one time increment away from the legendary 32.67. Please replace the movie file with this one.
Alyosha
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PikachuMan wrote:
I encountered a crash bug when rebooting core or closing emulator when running Gameboy games.
It looks like the crash happens when going from 'enable BIOS = true' to 'enable BIOS = false'. I'll look into it. EDIT: It looks like the core is not able to properly dispose of the state pointer for some reason. I don't know why yet. EDIT2: I don't know, now it just seems to happen randomly. I rebuilt the emulator several times, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. What does this imply? Compiler bug? Memory management issue?
Alyosha
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^ Nope, just me forgetting to reset the instruction pointer index after a reset. Fixed.
Alyosha
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Agreed with the sentiment that technical gimmicks aren't likely to hold many people's attention anymore. I don't know, the selection committee said they wanted typical TAS stuff, but I'm not sure they really actually do. My personal opinion is something interactive is needed to boost interest. Like, maybe we can do the SMB in SMW ACE, but give TASbot real time control of various aspects of the game, like enemy behaviour, to make it super hard and trolly. Then we can have a race between SMB runners to see if they can beat TASbot-SMB. Well, just an idea for something different.
Alyosha
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Sonia wrote:
Also, I was wondering about something. Alyosha, could you please add a volume slider for the SMS core? The reason I'm asking this is the same as when they asked you to add it for NEShawk. It's just that when you enable FM Chip, the volume is way too low. You can only hear it properly if you set your PC's volume to max.
I'll do this as I rewrite the SMS/GG core to bring it up to speed with the other cores. This will start to happen in the not-too-distant future.
Alyosha
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The story surrounding Todd Rogers' Barnstorming time is filled with as much intrigue as Dragster. Basically there are 4 times at issue: 32.04: Originally enterred into the databast at TwinGalaxies. Obviously impossible but still took a lot of effort to get it removed. I guess this was at a time when belief in the 'human factor' was still quite strong and Todd Rogers' reputation still un-blemished. 32.74: The 32.04 was changed to this since the thought is that 32.04 was just a typo and 32.74 is the lowest readily achievable score, which Todd probably legitamitely achieved numerous times (but I'm not sure if a specifc instance was used as justification for changing the 32.04 to this instead.) 32.74 is the current record according to TG. 32.50: This is one of those legendary times that there are claimed witnesses to but no evidence other then hearsay. There would need to be some kind of serious glitch discovery in order for this score to be achieved. At some point this score was the world record but was removed for reasons I'm not clear about. 32.67: Another legendary time, but this one is borderline believable. RTM, the former chief referee at TG, claims to have witnessed it personally. And actually, it might legitamitely be possible. There are several spots in my current run where it's possible to gain time, but I cannot maintain it throughout the run. Perhaps if someone really understood the games mechanics, they could work out how to improve the time here, it might even be decided in Todd Rogers' favor, who knows. But, I'm not interested enough to bother. My only motiavtion here is that the current TAS fails to beat the RTA record, which is even recorded on video, so it's a bit embarrasing that the published TAS should fail to beat it.