Just came back here to give this thread a bump! Just curious if any progress has been made. I assume you guys have a lot more discussion on this in IRC so I was just wondering if there has been any advancements.
I know this is an older topic, I'm wondering if anybody can help me with this? I'm interested in TAS running on real hardware and I've had quite a bit of success so far. I have an Arduino board running at 64MHz and I'm using the interrupt pins to capture the pulse and latch signals and sending out controller output to the data line. My goal is to TAS run Super Mario Bros. on real hardware, and I'm a little disappointed right now that it's not consistent. I often get through the first couple levels, but that's not a guarantee. The farthest I have ever gotten is about half way through World 8-1, eventually some frame trigger fails and I have no idea where the randomness is coming from. Does anyone know of what may be causing my frames to be captured incorrectly? I understand lag frames, but is there anything that may cause like a random lag frame?
This is just something I'm throwing out there. I have the spare console and I'm not currently working on NES projects so I can set this up if it sounds intriguing. Thoughts?
um ok well then let this be the start of a thousand questions.. so i need to download bizhawk 1.5.3? download your bkm? and it will just run no problem? never heard of a bkm but i assume its about the same as bk2 that being said i dont know how to get a bk2 to play on tastudio i've only been able to get tasproj to run on tastudio reminder i'm new there's no way to get your tas to work on the latest bizhawk? is this due to the emu lag and inputs getting desynced or for other reasons?
At the beginning of 2016 I started working on TASLink in an effort to make robust hardware that we could use at these live events to avoid annoying problems we have had every year, including parts breaking, or generally being unprepared for the event in terms of cables or visualization. I spent the better part of the year improving it and helping make it do everything we wanted. But then at the last minute it was decided we would use different hardware. We ended up having a number of the same problems we have had in the past, including parts breaking and having to fix them, and the hardware was largely untested and we had to work around annoying bugs that we didn't have time to fix in the week we were there. It hurt to have had put all that time and money into building solid hardware only to go to an event I cared about and not use it at the last minute. Overall I did not enjoy myself at the event. It was all work and no play mixed with sleep deprivation. This past year has worn me down much further than is healthy, and I am exhausted because of it. I have decided I will no longer be working on hardware including TASLink, I have stepped away from the TASBot community, and I have no plans to help out at another GDQ event.
Hardware verification at least for this TAS is very unlikely, the precision required to sync the inputs it up is likely to great. In general, I think it's a reasonable question though whether an actual Game Boy could do what this run did, at least in principle (i.e. rule out that emulator inaccuracies were exploited). The best you can do to test that would probably be to create a custom ROM that does these things without any inputs and flash it onto a cartridge that you can play in a Game Boy. That isn't really a fair test, since the cartridge itself is part of the system under test, and you exclude the whole joypad input side, but it would at least determine the plausibility that GB hardware can achieve what is seen here.
Fixed.
Test!