This topic is for the purpose of discussing #8031: Mukki & ruadath's GBA Sonic Advance in 10:49.94

So I'm happy to say I was able to get footage from the camhack lua in bizhawk for every level, but not without a few cuts and bruises along the way. This post is to document how I did this just in case someone in the future might have to do this. So first off I made no changes to the lua script. Unlike the Genesis camhacks, the game does not like it if you leave the camhack on in certain parts of the game. What ends up happening is if you leave the camhack running prior to a new level starting, there's a chance that you'll cause the game to think you beat the level earlier than expected. Here are the following examples of when that happens: Neo Green Hill Zone Act 2: Ice Mountain Zone Act 2: I also ran into a different issue in Angel Island Zone Act 2 where the game crashed at this spot: Now the way you can get around these is if you wait to load the lua script AFTER the lag frames that occur before each level transition. For example, it should generally be loaded one frame before the blue spikey things show up on the left side of each zone splash screen: And one final thing to note, is any time you load the lua script then disable it, the game will not run anymore unless you completely close bizhawk and start over. Rebooting the core does nothing. Edit: ACTUALLY ONE OTHER FINAL THING, do not rely on the audio from the camhack dumps you make, especially if you used savestates at any point. mGBA seems to have audio issues whenever states are loaded for this game, which cause some audio channels to be very quiet (examples include sonic's jumping sound being super quiet). It's best to just rip the audio from the non camhack dumps to avoid this issue. Either way I hope this will be helpful for anyone in the future.

Now the way you can get around these is if you wait to load the lua script AFTER the lag frames that occur before each level transition.

Sounds like an easy fix to implement in the Lua script. We just need to figure out a good RAM address that tells when the loading starts and ends. Anyway, I'll be busy for at least a week from now, so I can't do it myself for now.

Sounds like an easy fix to implement in the Lua script. We just need to figure out a good RAM address that tells when the loading starts and ends. Anyway, I'll be busy for at least a week from now, so I can't do it myself for now.

It’s just a workaround I was able to find. Plus the script, as it’s currently written, will cause the mGBA core to stop working entirely if it’s disabled after being toggled, rebooting the core does nothing. Someone with better reverse engineering skills with knowledge of this game in particular would be required if we wanna deal with less bugs such as this.