Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
Alyosha wrote:
The first game I tried to verify was actually Extra Mario Bros, but that game doesn't work on console because it doesn't set the mmc3 bank before jumping to 0x8000.
Has this been reported to the hack creator so that they have a chance to fix it on their end instead of you having to jury-rig something to get a console verification?
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
feos wrote:
This is very different from PC games that allow you to switch vsync on and off as an existingoption. There it's perfectly valid to say that once vsync is off, high framerate is accurate and legitimate. DOS games though, just render at whatever rate they're coded to, and refresh the screen at that rate. If this game had this option, high FPS in libTAS would technically be justified. But the scummvm fast mode option is not a special thing for this game either - it's universal. It doesn't expose something hidden in the game. It just emulates it at turbo speed.
In other words, if the DOS game doesn't have an option to turn vsync off it should only be TASed at the intended in-game framerate, no ifs ands or buts about it.
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
Re: Music situation - is there an option to turn off the music independently of anything else? If there is, you should create an alternate file for publication that toggles the music off in-game before gameplay starts.
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
This means that a full game of "unselected" stages will never see the light of day :/
True, but I could also see "All Lefts" and "All Rights" runs so that stages that would normally be slower for "warpless" or "warps/fastest completion" could still be featured in well-defined alternative goal categories.
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
Would it be a stretch to argue that only 18 days into 2025 we already have a "TAS of the Year" candidate? (Or at least a candidate for the best NES TAS of 2025...)
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
Darkman425 wrote:
Does this mean that there's no cutoff by the game on the number of races the player gets to play in the NES version?
This video shows two loops of the tracks, so you can at least get that far:
Link to video
As you can see, the scoreboard at the end of that video has room for 5 digits so 99,999 could be the maximum possible score to earn in this game! At only 20 points maximum per race, it would take an extremely long time to reach that number though (assuming a killscreen or something similar doesn't get in the way). Additionally, the single Twin Galaxies record for the NES game is higher than any of the arcade or MAME records, so there's every reason to believe that you can go as far as you want in the NES version.
That said, pursuing any kind of hypothetical maximum point value would be in a different branch entirely. This submission would still count as a baseline because it covers all unique content in the game, regardless of whatever score targets it might be possible to reach.
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
Huh, the final cutscene plays out longer than the actual run itself...
Also, I would love to hear your TEDTalk someday about how the different versions and ports of Myst compare to each other. :)
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
Man, for a game called "Fast Food", it sure feels like you're plodding along most of the time...
Also, what happened at the end of the encode there? Is the second loop supposed to be the same levels as the first one turned upside down?
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
One thing I noticed is the "PERFECT!" banners at the end of each round, which seems to delay the characters end speech. Is there some way to manipulate chip damage to avoid that time loss, or is it simply slower than letting the banner play out?
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
Patashu wrote:
It's too bad this can't be console verified because the route/tricks used are very funny.
Not consistently verified, anyway - a verification could still happen by pure (unmanipulateable) chance. The only foolproof way to test whether the save corruption works on a real console is to use a brand new, unopened GBA cart - which means you run into the same problem as Space Station Silicon Valley's mandatory first boot cutscene (in other words, no one is going to risk ruining their "mint condition" cart to test something that's not likely to work anyway).
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
Two questions:
1. Are you not allowed to carry more than one key at a time? (Would save quite a bit of backtracking if you could!)
2. There's no way to clip through the platform to the left of the locks and skip having to get the keys altogether?
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
It's interesting to see a NASCAR-themed computer game from a time when the sport was just starting to become a big thing across the U.S.A. (thanks mostly to the featured Richard Petty as well as Dale Earnhardt Sr. - RIP) instead of exclusively appealing to "redneck Southerners". Doesn't stop the game from being all kinds of jank, though - especially it being one of the earliest instances of obviously cheating AI racers (for example, you never see THEM needing to stop for fuel or having THEIR engine blow out).
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
But for any adventure with randomized dungeon layouts, including the published "Grail Quest" run, I would imagine the Friar is actually the fastest character to use, as long as you can find a seed that has a lot of potions which can be used for 2x speed.
It would probably take some code disassembly, but if someone could work through the algorithm the game uses to generate the items in the dungeons you could work backwards from that to an ideal starting RNG value for the Friar (assuming one exists, of course).
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
CasualPokePlayer wrote:
This would more only occur anyways if you're using something older than Windows 10 1607. I have just fixed this in the latest master.
For reference,1607 would be the "Anniversary Update" (build number 10.0.14393) released a little more than a year than the original Windows 10 public release. Outside of certain enterprise situations that BizHawk would almost certainly never be run in the first place, the only practical end users that would run into this problem are those running freshly installed and unpatched Windows 10 systems (something that an end user should not be doing for security) or the end users still on a version older than Windows 10.
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 320
Location: Stafford, NY
I'm reminded of the discussion over Noxxa's GTA 2 submission watching this - there's a lot of loading screens and not a lot of gameplay time. And that imbalanced ratio just drags the whole experience down. Abstaining from voting.
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...