Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
Posts: 32
Location: the Netherlands
Been away for a long while and I don't have any emulators and roms on my new PC yet, so I haven't seen your work so far. I'm the guy who made the movie at speedruns.org (which seems to have disappeared) which I think looked cool, but was definitely far from perfect.
It seems you're doing a pretty good job at it, so I wish you the best of luck. I don't think I could stand to do a perfect run for this game. ;-P Once I get my tools sorted out here I'll be sure to check your movie. It's a great game both to play and to look at.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
Posts: 32
Location: the Netherlands
Well, I think GMail's a good thing(tm). Sure, they scan your mails for relevent adds. I don't mind, it's not like I'm gonna get teh pr0n adds. :-P Basically anything you don't want google to see shouldn't be done through email anyway. Secrets don't exist on the internet, but you can always encode your emails for some extra security.
As for the elitist remark... it's not a club of people who work on an invite basis. GMail is still in the beta stage and they don't want a few million people registering 10 accounts straight away. The invite system means they only have to store a Gig of email for a few hundred thousand people at first which I think is a sensible thing to do.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Depends on who's talking. :-P I've heard Lufia2 be called a prequal often enough... I think most people use it this way since the number shouldn't matter all that much story-wise.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
Posts: 32
Location: the Netherlands
I use an ancient M$ Sidewinder. It's never let me down and I like the feel of it. Though I don't use it for speedruns, IMO nothing beats the keyboard for having full control. It's just that gamepads are more comfortable. Especially when my wrists hurt. If only windows could be fully controlled with a gamepad... ;-p
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
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Hmm, a bit iffy, but you may enjoy Secret of Evermore. It's not Secret of Mana and if you expect it to be SoM you'll be disappointed. But it's a great game which basically has the same controls as SoM. It's not a typical fantasy-RPG, but different parts of the world resemble different times on earth. It has an original spell-casting method, alchemy, for which you have to collect ingredients to cast spells. Quite a good story and some good humor IMO, though some people just find it annoying. :-P
Then there's Seiken Densetsu 3, AKA Secret of Mana 2. Great game with quite some replay value due to different starts and endings for different characters, as well as a pretty drastic character customisation.
And Lufia 2 is indeed a great game. It was my second SNES game I think and I still play it now and then. I got the Dutch version, but I hear the US version has some nasty bugs. Still a great game though. Pretty huge world, some nice little side-quest thingies like collecting dragon eggs. And then there the ancient cave... It's a whole game on it's own. Many people have literally wasted hundreds of hours on it. :-)
Well, there's plenty more, but I can't go and recommend them all I suppose. :-P Some other good RPG's you could check out are Earthbound, Breath of Fire 2 (BoF 1 wasn't good IMO, but 2 is pretty decent), Super Mario RPG, FF4, FF5 and plenty of others.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
Posts: 32
Location: the Netherlands
I think Blip found out both ways. He posted the code somewhere around here too. I haven't tried famtasia-->virtuanes, but virtuanes-->famtasia works sometimes. That's how I converted my "A boy and his blob" movie. However, my "Little Samson" movie went out of synch right from the start, so it's not very reliable.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Hooray for Google!
Pipes came from Star Trek. "Beam me up, Scotty!" :-)
Why he chose pipes is a mystery to me, but I suppose the tele-/transporting qualities are somewhat similar.
The items such as mushrooms are inspired by the "Eat me" and "Drink me" stuff in Lewis Caroll's "Alice's adventures in wonderland". Though I think he might've been tripping anyway. :-P
Source:
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Mario
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Location: the Netherlands
Maybe it's because hacked roms are illegal? I'm not sure, but I suppose modifying games this way is not legal, whereas currently people are *supposed* to use their own legal rom dumps. Well, I'm not a big fan of hacked roms anyway as their quality is usually not very good and you'd have to draw a line somewhere on what is and what isn't allowed.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
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Location: the Netherlands
Grassmunk, I didn't mean to imply you were going to rip people off. I was just speaking hypothetically as I'm sure most people were. I give you permission to use my movies ("A boy and his blob" isn't very spectacular :-p, though my "Little Samson" run on speedruns.org looks quite good IMO, 'though I'm not one of the big runners around here :o) on the condition that you are clear about them being available for free.
I cannot enforce this condition, not on you or on others who haven't gotten premission whatsoever, that was what I was talking about. However, I hope you do provide this service for a reasonable price and advertised properly as freely available emulator-enhanced runs. If you do this, thanks in advance. :-) If you do not, meh, not much I can do about it. ;-P
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Sure, it takes time and work to put together a nice collection, burn it and sell it. And you can't stop people from doing it either. However, that doesn't mean you should give people permission.
If anyone has the moral right to sell CD's/DVD's with movies, it would be either the original runner, or the person who is distributing it already. I wouldn't mind Bisqwit, Arc etc. doing it through a section on their sites. That way the whole thing is transparent and people can make an informed decision wether or not to buy them. But I think they are busy enough with their site already. :o)
That said, if someone else decides to provide this service it wouldn't bother me all that much. However, I choose not to support this idea because I'd rather not see it happen, not because I'm gonna fight people to death. :-P
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Location: the Netherlands
I'm opposed to it because I'm against selling people things that can be gotten for free. People on e-bay obviously have an internet connection. Even if it's a slow one they can easily watch the fmv's. If there were only avi's available I might've thought differently (though I'd definitely hesitate).
Free linux distro's being sold for a small price is an example of what I think is ok because some people have no other option, but as it is in this case, this is not even an issue.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
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Location: the Netherlands
*blush*
Thanks :-) I think the two areas where there's room for actual improvement are:
- Smoothness. I think I missed a few shots, though just a few, but mostly there's just situations in which I had to go crazy on controlling the movement in each frame, which doesn't always look good, to survive. That leads to the second thing...
- Planning. I hardly planned anything. I played it once, and then started making the movie. I still don't know which characters are best against which bosses. Initially I thought the golem would be best 'cause of the brute damage. Then I thought a rapidly firing Samson deals even more. Finally I found that the mouse is probably the real killer if you place the bombs right.
It's all just guesses and feelings in that run. :-P Ah well, that's ok for a first run I think. I plan a lot more now (though I haven't gotten around to completing a 3rd run yet).
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Oh, Lickle == Little Samson. :-P In that case I know this game. I did that run on Palatinum's site. There's some room for improvement, but I haven't had the time nor the will to re-do it and I doubt I will any time soon. :-P
It's a fun game, but perfecting every move can get frustrating at times as sometimes there's just too many enemies to run/jump/shoot past and you have to do all sorts of tricks to kill/avoid them quickly.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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That about sums it up for me. :-P Though I like the music and art in ALttP almost as much as that in CT. I'd rather play ALttP, but that's 'cause I've finished CT <bignum> times already.
Right now there's about 400 votes difference in CT's favor, but I don't mind either of these games winning. Now if only a game from the top bracket's gonna win this thing (preferably SMB3) I can continue pretending this thing calles justice is real. ;-P
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Location: the Netherlands
Well, beats me too. I love this game, but as far as I know quite some people have rather different feelings about it. The time is probably surprising to people who played it back then, but that goes for mosts movies here. Maybe it's got something to do with being the first game in on the site. ;-)
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
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Location: the Netherlands
Talk about coincidence. I thought I'd look up the number of downloads on my movie just when it hit 1337. I'm not really into the whole 'leet'-thing, but this amuses me. :oP
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Location: the Netherlands
I hope Bisqwit knew about this. Otherwise it's Bad Thing (tm) as he clearly asks people to link to his page instead of .torrent's. The publicity is nice, but I don't think many people will check out the link to Bisqwit's site. Those who do may not bother to read the explanation and come here to flame etc. Still, it's nice to see that other people also enjoy these movies.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
Posts: 32
Location: the Netherlands
Well, I just watched this movie and I have to say I love it. You waste practically no time and the glitch is great. Sure, the first few levels aren't as interesting a second time, but I don't find them boring either. I hadn't read anything in this thread before watching it, so I was totally amazed when you were suddenly back in level one. Great movie. :-D
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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I haven't tried with zsnes, but with both MAME and WinKawaks (arcade emu's). Both work ok, but when the emu starts to put more load on, camtasia just lowers the fps (using the standard codec) which results in extremely choppy movies.
Using either DivX or VidX resulted in incredible lag, sometimes even crashing camtasia and always producing movies at just a few frames per second. While using no codec at all, the movie became a bit better, though still far too choppy and growing very rapidly.
My conclusion is that camtasia is just not suitable for the task (at least at this point in time). It's really aimed at instructional videos with little movement I think. What's the program Bisqwit uses? You could always record it under linux if the program Bisqwit uses works better.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Woah, some heated discussion going on here...
I haven't seen either movie, but I can already give my opinion. I think that since this is Bisqwit's site, we should all be grateful he makes these videos available. If there's some video he doesn't accept, that's too bad for the maker, but things like that happen. It's not the end of the world. If you want to be sure your run gets published, don't do a game that's already been done.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Well, that's not because they are inherently incompatible. It's just that the authors didn't implement compatibility. If you're going to write your own emu, you can support the format (assuming the format is either straight-forward ,well documented or investigated by blip ;-), though it may require some serious hacking (hence the blip remark ;-).
Writing a proper emulator is one of my short-termish dreams, but I'm still just a beginning programmer and I've only just started learning some assembly (which is rather useful for writing an emu). It's not easy and takes a lot of time, but if you're up to it and actually do it, I'm sure many people here will be more then happy to help you in some way or another.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
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Either do like Bisqwit said or right-click and "save as". It happens sometimes with different filetypes. I've had it happen with torrents too (using firebird/fox). There may be an extension that solves these problems though.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 3/21/2004
Posts: 32
Location: the Netherlands
Hmm, I just remembered I hadn't commented on the movie yet. When I started watching it I thought I'd watch the first world, go to bed and watch the rest later. That plan failed. I couldn't stop watching. Great movie for a great game. You used wheel to get a great time, but luckily you also used a lot of other skills. I even recall a few seconds with beam, which I thouroughly hate. :-P
The sound did go out of sync somewhere, but I have to admit I usually turn of the sound anyway. I like watching movies, but the sound often doesn't do them much good (though Kirby has pretty good sound IMO).
I also really like the way you use highjump. It's one of my favorite skills and you show how it should be used. (Most people just used it to jump high ;-)
There are lots of places where you could win a little time, but it's never really serious. I think the most time you lost at one single time was one time you got a 1-up at the end of a level and even that didn't take too long. One of my favorite movies for sure. Thanks! :-)