Joined: 10/31/2010
Posts: 5
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
I had expected a much longer minimum time as well, something like 40 minutes. Great job doing it in 25.
At the world 3 boss, is there a particular reason you fight the dragon on the bottom row of platforms? If you could do the fight two rows higher you would save on time walking to the key. I tried it myself but I can't seem to do enough damage per second to defeat the dragon in two appearances and having it appear a third time wastes far more time than being on the middle row saves.
Joined: 10/31/2010
Posts: 5
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Circlekyuu wrote:
Alright, so which items should I actually take? I'm playing through the game again to see what I absolutely need or what I could skip, but that might be a while, so if anyone already knows or has any info, please give your input!
I played MG2 a lot when I was working on the translation, but that's 15 years ago and I've hardly played it since. I think there are very few items you can actually skip. Even most of the rations have uses other than restoring health.
also i'm not sure, but do you actually have to follow the green beret man to gain access to the room where you have to look in the manual for the code?
The map is actually different if you follow him compared to when you ignore him. I don't know how far you have to follow him for the map change to occur, maybe you can save some time by following him only part of the way.
Joined: 10/31/2010
Posts: 5
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
MrTickles wrote:
Too bad all of these "alternate" MSX famicom games don't have scrolling.
On MSX2, in character mode (SCREEN4) horizontal scrolling is easy. But then you can only use two colors per 8 horizontal pixels. In bitmap modes (SCREEN5-8) you can use more colors but there is only a hardware scroll in the vertical direction. Apparently Konami didn't want to make the effort to program a horizontal scroll in software for Contra MSX2. In for example SD Snatcher they did.
Joined: 10/31/2010
Posts: 5
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
C-BIOS is still in development, so future C-BIOS versions are likely to have a slightly different timing from the current version. So for recording TAS's, I would recommend against using the C-BIOS machines.
Also the Panasonic FS-A1GT is not an ideal choice, since openMSX does not perfectly emulate the refresh timing of this machine yet. We hope this will be improved in the future, but these small changes could break your recordings. The same applies to the other turbo R model, the FS-A1ST.
A good choice for playing Japanese games is the Panasonic FS-A1WSX, which NitroGenesis used for the Rambo TAS. For European games, the Philips NMS 8250 would be a good choice.
Joined: 10/31/2010
Posts: 5
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
I am one of the openMSX developers, although I did not work on the TAS mode, which was mostly done by Wouter. We discussed the file extension issue on IRC and the outcome is that the extension will be changed to ".omr" (short for "openMSX replay").
The reason for choosing gzip compression is that openMSX already includes support for gzip compression. This means fewer code is needed and no additional library dependencies. Also, it gives a good tradeoff between compression time and final size; for example bzip2 is more compact, but is significantly slower when compressing.
The reason for compressing at all is that the uncompressed size, although manageable on modern PCs, is still big. One replay won't fill up your HD, but a few dozen do eat up free space. Also, openMSX runs on mobile devices (Dingoo A320, Nokia N900) as well, which have much smaller storage which is typically also slower. I don't know if people will do TAS-ing on mobile devices, but recording a walkthrough type of replay should be possible.
The XML is generated from serialized C++ objects, which explains why its structure looks different from what a handcrafted format would look like.
