Joined: 6/20/2023
Posts: 5
Location: Morrisville, NC, USA
For PS2 TASing, we have to use a PS2 emulator, right?
So what I'm asking is: do you prefer your emulator prioritize speed, or accuracy?
Like, do you want your emulator to be accurate but at the expense of it being slow as hell, or at like 60fps but at the expense of it not being as accurate as it should be?
Are you asking as an emulator developer? I think the priority would be reliability, as PCSX2 has TAS tools but is unstable with regards to syncing. Past that I don't know.
Joined: 6/20/2023
Posts: 5
Location: Morrisville, NC, USA
Hmm, so in other words, accuracy to the original console, huh.
So are you alright with an emulator that runs at an abysmal 10FPS in exchange for it being one of the most accurate emulators of a console, esp considering that other consoles don't even come as close to this emulator in terms of accuracy?
I wasn't getting at accuracy to console, unless that is the cause of the current issues. PCSX2 is listed here as "Preliminary reports indicate instability with sync requiring multiple movie files to create a final product." Issues such as this prevent it from being acceptable for the site.
If this speed vs. accuracy is a question that needs to be answered to implement better TASing tools, then the answer is probably a bit of both. TASes aren't made at full speed so being able to play at a high framerate isn't massively important. The accuracy should be enough that it's not introducing new glitches or something of the sort.
Well, I think more experienced people may give a wider feedback on this regard, but from my point of view, the priorities should be in the following order:
1. Moderate emulation accuracy - have approximate emulation regarding games' graphics, sound and logic. In short, have most games playable, completable and going by the flow how a real PS2 game works, without all those crazy glitches which can skip half the game which cannot be done on a real PS2.
2. TAS movie playback stability, so a person would "almost never" have cases of movie desyncs, so he would have to be redo everything again. TASing is a very time-consuming process. Desyncs spoil this =(
3. Tolerable speed while maintaining points 1 and 2.
4. High emulation accuracy
If you'll have an emulator being 99.9% accurate to the real PS2, this will be a revolution, since even Dolphin cannot achieve it (at least, in terms of TAS verification on the real console).
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
The thing we want above all else is sync stability. Accuracy and speed are seconded and overall independent compared to sync stability, as sync stability is largely a question of having proper savestates.
Most likely, that's indeed can be lack of interest. End users usually don't know what is the percentage point, below which a game is considered "inaccurate", so they end up sending good feedback and developers, accordingly, don't see big demand towards accuracy improvement.
What's regarding developers, sure they know the accuracy situation better, but at some point, they don't consider further time investments reasonable to push emulation accuracy further. I see 2 obstacles here:
- the difficulty - developers know what the problem is, but it may be complex and require a lot of time coding and testing,
- the uncertainty - developers doesn't know what the problem is, so they end up re-reading available documentations for 101th time and doing micro-adjustments to the complicated architecture to see if it improves accuracy and not ruins anything else.
Sorry for bla-bla-blaing
P.S: I agree with CasualPokePlayer
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6441
Location: The land down under.
Just for the sake of pointing out. The TAS features were actually redone recently during the massive overhaul that it had as of November 2022 (for TASing improvements).
It's improved comparatively in the past but it still has teething problems.
Looking at the Pull Requests it looks like it's about to have another major update if it all works out (but still with teething problems).
TASing is getting addressed by the team which is great... but in my opinion PCSX2 video dumping is poor as it's dumping at a single resolution (711x486, with Active Area) instead of multi-resolutions as the system operates (open the PCSX2 tab if you're curious).
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.