Yes! Finally some Pac Tom updates! Thank you.
I agree that a strict run through country borders with more than three countries indeed seems difficult, and would probably require more than a marathon distance. If you cheat by considering Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republica Srpska as separate countries rather than a single federated country, then those two and Croatia and Montenegro is probably doable in a single run. But take a passport that is valid for at least 90 days after the trip, and please do your own research before you try this.
Or you could try to relax the rules by running a few kilometers in each of four countries the same day, but traveling on a vehicle (such as a bus, train, ship, bicycle, unibycle) in between the runs once. In that case, it would probably be cleanest to only cross borders while running. |
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So happy to have made that list :) |
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Here via Zoe Quinn's "10 Best Games of 2014" list. This was delightful and broke my brain a little. |
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tom, i can't stop listening to your tunes! i've begun jamming to them in ableton and it doesn't look like there's any end in sight!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNsqN-eyHjc
i plan to keep jamming and incrementally coming up with more complex arrangements!
you're the best! |
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Oh! I wonder if you’d like Opus Magnum? Not anything like any of the other games being discussed here but it really seems like something special that your brain might latch strongly onto. |
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Predicting the PPU is not that hard, but I don't have that many spare cycles to do it. The main challenges are:
- Address reads are noisy, but each address only tells you a little about where rendering is on the screen (nametable/attribute reads are nice and deterministic, but don't tell you the scanline; pattern table reads depend on the tile returned by the nametable, but do include low-order bits of the scanline).
- The PPU does some irregular stuff during "hblank" to read sprites and to prep the next scanline (I don't handle this and I think it's the main reason the left column of the screen is kinda messed up)
- You want each code path to be similar in length, to reduce timing jitter
Ultimately what I did here was pretty simple, but it's also delicate wrt timing, and went through several iterations (some were fancier and worked worse).
For sound: I need to watch this tasbot video since several people have mentioned it! I think making sound is actually pretty straightforward; for me it was just a matter of running out of time (for the project before my talks) and time (within a frame to do significant computation). |
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Is it possible to recompile the binaries as to use the AVX instruction set (Intel Processors) (I am guessing that this could maybe improve performance, although I must be wrong...) [Or perhaps something less advanced? SSE4.1??? I don't know...
I spent about 6 hours trying to recompile it in many different ways but the mess of cross-compilation and mingw64+cygwin was just too much for me to get around. Not even Ubuntu and a VM did the trick...
(Errors with protobuf, problems with windows libraries and etc...)
Also, is it possible to use VS to compile it? (or anything that doesn't require too many fiddling with bizarre compilation methods?) |
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This is a great project.
What I don't understand though is what makes the addresses the PPU reads so hard to predict on your side? Doesn't it basically read the attributes and tiles all in the same deterministic sequence in all frames? I mean, perhaps the scrolling can nudge the sequence around a bit, but I still don't understand why it matters so much that it's difficult for the reverse emulator to read the addresses from the bus.
Also, as for the sound, could you reuse some parts of the Tasbot project demonstrated on AGDQ 2017? In that one, they also produced sound on unmodified NES by feeding it data from a fast computer. You'll still have to figure out how to generate the CPU input, but perhaps you can use their software to figure out what the CPU should tell to the sound chip. |
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Re:metroid art, I thought it looked okay but yeah pixel art would have been way better. I imagine there's some edict from Nintendo that all 3DS games must support the (fairly lame and pointless) stereoscopic 3D feature. Ah well.
For other PS4 games, Detroit seems cool (I enjoyed some of Quantic Dream's other games like Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain) though the social commentary side of it seems pretty tone deaf so I'm a little hesitant to play it. Bloodborne is an absolute must if you like souls games, it's one of my favorite games of all time. Until Dawn and Uncharted 4 are PS4 exclusive and both are really solid. There's also some more not-exclusive-but-more-at-home-on-console type games like Nier: Automata (haven't played this one yet but I've heard it's amazing) and Metal Gear Solid V, which I loved. |
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Sorry, it's my fault. I should have warned you earlier. |
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13534. Tom 7 (108.32.43.250) –
01 Jun 2018 22:47:38
[ ARST ARSW ]
Anon1: The subtitles are not accurate enough for the effect I was trying to get, and more importantly, not aligned to the frames on which the words are spoken.
Anon2: I was unaware of the lore surrounding this scene when I transcribed it. I remember struggling with that word for a while, and it did occur to me that maybe he was saying "Carrie!" but I transcribed it as "Hey" since that sounded much more reasonable to me and I think it matches the audio about as well. Hamill assert that he was saying "There she..." |
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Yes, that was pretty inexcusable! Was thinking about it, but also procrastinating it, all week.
fet: Yes, loved La-Mulana! Would be very happy to play another game in that vein!
Adhesion: I conisdered Samus Returns, but the art just looks so bad to me, so lazy! Why can't they have some lovely pixel art?? I've had H: ZD recommended by a few people, so I might try that one, but I'm a little reluctant to add another console. Are there other can't-miss PS4 games? Detroit: Become Human? |
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Damn, you'll have to backdate an entry by several hours again now. |
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13531. Anonymous (98.163.207.154) –
31 May 2018 13:24:39
[ ARST ARSW ]
Sad to see you didn't include Luke mistakenly saying "Carrie". I figured it was because you were using the subtitles, but you said you were typing the phrases yourself... |
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Let me Google that for me; apparently you played it three years ago! |
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Have you played La-Mulana? That seems up your alley. |
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Ahh I wanted to try using about 20+ computers with the project to boost timings at the cost of a heavy electric bill hahah for time. Scopefun still works fine, tricky to encode the end result but it works.
As for utils.o I am 98% sure it failed with "not found" I asked around and weirdly enough I cant get a valid answer no matter where I checked. Other than that as-is the program still works just fine with the binaries, using a super modern Intel 7800 gives about 10 inputs in a 6 to 40 second range! On a single computer of course.
Ill give compiling another good attempt in another hour or so. Cheers! |
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Games-wise, I just finished Metroid: Samus Returns which was pretty solid, about what you would expect from a 2D metroid game. Not quite on the level of Super Metroid, but what is I suppose. I've also been playing a bunch of Horizon: Zero Dawn (also quite good and fairly similar to Breath of the Wild) and slowly grinding through a 100% run of the Final Fantasy XII remaster. |
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Oh, I bet that using zopflipng or pngcrush on the controller graphics (I did this for my whole repository) made it so they can't be opened by stb_image. I think I got some reports about this one. Anyway, scopefun is not worth end-users using... just load up the movies in FCEUX.
Compiling is not going to be easy. I recommend just using the binaries unless you want to make modifications. (These do have network support, at least localhost.) Not sure what "utils" is -- util.o? netutil.o? |
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And I should have known that too, because you said it in the 2017-09-30 entry. |
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Alas, I already played through that one! I did really like it, though. |
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> Any new games to recommend?
Well, I heard rumors to the effect that *The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild* is a pretty good game. Some gamers even called it the best game ever. |
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Hey Tom7! Been a long fan of this project since it came out in 2013ish. Hope you keep at it, I still enjoy playing with learnfun and enjoy its interesting quirks to this day even!
When compiling I couldn't get it to complete in hopes to get the network portions of the program up and running. I also would like make a small side-note, I noticed the two controller images were updated (smaller size... maybe alpha removed?) causing scopefun not to play nice with them... luckily the older ones still work fine. Anyways im not a programmer by any means but this did get me super interested into getting into it, wanted to say thanks for putting so much work and effort into something for everyone to enjoy!
Anyways fails to compile at utils.o missing |
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