Sonic romhacks playing themselves to completion

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notaz
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Joined: Mon Feb 04, 2008 11:58 pm
Location: Lithuania

Sonic romhacks playing themselves to completion

Post by notaz » Tue Dec 02, 2014 1:33 am

These are currently fastest Sonic TASes (tool-assisted speedruns) hacked into the ROMs themselves and resynced to play on real hardware. Usually to play a TAS on real hardware, some sort of device is needed to be connected to controller port(s) to feed the inputs, with this any console with a flashcart or any emulator can be used instead.

Note that the TASes (and hence the ROMs) are made to be run on 60Hz mode.
http://notaz.gp2x.de/md/rel/tashacks/

Curious fact is that all emulators I tried fail at this miserably and desync after first boss fight. This is a real problem for TAS community, because unlike for SNES, they don't have any emulator to make a TAS that would play on real hardware. Hopefully some "accuracy" emulator author now will have more motivation to handle things like Z80 68k bus accesses and at least some approximation of RAM/ROM refresh cycles.

Verifying TASes in general is a problem on MD because of seemingly inconsistent state the console boots in. I'm not sure what the real cause is, I suspect it has something to do RAM/ROM refresh cycles that were discussed in some threads here. So because of this:
- s1tashack occasionally desyncs in Scrap Brain 1
- s2tashack occasionally desyncs in Chemical Plant 2, Mystic Cave 2 or Wing Fortress
So the problems show up (if they do) much later than on emulators.

For me the success rate of movie playing to completion is >50%, so if it desyncs, power cycle and try again. I've only tested this on VA6 MD, would be great to get test reports from other hardware.

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