Tool Assisted Speedplay on ZX Spectrum?
I wonder if anyone ever thought about adding Tool Assisted Speedplay support in ZX Spectrum emulators?
The idea of TAS is to create input recording (similar to RZX) of beating a game as fast as possible using all the possibilities of the emulators, like slowdown or frame-by-frame modes, save states, etc. which provides the player with incredible reaction, prediction of events, etc. TAS is not about hacking, the game data and code remains completely unchanged (however, the code is often examined in order of searching useful bugs). It is not about gaming skills as well, it is about creating some new art by removing human's limitations. Here is example how it looks like: Super Mario Bros on NES, one of the most optimized TAS movies.
I think it would be cool to see something similar for popular ZX games. To my knowledge, currently there are no emulators which has neeeded features to create TAS movies. The features are input recording, re-recording from save state, frame-by-frame advance.
The idea of TAS is to create input recording (similar to RZX) of beating a game as fast as possible using all the possibilities of the emulators, like slowdown or frame-by-frame modes, save states, etc. which provides the player with incredible reaction, prediction of events, etc. TAS is not about hacking, the game data and code remains completely unchanged (however, the code is often examined in order of searching useful bugs). It is not about gaming skills as well, it is about creating some new art by removing human's limitations. Here is example how it looks like: Super Mario Bros on NES, one of the most optimized TAS movies.
I think it would be cool to see something similar for popular ZX games. To my knowledge, currently there are no emulators which has neeeded features to create TAS movies. The features are input recording, re-recording from save state, frame-by-frame advance.
Post edited by Shiru on
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But fair enough, I suppose there's a sliding scale from the emulator features we've got now to the ultimate RZXing tool, which I guess would be something to let you edit recordings at the level of individual port reads.
But that's exactly what rzx recording does :-o
input recording - yes, it records your input :)
re-recording from save state - rollback
frame-by-frame advance - set emulator to 5% while rzxing and you'll have a lot of time betweeen frames
I'm rather suprised that others discovered at last that you can record keypresses instead of making lossy mp4 movies :)
I do quite a lot of rzx recording on Spectrum but I don't like neither speedruns or compulsive-obsessive striving for perfection.
As for speedruns they skip all the texts and animations I would like to see, use dirty tricks, player doesn't collect things and bonuses and for me all the gameplay looks wrong, not as it was supposed. I prefer to watch a normal game run.
As for the perfection, what perfection? Shortest time, collecting everything, never being hit? They make your recording will take much more time to complete
If somebody would like to try this type of game recording, I'd be curious to see it, but personally I'm not going into it.
I don't care about usual speedruns. TAS is insteresting for me because it is a whole new level of the play - play with the game instead of play the game. It is very cool to see crazy things is a game you thought you know perfectly for many years.
Anyway, I'm not going to discuss is TAS good or bad thing. The thing exists for many years, has international community, and here are hundreds of movies for most of consoles, but very few computers. I'd wish that ZX was among these computers too.
Some more examples:
Mega Man - every Mega Man game has a lot of cool glitches which could be heavily exploited as shortcuts (starts from ~1:00)
Excitebike - in this game a superhuman can achieve super speeds, faster than screen updates
Contra - a superhuman can play for two players at once and beat the bosses in a second
Right-Click the Pause button for more options including frame advance.
The Reset button has option for USR 0 reset too.
My ZX Art Music Page
Carlos Michelis Theme
I always wondered :
Why people devote a lot of their time to create great programs which will have some features, but don't care to devote little time to do a proper documentation for it, so most users won't ever discover these features :roll:
Remind me 1) exactly how much you have paid for Spin 2) why emulator developers get discouraged from continuing with their projects.
because it's boring
because they are writing the program for *their* amusement not yours and they know how all the features work :p
And anyone cares because?
Having an incomplete documentation is not a good thing, period. The rest is self-importance.
Not to mention they only use it themselves anyway. Uh, yeah. No problem indeed. :)
I'll check back in 3 months and see how many new emulators we have...
1)
You know the answer ;-)
Yeah, I know. Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
2)
However stiil I feel that constructive criticism is a good thing.
I probably could even help myself to write a nice, dummy-friendly guide for Spin if the authors don't find it necessary or amusing and I think others would help too.
The authors just never suggested it.
Absolutely. It may be a language barrier, but your original comment didn't come across as constructive. On the other hand, offering to write documentation is constructive :-)
On the other other hand, certain other people describing the lack of documentation as "self-importance" really don't help :-(
What I was actually 'describing' by it though, is the notion of "you pay $0 implying shut up and worship (or else I'm stopping all work on it)". The opposite statement, which is "you release this to the world implying take responsibility (or just keep it to yourself really)" sounds just about as 'positive', don't you think? However, the latter would never arise where there is no former.
In the end, it's all a matter of actually acknowledging the existence of the users of one's product. When this condition is clear, it is no longer a necessity to keep defining definitions for constructive or what have you.
I think the reason that Dunny doesn't work on spin anymore is because he doesn't like any of you very much. And it's not hard to see why, is it?
The fact is, without an active, enthusiastic community (which WoS most definitely is) to share feature requests, report bugs, and generally motivate developers to continue with their work, there'd be little point releasing an emulator publicly.
In other words, it's a two-way dependency - the users being equally as important as the developers. Sure, sometimes people may make silly suggestions or be guilty of failing to fully appreciate the work involved in writing and maintaining a product, or adding a new feature, but I've never seen that done out of malice. If anything it's just down to over-enthusiasm and keen-ness for new toys to play with, or keen-ness to understand how existing toys work.
I don't really know (or want to know) what went on with Dunny and SPIN, but I really hope he decides to return to SPIN development one day. I don't think it's really fair to blame WoS, or the Speccy community generally, though.
If only I had the same level of appreciation and energy from the users of the stuff I write commercially that I get here!
Yep good point Dunny, oops sorry I meant Willy ;)
I am actually quite close to Dunny. He's a relative :-p
Until recently, the only home computer which had emulators with TAS support was PC, and now there is MSX as well (no movies were made yet), which is cool, but none of the games I'd like to try were released on the MSX.
Just because emulator X doesn't have some other advanced tools doesn't mean it doesn't comply.
Frame advance and frame counter is a must. Otherwise you can't record exactly what you want, and can't measure how effective your actions are (thus can't plan).
Sounds like action scripting is pretty much what you want - you plan your keypresses on a frame-by-frame basis. Spin doesn't have any sort of visual editor for this as Dunny didn't get around to it but the scripting works fine and is text based.
All I can found is menu option: Recording/Load action script
I never used it as I don't know how.
How do you create this action script?
are you always this wrong?
Fair enough, time will tell ;)