NES/FC/FDS/Dendy

[sharp geode]

save state

[fierce estuary]

maybe try fresh, it's possible it captured some bad thing

[sharp geode]

alr

[fierce estuary]

there's a code for invicible that makes it fast

ill try it as well

[sharp geode]

do need changed settings in advanced?

[fierce estuary]

not that i'm aware of, but I keep clear on 0 usually

[mint lichen]

I feel like that Witch n Wiz bug report isn't happening. I played it today and it was fine. Issue 364

[fierce estuary]

that's from a fresh game

[hasty trout]

Your clip sounds right to me

[fierce estuary]

yeah save states restore the bad sound

because they captured the old behavior whatever it was

but it shouldnt happen in the future I guess

is this actually broken? https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/issues/400

[hasty trout]

Nope, I play Pac-Man Championship Edition all the time on the core

Just played it yesterday

[fierce estuary]

im gonna close that

[sharp geode]

ok

now it works for me

[fierce estuary]

great 🙂

[mint lichen]

There's one dump of the game that is broken, has the wrong mapper or something, the proper one works

[fierce estuary]

okay I think that is all the open game bugs addressed

minus mapper requests and the like

every test passes, no unexpected behavior from any demos

so, find more bugs for me please

[mint lichen]

Would it be possible to display the mapper somewhere once a game is loaded? I feel like that would be neat, but no idea what would be involved

[fierce estuary]

it's kind of annoying to draw text

maybe I can put it in the menu somewhere

[mint lichen]

Yeah, something in the menu so you could see if you were curious

[sharp geode]

benchmark said 126/128, is this necessary? 😁

[fierce estuary]

if you turn on NES ppu behavior it will pass 15 column

19 should be passing, are you using the latest test core?

[sharp geode]

yea

[fierce estuary]

what are your settings?

something must be impacting that

passes for me consistently

[fierce estuary]

it's a pretty unimportant test all things considered, the 8-bit steins gate will show a single flickering pixel if it's working correctly

[clever scarab]

so am I correct in understanding that you should set the core to NES to pass all 128 tests?

[sharp geode]

famicom ppu behavior will fail test in page 15, but it's not so critical i think

[fierce estuary]

it's actually better to have it fail

otherwise some games will break

it doesnt impact behavior

but yeah to pass the test you have to turn it on

I have no idea why the stale sprites is failing for you

[glacial turtle]

It would be really useful to be able to tell what mapper a rom is from the core, that would be so cool. Especially if it also manages to work for ones not implemented.

[steep yew]

yeah, I believe so

[jade zenith]

i would love to see those added. iirc it's a rather non-standard configuration, but those hacks are so cool, it would be a shame not to support them

[gray plaza]

VRC6 with CHR RAM should be fine? It might not work if CHR banks aren’t initialised properly

[clever scarab]

so the NES setting passes everything but the Famicom one doesn't? HAW HAW HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN

[steep yew]

yeah, I watched a video on them but then someone mentioned they weren't working in mister

[clever scarab]

It's official NES > Famicom

[hasty trout]

which Mega Man ROM hacks?

[steep yew]

more like FamiCANT

[hasty trout]

the Rushjet1 music one for Rockman 2 works and that seems to use VRC6

[gray plaza]

MiSTer can load up oversized VRC6, just tried the MM2 ROM hack with RJ1's music, loads fine and CHR works too

[jade zenith]

huh really? last time i checked, it didn't work, so i'm glad to hear they do now. must've gotten fixed in an update

does the mm1 hack work as well?

i'm not at my mister right now but can check later if no one else can

[gray plaza]

MM1 doesn't

[jade zenith]

damn

wonder why. you'd think it'd be the same mapper config

[gray plaza]

OK, I got it to boot. Header needed to be changed cause it was using an INES header

[jade zenith]

oh sweet!

[gray plaza]

It assumed there was no WRAM I believe

Edit the header in Mesen to NES 2.0 and change the options for WRAM and CHR-RAM to 8KB.

should look like this for MM1

[gray plaza]

I believe this applies for a lot of other mappers too, like I was able to get MMC5 + CHR-RAM working fine for a project

[fierce estuary]

you have to force it to do outlandish things with headers, it wont be inaccurate by default, by design

okay ill give it til tomorrow and then merge the PR

I want to do a release after that so if you have something brewing @gray plaza get it in

[gray plaza]

No weird mappers from me haha

I really don't think there is any more mappers really that are worth adding now, plus I wouldn't want to make timings fail.

[half pasture]

Core is now complete! Close channel!

[granite pivot]

I pretty much found out about it by trying out the game on MiSTer and setting it to Vaus mode (already set up the NES core for mouse as spinner). Was not expecting it work (dpad control is actually pretty good). I get the full range on MiSTer, but not on real hardware. The only paddle that works with it is the Arkanoid II paddle, which can be finnicky with range (though has full range in Arkanoid II). It's also the only game I know of that, as far as I can tell, works with the Arkanoid II paddle, but not the black Arkanoid 1 paddle (which I didn't think was possible).

[gilded idol]

Awesome you discovered that. I'll post a video with examples of the iCode spinner and/or JogCon with Reflex Adapt controlling the game 🙂

[timber lava]

Thank you for the new build and explanation on Doreamon 👍

[calm jay]

mapper 99 before release plz

[ember bone]

Is anyone else having an issue where you save a game, it saves to the SD card, yet when you power the MiSTer on again, it won’t recognize the save. Same with the settings. I see they saved to the microSD, but aren’t used. I have to constantly reconfigure the NES controller and despite me saving my game of Uncharted Waters, for a third time, it keeps telling me that I have no saved game despite the fact that it’s on the MicroSD in the saves folder

It’s driving me crazy now

[steep yew]

is this with the latest core in test builds?

[ember bone]

Yep

Past three of them.

I have auto save on

Every time I need to backup the save, I press the menu button and let it save

[steep yew]

lemme see if I can test it real quick

[ember bone]

Okay

[elfin flume]

I just did a quick test with Zelda 2, which I had no saves in, and it saves just fine in the latest test core, showing up when I boot the game after rebooting the mister

[ember bone]

Did you power it off and power it back on or just reboot?

Because mine was working on reboot too or game change, but as soon as I turned power off and came back later, it wasn’t working

[elfin flume]

first a reboot, just now I shut it off and turned it back on, save still exists.

[fierce estuary]

I didn't touch anything that relates to saving

hmm

test saving with clear ram on

it's possible im clearing the saves?

no

it's working fine as far as I can tell

I just created a new save

[real matrix]

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/issues/430

Does anyone have real hardware and a flashcart hooked up to test this out?

[fierce estuary]

that's a mapper issue

[ember bone]

Trying a couple other cores to see if they have the same issue

[real matrix]

Makes sense. Is it an unofficial mapper?

Unless you're responding to someone else lmao

[fierce estuary]

it's mapper 31

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/INES_Mapper_031

[real matrix]

So it's unofficial

Known issue?

[fierce estuary]

I think there is a bug report for it

[steep yew]

Trying to find a save point in Uncharted Waters

[fierce estuary]

it's a stupidly simple mapper

[real matrix]

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/issues/414

Yeah. I'll close my issue as a dupe

So when loading an NSF, how does that work, because it seems to load it into a player ROM of some sort.

[ember bone]

Press select when you’re in port

Super Metroid MSU-1 save worked fine so far. Powered off the MiSTer for a few minutes to be sure.

So at least I know another core is working as intended

Uncharted Waters has always been a picky game even with flash carts

Even if you try to do save states, you can fuck up the game. Doing the save states on the Everdrive N8 Pro to try and make money gambling is how I managed to see the ending. Plus, the game can error out if it detects too much “memory” being used. It’s really really strict.

I more use it because it was a game me and my stepdad would always play together but it comes in handy as a good test cart

[fierce estuary]

this mapper is jank

I think it was added just for the NSF player and not tested with games

[real matrix]

Do any games even use it? I thought it was just for playing NSFs

[steep yew]

I can't get Unstable Waters' saves to work in the stable core either. So either there is an old bug there, or you can't save in the first city.

Both cores create a save

save states work fine in the new core

[ember bone]

I never tried saving in the first city. Usually I’d do my first save after doing my first round to Bordeaux and back

[steep yew]

i am not nearly good enough at this video game to go to france

[ember bone]

You can tell I know the game like the back of my hand lol

It’s a screen up and two screens to the right

[steep yew]

im pretty sure I found greenland

new core fixes a graphical issue that the stable has in the menu, so that's cool

[elfin flume]

Saves seem to work in the first city if you reset the core, but they are not detected ingame when loading a different game and loading uncharted waters again, or rebooting the mister, despite the file existing

[ember bone]

That’s the problem I had. While it was powered on, it recognized the save if I reset or changed games. After powering off and back on after a while, it wouldn’t

[steep yew]

yeah, and it happens on the current (stable) core, so it's an old issue

[ember bone]

Wonder why with this game

If it’s happening on stable as well, maybe we can catch it this time

[steep yew]

yeah, it's just good information so Kit knows it's not something she touched with this rewrite. it's been there

[ember bone]

These past few NES betas are where I’m finally getting a chance to sit down and play it. Only had this MiSTer Pi about a month and mostly I been making NFC cards so haven’t had a chance to fully sit down sit down yet. Maybe a few minutes here or there. This time, I been sinking hours

Usually just sticking so far to games I had growing up that normally wouldn’t be played. Like Bigfoot, Days of Thunder, Dragon’s Lair, Uncharted Waters, etc

My stepdad was sort of a racing and fantasy nut that also liked weird games (like Dino Riki and Caveman Games)

So when I played the NES, that’s mainly what we had

[pseudo phoenix]

Time for a celebration 🎉

[real matrix]

RMW $2007 Extra Write still fails for me, but I'm using an old version of AccuracyCoin

Not that it passing makes any difference lmao

Latest version passes all tests

Also the PPU reset test passes in Famicom mode as well :P

[heady valve]

I get a grey screen when trying to load Haratyler, a shmup homebrew. It seems to be a problem for everdrives as well?

Does there exist a fix or a workaround?

[timber lava]

it means the mapper is not implemented

https://github.com/100thCoin/AccuracyCoin/commit/7a42089a2a3baa24198e7063d81bf796082ab3a2

[heady valve]

Ah gotcha

[half pasture]

That proves that nobody is actually playing any games on their MiSTers!

People are just trying abscure accuracy tests roms!

[tepid umbra]

I play fire emblem on the core. 🙁

[dry lynx]

It’s a tiny toon adventures core for me

[tepid umbra]

Did you mean a tiny goon adventure core?

[clever scarab]

For the people who don’t know me I’m just kidding. I say lots of silly bullshit like this as a parody of retro gaming culture.

[half pasture]

I shitpost a lot too, so am I entitled to be a mod like you are, right @clever scarab ?

[clever scarab]

I shouldn’t be a mod, this was a mistake lol

[umbral dove]

Adventures of Lolo core all the way (look at the JP releases, there is two disk system games as well as another cartridge game not released in the west called meikyuu no fukkatsu, very English friendly). Good shit if you’re into puzzle games

[fierce estuary]

another day, another accuracycoin test to pass

[clever scarab]

Another day another build to pin. Not even sure if anyone even uses the pins but it makes me feel like I’m useful

[tepid umbra]

You ARE useful! You created pissfingers and introduced us all to gooning!

[blazing oracle]

‎ 🎩

🧿👄🧿 ✨
‎ 🫴

[clever scarab]

what do you need focused on with this test?

[fierce estuary]

nothing really, I guess make sure safestates still work

basically the CPU only knew "reset" and "reset" isnt really the same as "power on"

so I had to add a "power on" thing for cold boots

it's really trivial

but no red squares allowed

cold boots happen when you load a rom

the signal already existed for APU behavior

happily, you dont have to enable nes ppu behavior anymore with the newest version of the test

[clever scarab]

Nooooooo!

[mint lichen]

Well something is wrong with that new build @fierce estuary

[sharp geode]

yep

[tepid umbra]

Yeah the color of the sky is slighty off, right?

[hasty trout]

Omg

That’s an incredible clip

Mario enters The Void

[fierce estuary]

Lol

Oops

I forgot to remove experimental palette corruption

[sharp geode]

perfect

and i just updated test rom

[fierce estuary]

I'll upload a good build when I get home. Don't use that one

[sharp geode]

we have used at own risk

[half pasture]

Please leave that as a toggle

Love it!

[vivid roost]

kitrinx is making kaizo romhacks now?

[half pasture]

Kaizo core

[sharp geode]

can speedrunners pass that?

[blissful prairie]

The world as we know it falling apart

[sharp geode]

just tested benchmark on my AV Fami, and scores 125/128, page 10 fail first 3 steps

[steep yew]

your AV famicon is not accurate - apologies

[sharp geode]

yea, true

[main narwhal]

same on my AV FC; those 3 tests failing is known behavior

[fierce estuary]

here this is the same as the previous one sans palette experiments

[timber lava]

Thank you Kitrinx - Super Mario is working great with the last rbf !

[fierce estuary]

lol

[steep yew]

I much preferred the original japanese version of super mario 1 from the last RBF. I hate that it's dumbed down for americans

[glacial turtle]

Is the sky blue now?

[fierce estuary]

I think it's better if you can really soak in the lovely periwinkle sky color with no distractions

[steep yew]

Boiled down to its essence

and you got to watch it strip away all the layers, so you could understand all the cruft that you don't need

a real statement piece

[fierce estuary]

actually it was deleting the palette colors one at a time

[steep yew]

basically like the ending of hannibal where anthony hopkins is eating ray liota's brain, slice by slice?

oh sorry, spoilers

[blissful prairie]

All say the movie is terrible. I oppose that.

[steep yew]

I actually loved the book. I think they went the coward's way out with the movie

Let clarice and hannibal live happily ever after - who cares

they deserve happiness

[fierce estuary]

they hook up in the book?

[steep yew]

yeah. it's very romatic. he rescues her, drugs her, forces her to eat the dude's brains with him, and then they live happily ever after (not a joke - thats...uh...how the book ends)

I guess jodie foster declined to do the movie after reading that - and then they didn't use it.

[fierce estuary]

I mean

he wouldn't be the worst husband

he's very smart

[steep yew]

an incredible cook

[fierce estuary]

tasteful

not everyone is so caught up on the ethical details of cannibalism

[steep yew]

I like that book a lot. And, in the context of the whole thing, the ending makes more sense than I'm giving it credit for.

My dad and I listened to it in one sitting driving from Denver to Chicago, so there is likely a lot of nostalgia in there too

anyway, deleting the palettes is basically the same thing as marrying hannibal lector is what I'm trying to say

[fierce estuary]

I understand completely

[tepid umbra]

I'd marry a cannibal.

[covert crypt]

But what about the prion diseases

[tepid umbra]

There are governments that advocate eating roadkill, I'd say we all don't have long so make the best out of it.

[ember bone]

Does this new RBF fix the Uncharted Waters save issue or not yet?

This way I know if I should test it or not

[steep yew]

I didn’t get the impression that that code got touched. Might be good to write an issue up for it

[ember bone]

I thought that was the point of putting it here

[elfin flume]

Bug reports on discord can get lost in the ether and forgotten.
The best place would be to file an issue on the repo https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer

[steep yew]

It was good to put it here to check

but yeah, once we verified that it was an issue, unless Kit (or whoever the core dev is) says they are looking at it, it's best to file it so it doesn't get lost

Like I was, near greenland

[cursive sable]

https://tenor.com/view/darth-vader-alter-the-deal-empire-strikes-back-star-wars-gif-15971205

[cursive sable]

I'm so keeping this one as NES_CURSED.RBF

[fierce estuary]

what's wrong with uncensored waters or whatever?

[steep yew]

doesn't recognize saves after a reboot

will recognize them if you reset the core

but a full reboot results in "no saves found" even though the file is still there (and, assumedly, unchanged)

[grizzled tusk]

I'm naming my copy this too. I dream with the circuit bent version of the cores, moving the right analog stick or a mouse cursor to make the games glitch.

[cursive sable]

Though I was only able to get it to mess with Super Mario Bros

[ember bone]

I just put it up

[steep yew]

#1091056042667937944 message 🤞

[fierce estuary]

hey

I need a real hardware favor

[half pasture]

Someone pls send Kit some real hardware

[fierce estuary]

I need someone to run this rom on a real nes frontloader or newer, unmodified with nesrgb or anything

it depends on alignment, so you might have to reset it a few times to get the right alignment, but when you do, the colors should do funky stuff and not just scroll normally

I need a recording of that

maybe @hasty trout or @mint lichen

[real matrix]

If nobody does it by tonight, I'll dig out my NES from the garage. I got an Everdrive N8 in it

[fierce estuary]

people here have been really helpful so far

[mint lichen]

I can do it, gimme a few

[fierce estuary]

thanks

[real matrix]

What rev PPU does the core attempt to replicate?

[fierce estuary]

early model G

[real matrix]

I noticed in SMB1, there isn't that half a scanline of flicker like on my real Rev G PPU

[half pasture]

This core will become a 16bit core soon given the level of quality and accuracy

[real matrix]

I think something NMI related. There's a hack that fixes the behavior

[fierce estuary]

I think it's alignment sensitive

so you probably only get it 25-50% of the time

[real matrix]

Ah. So different PPUs behave differently or what? I get that behavior every time I play SMB1 on hardware

But I only have one NES

[fierce estuary]

so, the CPU runs at masterclock/12 and the ppu runs at masterclock/4. When the system powers up, the alignments aren't always the same between the two

[real matrix]

Oh. They don't use the same physical clock?

[fierce estuary]

depending on which of the 4 alignments you get, it can have different outcomes

they both share a master clock, but the dividers are internal to each chip

so when they start counting differs

depending on just electrical randomness

[real matrix]

Fair enough. Why would it start counting at different times, though? I thought all behavior in a pipeline stems from the clock

[fierce estuary]

because the reset line can fall at slightly different times for analog reasons

[real matrix]

Oh, interesting

[fierce estuary]

or they just power up at different times for the same analog reasons

[real matrix]

Is there a way to replicate that behavior in the core?

[fierce estuary]

yes, and I plan to eventually, but it requires a whole big chunk of work

[real matrix]

Also from what I read, Rev E PPUs don't have that issue. Any reason why, if that's true?

[fierce estuary]

to really get it right the unstable bus when M2 rises and latching behavior of writes have to be properly replicated

I don't know much about revision E, but it's possible they finally synchronized them to only the "good" alignment electrically

one alignment is considered better than the rest, and most consoles get it more often than the others

[real matrix]

For some reason, the Famicom seems to have Rev E PPUs as the most common one. I'll pick up a Famicom one of these days :P

[fierce estuary]

oh E, they have alignment issues

famicoms and nes have some differences how they power up

[real matrix]

Oh. Is it due to the CIC or smth?

[fierce estuary]

no

they just tried to engineer it better with the NES because it came later

afaik nes never had any revision less than G

[real matrix]

I thought super early ones had Rev E IIRC

Like, from the 1985 launch test in NYC

Not 100% sure, though

[fierce estuary]

I suppose it's possible

[real matrix]

https://consolemods.org/wiki/NES:NES_Model_Differences#NES-CPU-01_through_NES-CPU-04_(1985-1987)

Yeah. Early ones used Rev E. Just the vast majority of them used Rev G

Only reason I still use original hardware nowadays is for the native composite output. Hard to replicate

[mint lichen]

I can't get it to do anything other than scroll normally on my regular frontloader, reset a ton of times and it's the same scrolling. Sometimes the top left orange square half disappears but that's it.

[fierce estuary]

😐

this bug is too buggy to emulate

[mint lichen]

Or was I supposed to manual scroll them and get this?

[fierce estuary]

woah, that seems trippy

what did you do to cause that?

[mint lichen]

Just Down on Dpad til it got to the bottom

[fierce estuary]

I think it's supposed to just happen on its own though

[mint lichen]

Immediately after a reset or after a while?

[fierce estuary]

I'm not sure, that's why I need the recording 😭

well im probably going to not add this one, it's just cosmetic and arguably in an unappealing way

if they figure out how it works better I can add it

so where are we, any issues since the last test build? good to go?

thinking of merging all this if there's no further issues

[mint lichen]

I only tried a few games today but it seemed good. Tried a lot of homebrew yesterday and only noticed another accuracy improvement, haha.

[fierce estuary]

k, time to ship it then

[cursive sable]

At this rate the core is going to have an option to simulate aging capacitors or clock resonators, oh wait, that last one is SNES

[dry lynx]

First game I’m gonna try is micro machines

[steep yew]

I'm going to play mario while humming the day the world went away

[dry lynx]

I can’t play Mario because he’s stuck in an observatory in space right now

[granite pivot]

I can't play Donkey Kong because he's playing with rocks.

[cursive sable]

What is this meme?

[half pasture]

Always thought DK was a crack head!

[real matrix]

He becomes Cranky Kong when he doesn't get his rocks

[half pasture]

Cracky Kong when it gets, maybe?

[real matrix]

Is there a way to swap 12.5% and 25% pulse waves to emulate old famiclones?

[hasty river]

is this hidden gem finally playable

[fierce estuary]

never before

[fierce estuary]

nope

why would you want to?

[real matrix]

Nostalgia

[fierce estuary]

it's a dangerous disease

[real matrix]

The famiclone? I had a Super Joy when I was a kid lmao

The infamous one that there was a lawsuit over

[fierce estuary]

I'm sorry to hear that

at least we live in happier times now

[real matrix]

Yeah lmao

[glacial turtle]

What would changing the pulse waves actually do?

[real matrix]

It changes the sound of the audio

Old famiclones were designed that way

[clever scarab]

Why is PAL in black and white

[jade zenith]

color wasn't imported to europe until the 1990s

[grizzled tusk]

I said before, lots of people played many many hours with inverted duty cycle.

Too bad it's resources intensive to mess with it.

[hasty trout]

just tested the newest build and PAL myself, and yeah it's in blank and white

happens via HDMI or SCART

weird

[clever scarab]

@fierce estuary ^

[fierce estuary]

damnit

the best laid plans of mice and men

it's super dumb

wire not_grayscale = ((in_draw_range || (vram_r_ppudata && is_pal_address)) && sys_type == 0) && ~grayscale_bit;

it's that line

typo that makes any system not ntsc grayscale

tee hee

[clever scarab]

Yeah I caught that earlier going through your code, was wondering when you’d catch it.

[fierce estuary]

testing me again, eh robby

[warm galleon]

Robby is so smart

[clever scarab]

thank you!

[vestal blaze]

Would it also be correct for the Dendy mode?

Given that many bootleg games were designed to be run on Famiclones, is it also possible several games were made with the inverted duty cycle in mind?

[warm galleon]

I kinda want faux stereo even though @fierce estuary said she didn't think it sounded good.

[fierce estuary]

why don't add I just add an option for you Screech: No, Yes and you can just turn that on if you want your ears to bleed

[warm galleon]

Debug option, hotplate

[fierce estuary]

no

[warm galleon]

For those dq3 speedrunners

[fierce estuary]

watch me cook

[warm galleon]

Lol

Have different hot plate temperatures simulated as options

[fierce estuary]

don't I have console temperature as an option in 7800?

[warm galleon]

Haha

[fierce estuary]

because atari stuff was so shitty, the temperature changed it's color output

[warm galleon]

Yeah for NES it's just like an option to give it a race condition I guess technically lol

And some people glitch by putting it on ice packs too

[grizzled tusk]

No, the Phantom System is PAL-M (a color system much closer to NTSC in resolution and refresh rate) and its duty cycle is reversed.

[fierce estuary]

building a new thing now with no black and white

[clever scarab]

Can we get jail bars

[fierce estuary]

you can

[clever scarab]

lolol uh oh

[steep yew]

The moral of the story is that people should stop testing PAL

[cursive sable]

I've heard of light bulbs and TVs having warmer colors, but that's just ridiculous

[fierce estuary]

yes I think so

[clever scarab]

I wanted to play Elite!

[tropic belfry]

It's an impressive port.

[ripe shell]

it might sound like bullshit but I think it's the best and most accessible version of Elite

seriously

[granite pivot]

The cat looks like he wants to force people to play that crappy Garfield game instead.

[granite pivot]

It's a reference to Bananza where DK befriends a talking rock

[cursive sable]

I tried to play it and could not even navigate the menus, trying to kludge those controls onto a controller with a d-pad and 4 buttons, only two of which are face buttons seems to have to taken it's toll

[ripe shell]

it's a bit cumbersome but I got used to it, the game starts with navigation computer already on your ship and that's a big factor in enjoying the game and actually landing the ship on stations

[fierce estuary]

this fixes pal

again

[fierce estuary]

no one will know i'm cheating

[hasty trout]

Ooh TAS support, thats awesome!

[fierce estuary]

the problem is it's really hard to find verified scripts

so it ends up not being as good as tool for verifying regressions as I hope

kind of ostentacious

[main narwhal]

still cool to have

[glacial turtle]

Oh that's neat! Is there a collected database/site of all the .tas files somewhere?

Guessing here is the best place

https://tasvideos.org/Games/List?SearchTerms=&System=NES&StartsWith=&Genre=&Group=

[glacial turtle]

I didn't appreciate the format was used on so many different systems

[cursive sable]

Might be a good idea to try out TAS videos that do arbitrary code execution, especially some of those that do more than just use it to jump to the ending but use it just for the fun of showing off by reprogramming the game into flappy bird or something like that. I would imagine that's probably going to be really trying on the accuracy, depending on the game and exploit.

Hmm, seems files on that site are in all sorts of different formats

[gray plaza]

Ive got a BK2 file that might be worth testing, I’ll convert it to R08 later

[sharp geode]

oh, tas player feature on mister sounds nice

[warm galleon]

try this one out 😛

[idle patrol]

thank you for this improvment !

I used the test rom in my Twin Famicom and 5 tests are not passed. As I read this test is based in a model -G cpu and ppu. Anyway. I was doing some tests with mister one side, famicom the other side and they never desync. This is great.

[fierce estuary]

a lot of those tas videos require very speciific memory configuration or some kind of weird frame timing that only emulators have

or arent verified on real hardware

[clever scarab]

So they’re emulator speed runs?

[fierce estuary]

tool assisted speedrun is what it stands for

[steep yew]

Have you never watched the TAS block at a GDQ, Robby? It’s pretty wild what they do

[clever scarab]

oh my bad i mean they’re strictly in the emulation camp right. Like you can’t do a TAS and assume it’s possible on a real hardware if you could replicate it

[amber willow]

Here's what I had on my mister, I haven't tested any of these recently

[fierce estuary]

you can actually

they have a little device that plugs into the controller ports

it reads the polls

[clever scarab]

Ah wow

[fierce estuary]

anyway that feature is not fully implemented

[mint lichen]

I think there's a list somewhere of ones that are Console verified, pretty sure there was more than this https://tasvideos.org/ConsoleVerification/Tests

Oh here https://tasvideos.org/Movies-verified-obs-nes-fds

[clever scarab]

I’m ok with that

[dry lynx]

As long as you’re okay with it, sorg

[clever scarab]

I think if there’s time and availability then including features for speed runners is nice but shouldn’t be a priority. They already have tools for that, just keep using that

[mint lichen]

This is not a tool for speedrunners

[amber willow]

I've made one of those devices and played the same file back on emulator, on real nes, and mister though snac and the load tas feature Kitrinx was showing off.

[clever scarab]

that’s cool

[gray plaza]

@fierce estuary how are FDS movie files handled? Since I know the BIOS has a patch to load disk on button press

[clever scarab]

listen, when i spout hot takes I can’t be held back by silly things like “reading comprehension” and “facts”

[dry lynx]

Like a true American

[solemn sedge]

Was this something you designed or an opensource project somewhere, by chance?

[austere violet]

Is this flashing line in the boss select of Mega man 3 on real hardware too?

The line is flashing

Above shadow man

[steep yew]

I'm pretty sure that's real hardware, but it's good to check

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Jz8x4-HyD-Y&t=209s

[austere violet]

Yeah sorry if this has been checked before

[austere violet]

Perfectly corrupted on real hardware too 👍🏻

[clever scarab]

I was going to say I remembered that from original hardware

[austere violet]

Nothing escapes Kitrinx ❤️

[clever scarab]

she’s not Kan’trinx after all

I’m really trying to force that joke lol

[fierce estuary]

it's fine, that particular glitchy line hasn't been

[grand jewel]

When I had the cartridge back in Christmas 1990, I thought my copy was faulty.

But my friends had the same issue from another store.

[amber willow]

I think I started with some open source project using an arduino with a sd card reader(it had a shift register like a nes controller and the nes controller plug), but eventually modified that to add buttons and a screen. The TASBOT used some other microcontroller

[dry lynx]

Glitched lines, dots and garbage. Getting this stuff nailed is incredibly impressive

[main narwhal]

will you keep the TAS support in the main release? I mean it can't hurt

[clever scarab]

It’s important because people grew up with emulators and have no concept of how the original hardware handled it

[main narwhal]

unless you're concerned about clueless people complaining about unverified runs

[main narwhal]

I love FPGAs pulling off these kinds of glitchy behavior because it gives things a feel of the real hardware

[fierce estuary]

I want to add it as a feature, yes, but I need to give it more memory a couple options, and an on-screen indicator to keep the speedrunners from raging

[main narwhal]

ah yes, you mentioned about the indicator. In fact it could even be nice to keep it as an option for regular play for streamers

[warm galleon]

They aren't always strictly in the emulator camp, there are ones that are ran on a real system using an arduino as well.

[clever scarab]

Using an arduono sounds like CHEATING!

[warm galleon]

technically, in every sense, yes - https://youtu.be/PYX8iDqCDAY?si=M0Mi785oZGDGtKLw

the 2nd TAS they use a few minutes in is compatible with the mister core, i tested it this morning

[clever scarab]

YOU ARE ALL CHEATERS!!!!

[idle patrol]

It is normal.

[clever scarab]

oh sorry I meant COOL, silly autocorrect

[idle patrol]

These things happen too in the japanese version of SMB3 in the core. All these things are the true feeling.

[fierce estuary]

the flickering and glitches should be fairly pixel perfect 😛

stuff like PAUSE flashing here in Isolated Warrior are pretty involved

[mellow dawn]

As mentioned in the original issue I assumed it was a mistake with a missing check for submpper 15. That is the issue. It is a one line fix

[fierce estuary]

do you want to do a quick PR? or I guess I can if you really dont want to

[mellow dawn]

I was hoping to find why the nsf player is corrupted but am still looking at that.

[gray plaza]

this uses sub-frame inputs on controllers 1 and 2 if that's of any use testing

[fierce estuary]

tas stuff needs a setting for initial frames and filter types

so a lot will be broken til I add those

right now it just has a crude frame filter

also the initial ram for a lot is intended to be 00 00 00 00 FF FF FF FF pattern

you can do this by disabling ram clearing and using this rom for now

you run that rom to init the ram then run the game with the tas script already loaded

but ill add it natively

that rom is what they use on real consoles, apparently the SRAM can hold it's value fairly well for a couple of seconds after power off

don't worry about it too much though, I just wanted to test that PAL was okay now and that feature was already half implemented so I left it

[glacial turtle]

Do FDS tas files work as well?

[sharp geode]

should be

at least on emulators

[cursive sable]

To be fair it can also be a useful tool for testing/debugging. If a TAS runs on real hardware but does not on the core you can try to figure out why.

[mellow dawn]

Ok. Got a workaround for the nsfplayer

[cursive sable]

I still remember that one where they ran a TAS on two NES systems and a SNES system to execute code that basically turned the two NES systems into an audio input and SNES into a video input, then used them to play videos of TASes of other games like Mario64 or Portal by sending video data to the SNES and audio data to each NES through the controller ports.... wonder if you can replicate that with three misters

[timber lava]

For information, the save is working on Daikoukai Jidai (japanese version of Uncharted Waters)

[steep yew]

through reboots?

of the whole mister I mean

[timber lava]

After the whole reboot it doesn't work ... so same issue ...

[steep yew]

it's very weird

[timber lava]

i saw on MMC5 mapper page there is this line
"Uncharted Waters requires emulating bankswitching of PRG-RAM: it writes to PRG-RAM at one CPU address and expects to be able to read the same data back via a different CPU address."

[steep yew]

aha, nice catch

wonder if that is it (he says, pretending he understands more than half the words in that sentence)

[timber lava]

yes it is vague

[clever scarab]

Yeah as per usual my hot takes are wrong lol

[fierce estuary]

I'm sure it is this

Can you add it on the GitHub issue?

[clever scarab]

Damn, you kick ass

[half pasture]

@timber lava is pretty much like Winamp: he really whips the llamas ass! 🦙

[mellow dawn]

I thought that was implemented. I think Sim City used it as well.

Incidentally Sim City does a lot of unusual things with the ppu

Probably worth a regression test

[steep yew]

It doesn’t work in the stable, but I haven’t gone back farther (further?) than that

[timber lava]

ok ! done

[timber lava]

Sim CIty uses also mapper MMC5?

[mellow dawn]

yes

[fierce estuary]

I did test with simcity throughout and it caught some regressions, but afaik it's working correctly as of now

[mellow dawn]

Quick test looks ok to me. Just getting the title screen working the first time 6 years ago took days. The in game tool selections took a while too. Both look fine with latest.

[timber lava]

and SimCity save also with a cold reboot we can use the save so maybe Uncharted Waters uses something differently

SimCity is very impressive on NES never tried it before

[mellow dawn]

If uncharted Waters is writing to save RAM through banking outside of 0x6000-7fff then it won't trigger the need to save

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/blob/master/rtl/nes.v#L652

[topaz moon]

assign save_written = (mapper_flags[7:0] == 8'h14) ? (prg_linaddr[21:18] == 4'b1111 && prg_write && prg_allow) : (prg_addr[15:13] == 3'b011 && prg_write) | bram_write;

[mellow dawn]

Adding it to the mapper 20 exception on that line might fix it.

assign save_written = ((mapper_flags[7:0] == 8'h14) || (mapper_flags[7:0] == 8'h05)) ? (prg_linaddr[21:18] == 4'b1111 && prg_write && prg_allow) : (prg_addr[15:13] == 3'b011 && prg_write) | bram_write;

[hasty trout]

Made a build of the latest changes that adds the mapper 31 fix and nsf player fix by GreyRogue, and also the potential Uncharted Waters fix

[swift temple]

Dang, you peeps have been pumpin on these NES updates. Every day I'm slamming my SD card in and out 😂

[tepid umbra]

You can just use ftp

[hasty trout]

Hmm sadly I don't think this fixes Uncharted Waters, just tried it and my save still disappeared after rebooting the MiSTer

[swift temple]

True 😂

[timber lava]

Thank you MP2E for the build and GreyRogue for the proposition
I confirmed I have the same behavior for Daikoukai Jidai.

I tried also Load Backup Ram but still the same

[mellow dawn]

Is it creating the save file? How big is it?

[timber lava]

the save is created.
same size as SimCity

[mellow dawn]

Uncharted Waters has two 8KB ram chips. Only one is battery backed. Maybe it is saving the wrong one https://nescartdb.com/profile/view/1052/uncharted-waters

Could try limiting to 16kb and/or inverting the bank bit https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/blob/master/rtl/mappers/MMC5.sv#L601

[topaz moon]

assign prg_aout = {prgsel[7] ? {2'b00, prgsel[6:0]} : {6'b11_1100, prgsel[2:0]}, prg_ain[12:0]};    // 8kB banks

[mellow dawn]

assign prg_aout = {prgsel[7] ? {2'b00, prgsel[6:0]} : {8'b11_1100_00, prgsel[0]}, prg_ain[12:0]};

or

assign prg_aout = {prgsel[7] ? {2'b00, prgsel[6:0]} : {6'b11_1100_00, !prgsel[0]}, prg_ain[12:0]};

If either of those work, a more generic change would be needed for other games.

[lone gust]

@fierce estuary I'm super out of touch. Does this rework include the PPU/CPU syncing we discussed a while ago?

[hasty trout]

thanks! building new cores to test now

[fierce estuary]

unfortunately no, but it's on my list

that's the one thing from my refactor that didn't make it in because of the sheer chance of error, so I wanted to break it up

[hasty trout]

Unfortunately, both prg_aout changes seem to have broken the game. When you take control of your character, character spawns out of bounds and has glitched graphics. When I try to save, it just hangs

[fierce estuary]

just the way I remember it

your glitch is not as cool as my mario vanishing colors glitch

it's sort of cool and a little sad that now even real consoles with an everdrive or nesrgb aren't nessesarily accurate enough to use to check real hardware behavior to check the core

[hasty trout]

I agree! I had always just assumed that RGB mods were giving us exactly the right pixels out of the PPU, and now the MiSTer shows minor things that RGB mods can’t even do

[fierce estuary]

this got all the way to the point where it tried to reset the console, but r08 format doesnt support that 😭

[warm galleon]

what's the size limit on the tas files?

i have an itsy bitsy 7,262 KB dragon warrior TAS file that isn't working for some reason and i'm pretty sure it's because it's 7,262 KB

[glacial turtle]

How long does that take to play through?

[warm galleon]

like... 16 minutes i think if it's the same one

it might be doing resets but it's an r08 file so i'm confused

a boy and his blob gets very confused

[echo night]

New core works great for showing all the overscan area. Thank you!!!! 🙏🏼

I noticed some games have a missing pixel at the top right. Has anyone noticed this as well? On real hardware? Here is a screenshot from Super Mario’s Bros. 2

[warm galleon]

ninja gaiden is similarly very confused

probably uses sub-frame inputs as well

gradius is one of those very fun ones that because there is kind of a fixed time for most of each level they just go full wanker

[glacial turtle]

What folder do the tas files live in?

[warm galleon]

i just put em in the games folder like roms in their own folder

i have the same set that greyrogue posted above, it's from the many years ago kitrinx first unveiled this

and then i added some from a github repo i found, not sure if they work

that's where i got the solar jetman one though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fy8CHV98u8

https://github.com/alyosha-tas/NES_replay_files

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x6UiLnAMeU

the gradius one is just insane lmao

[undone willow]

Coincidentally was just going to enquire about this, with overscan set to everything noticed it on mario bros 3 and ninja gaiden 2 in the same place.

[fierce estuary]

I rather like it

[warm galleon]

it's there in top gun as well

the world's greatest game

[fierce estuary]

that looks like roughly scanline 0, pixel 245ish?

I can't see why anything would happen at that pixel at all

[warm galleon]

woah, it randomly went away when i reset the game

hrm

power on reset thingy maybe

[fierce estuary]

schenanigans!

holy crap this metroid tas

[warm galleon]

yeah just started it, the like simultaneous left and right shots lol

[undone willow]

Appears to be the pixel just before where the borders would be cropped with the "normal" overscan setting.

[fierce estuary]

so the last pixel of the first scanline?

[undone willow]

Last pixel I guess of what you would call the active area?

And yes it's on the first scanline.

[amber willow]

I remember being very impressed with the metroid ones, think it was the first time I saw the door glitching. That's what you're talking about right?

[fierce estuary]

yes

it got all the way to the end

[amber willow]

a long time ago the metroid ones would fail, are they working now. aw you already answered 🙁

good job on whatever you or someone else fixed 🙂

[amber willow]

nice, iirc samus would run into the spiky thing before the first door on the one I tried before. Like maybe it's starting position could have been determined by RNG using some value in ram, or could have just been a bad tas, not sure.

And running into the spiky thing messed the run up

[fierce estuary]

it relies on the bizhawk/fceux memory pattern

which is 00 00 00 00 FF FF FF FF

[cursive sable]

@warm galleon Have you tried any TAS files that do code execution bugs to add or change things with the game? Curious if those work

[warm galleon]

No clue. Not very knowledgeable about the specifics of these files.

[mint lichen]

There might be some ACE (arbitrary code execution) runs in that lot you posted. The most well known are Mario 3, Mega Man 1, Final Fantasy, Kirby, could check those. Battletoads also has a 55 sec one that's looks to be in there, GEG (game end glitch)

[half pasture]

Disabled vertical crop and set overscan to Vertical Overscan and it’s really the last top right pixel that is missing

[mellow dawn]

That corner shaving is as much of a CRT filter that Kitrinx is willing to implement.

And it caused her physical pain to do it.

[austere violet]

She was like ”alright, alright! Stop crying sheesh! There, are you happy now?” 😂

[fierce estuary]

im sure it probably has something to do with the uneven frames

actually it's not consistent

smb1 doesnt show it

crystalis also doesnt

maybe this is a thing a few games do?

[mellow dawn]

Slightly messed it up. This looks like it works. https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/pull/432/commits/e54719cf88237d75e4224a2ca9a737095926287c

[blissful prairie]

Whoa, at the moment it's like you fix all the bugs that accumulated for years in a rad "coding spree" of just 2 weeks.

Would be nice if you could squeeze that in before having an official release.

[fierce estuary]

a lot of the remaining ones are snac stuff that im not even sure is real, mapper requests, or just feature requests

[clever scarab]

Can you support that one mapper that uses a modern day processor to make crazy shit that wasn’t possible with the original NES

[fierce estuary]

yes

but I won't

[grizzled tusk]

But how can we play Doom on the NES? 🤣

[clever scarab]

But my cycle accurate nostalgia

[fierce estuary]

has nobody done this?

[livid leaf]

Kind of, but it involved using a Raspberry Pi as a co-processor, so I don't think that should count.

[grizzled tusk]

It was a joke, but someone kinda did.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzVN9kIUNxw
The Raspberry did all the work, like a Super Game Boy.

[grizzled tusk]

And my reverse duty cycle nostalgia.

[cursive sable]

I was thnking more ones that don't just skip to the ending, but do things like give you new powers, or basically write an entirely different game in memory, or such. There is a SMB1 ACE TAS that after a few seconds of normal gameplay makes the NES play Bad Apple, IIRC it was made by the guy who made those recent NES accuracy tests, but I coulden't get it to work properly in Bizhawk even though it was made for it. Coulden't get it to work right in his own emulator either.

[cursive sable]

Isn't it just doom that does something like this?

[clever scarab]

I was talking about that one wacky RPG

[gray plaza]

What version of BizHawk were you using? Older versions fail to emulate Open Bus accurately, which that TAS uses

[cursive sable]

I don't remember what I was using, but I tried updating to the latest as of yesterday and... I keep getting LUA errors now when I try to run a TAS file

[tropic belfry]

Talking about emulator behaviour accuracy. i guess mappers isn't included in the equation. they're not part of the console... well, it's a single circuit when a cartridge is connected, but you have to draw a line.

[gray plaza]

Is this for the script to convert to R08?

[main narwhal]

you're thinking too small

with the power of FPGA

[cursive sable]

Technically you have to draw a lot of lines, and transistors too

[main narwhal]

make a GPU for the Linux core that runs through the SNES

[cursive sable]

No, I was just loading a bizhawk format TAS by dragging and dropping, it was workiung in the previous version. Well, "working" in that it dind't crash, but the TAS file didn't play properly at a certai point

[clever scarab]

🤯

[livid leaf]

Imagine attaching a RTX 5090 GPU to the MiSTer.

You can see every drop of sweat when you play CluClu Land

[cursive sable]

Ironically, you would be able to use it to heavily simulate a CRT over HDMI

Isn't there some new shader that emulates even the dot crawl or something like that, but needs an absurdly powerful GPU?

[clever scarab]

I read that as “stimulate” lol

[cursive sable]

No, that was just some very specific games

[main narwhal]

its not that much different than having a MIDI core to play with consoles' sound chips, except with PPU and other graphics chips 🤣

but you might as well make it a separate core at that point...

[blissful prairie]

Sorg merged the mapper 31 fixes. Exciting

[tropic belfry]

nosefart mapper?

[clever scarab]

wat lol

[tropic belfry]

Nosefart. The original NSF player. (At least I think it's the first)

NoSeFart

[clever scarab]

@fierce estuary do you do any work on this core? Sorg is doing all the updates it seems.

LOL OK for people who think I’m be g serious, it’s just a joke because he does the nerves so it says his name

Merges

[tropic belfry]

came out in 1998

[glacial turtle]

Hopefully Sorg can add tas support, he has been on fire recently

[mellow dawn]

That has the Uncharted Waters save fix too

[steep yew]

nice!

@ember bone can you check uncharted waters with the latest unstable and see if it's fixed? if so, you can close the github ticket as well 🙂

[fierce estuary]

god that super mario bros 3 pixel is haunting me worse than those three assholes that come around and harass me about the future every christmas

[cursive sable]

Wait, all three are about the future?

[fierce estuary]

I don't know I always tune them out

[cursive sable]

🤣

[fierce estuary]

everyone wants to argue about something. I just had someone tell me foam wasn't a food, and I insisted that bread was a foam, and was a food.

[cursive sable]

It's like people who argue what is and isn't a sandwich

I mean, tehnically bottled water is a sandwich

[half pasture]

bread is a foam? wtflol

[steep yew]

Does that make a hotdog a float?

[covert crypt]

Don't be telling me a tomato is a fruit next

[fierce estuary]

how is bread not a foam?

it's air bubbles

styrofoam and similar things are considered foam

foams can be solids

bread is a foam

[austere violet]

that makes sense lol

[swift temple]

How can you bite down on something when your bottom jaw is actually biting upwards?

[grizzled tusk]

It is foamy, but saying it is a foam is going too far.

[covert crypt]

Thanks, I'm now looking up the scientific definition of what foam is

[austere violet]

the videos posted earlier about Crystalis made me curious on the game. Have never played it, the snippets looked really cool

[cursive sable]

A CPU is just a rock that we tricked into thinking

[covert crypt]

Bread is a solid foam (colloid) according to me skimming the top results on google

[grizzled tusk]

It's a nice game, went quite far but didn't finished in the past, started playing again on Mister recently.

[ember bone]

Gotta give that a try later today

[pseudo phoenix]

So what's the deal with a missing pixel? That's quite odd. A bit of overscan would mask it but I'm intrigued now

[undone willow]

I don't know if it's of any help but the pixel on this screen on Ninja Gaiden 2 at the start of the game doesn't stay solid but changes colour as the text comes onto screen.

[fierce estuary]

I think it is an errant sprite pixel

[undone willow]

Having a little walk about!

[cursive sable]

So many misbehaving pixels on the NES

[fierce estuary]

OKAY so the reason that pixel doesn't draw is because in_visible_range_and_rendering only includes lines 0-239, not pre-rendering, and when it's disabled, the in_range flag is forced to false invalidating all loaded out sprites

pixel fixed, I think

[pseudo phoenix]

Doesn't make sense to me yet. The pixel that's missing is on a line being displayed. Can you dumb it down a bit?

[half pasture]

So the pixel is also missing from real hardware?

[fierce estuary]

sprite evaluation basically tells the sprite shifters that all sprites evaluated on the pre-render scanline are bogus, and since sprites are loaded 1 scanline before they are shown, this means all sprite data on line 0 is ignored and invisible

[dry lynx]

Kit fixed it, so I assume not

[fierce estuary]

every stray pixel is a rabbit hole

[half pasture]

So the core is not accurate anymore?

[dry lynx]

The core is perfect

[pseudo phoenix]

Okay the pre render scan line (-1) is meant to be invisible so it uses the time (1/60 or 1/50) in the display cycle to do 'stuff' (shifter stuff). So there was a bug in that pre render time frame.

[half pasture]

It was perfect already before hyper accuracy was implemented

[pseudo phoenix]

That's all I got haha

[dry lynx]

Yep, but Kit has higher standards than perfection

[undone willow]

Looks good on the games I and others mentioned, thank you!

[steep yew]

🎶🎶🎶 that's why every cowbow sings the same sad song 🎶🎶🎶

[fierce estuary]

please give that some solid testing

[main narwhal]

there is this thing called Mousse that literally means foam. the chocolate one is great as dessert

[grand jewel]

With Pac-Man (USA) (Namco), I can now see part of the Pac-Man sprite in the far left corner.

If I remove the overscan part, we could see an orange line of 1px.

[undone willow]

It's there on real hardware capture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6M-u1bBQjs https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ka8_b8lZvY0

[grand jewel]

Thanks for the confirmation.

[hasty trout]

Good catch!

That’s interesting

[steep yew]

Looks different here. Maybe that’s normal too.

[grand jewel]

Depends of the overscan option selected.

[steep yew]

on analog?

oh you're right

weeeeeeird

[ember bone]

So far so good. Saved the game first time, turned the unit off for a few minutes and back on, save was still there. Saved a second time about a half hour later, left it for an hour while I cooked dinner, turned it back on after that, save will still working. So I think we’re good on that front. Right now, just came back from my first Santo Domingo trip of the game and all seems well.

[ember bone]

I think that’s on legit hardware as well. I remember that.

[fierce estuary]

almost no tv's except PVM's will see the top and bottom overscan

that's why 224 lines is considered "normal"

you're just seeing the bottom line of the wedge

[ripe shell]

I don't know how eye-rolly this is but Metroid's ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHER F crashes the game consistently on recent core

I remember a while ago doing it and it went a bit beyond the dark screen

[fierce estuary]

what is that?

[supple jasper]

Depends on which rom version you are using

[supple jasper]

Some glitchy password thing people figured out years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9LwD9680u0

This looks like a hardware capture to me. Seems like the correct behavior.

[ripe shell]

for the record, this password also crashes Nintendo's official emulators (I personally crashed both 3DS and Switch 1's NSO app)

okay, in the case of latter it was quitting to the NSO game library while politely stating "unknown error has occured"

[ripe shell]

No-Intro Headered

will try all of them later

[fierce estuary]

I think I need some proof that that has different outcomes on a real system

since it relies on mapper behavior (this is an MMC1 related glitch) it has to be a real cart

[supple jasper]

I thought there were two revisions? I'll look. I thought there was a PRG0 and PRG1 in goodroms

[ripe shell]

m.r. only has listing for US, PAL and Virtual Console equivalents

[supple jasper]

I am wrong. There are known bad dumps of PRG0 which probably let you see more of the game after entering glitched password.

[ripe shell]

reference for various software emulators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRrNmY5wZZI

I've never heard of Famtasia, this is new to me

it gets more wonderful later on

[supple jasper]

this is not worth being concerned about

[ripe shell]

yeah the current behavior is objectively correct

[fierce estuary]

it hits a STP instruction

it should stop

I think it's correct behavior to crash

[cursive sable]

Dosen't it actually lock up the entire 3DS?

[ripe shell]

Pre 2016 firmware, yeah

After that it errors out

[blissful prairie]

@fierce estuary I guess that your current TODO list is pretty empty now, the PPU rewrite/refactor was long in the planning. Mapper 99 support and TAS are possible targets in the future. But are there any tasks left, where an increase in accuracy could be made?

[half pasture]

Kit sits and wait for a new failing accuracy test rom to appear

[surreal karma]

I gave the NES core (updated unstable) a go last night...............WTF? looks so much better! 2A03Puritans one example. Used to look like a right jargled mess (graphics glitched to hell) Now when I put it on last night............cor! Can actually see it now

[blissful prairie]

Well, that was a special problem of that game (more correctly: of the mapper implementation) and is not the result of the general accuracy gains.

[idle patrol]

to see these artifacts, neogeo transitions and pal artifacts, sega megadrive ram dots... all this is true feeling.

[fierce estuary]

I want to implement variable cpu/ppu alignments

[pseudo phoenix]

Why was that again? I believe there were good and no so good combo's

[fierce estuary]

yes, there's very little value to the alternate alignments, except to speedrunners

[idle patrol]

what it means ?

[fierce estuary]

for most people, slightly different glitchy pixels

for speedrunners, different RNG patterns and lag frames

[half pasture]

Can speedrunners really see a scanline being drawn by a CRT?

Weirdos!

[austere violet]

@fierce estuary Its probably expected as I dont understand the pixel thing you fixed, but the corrupted pixels in Mega Man 3 boss select screen are still there. So still accurate

[main narwhal]

its probably more obvious in RNG behavior during gameplay

[ripe shell]

That's not something you can ever fix with any sort of emulation

Only if you decompile and port the game

I forgot what it was but the game was rushed with Capcom devs employing hacks and that line from the boundaries of the menu screen keeps bleeding into the stage select

And I don't think it was related to the other pixel thing

[austere violet]

I didnt think either but thats why I commented on it

[fierce estuary]

it only impacts line 0

[pseudo phoenix]

If does differ for PAL NTSC. PAL has eight NTSC 4 possible CPU/PPU alignments. Disclaimer I'm not that good at math. So right now a fixed one is used?

[fierce estuary]

PAL has no alignment

it constantly shifts alignments

it's horrible, and right now PAL is not really implemented great, but variable alignments would fix that

[calm jay]

is it related to this "issue"?
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/issues/209

[fierce estuary]

yes

[tepid umbra]

I died twice in fire emblem today. Must be something wrong with the core, I'm an RPG Adonis and don't die k thx bye.

[fierce estuary]

https://tenor.com/view/smg4-smg4skill-issue-skill-issue-smg4mario-smg4skill-gif-26104493

[pseudo phoenix]

I got the same number but blargg nesdev has a way better explanation ', there is one CPU clock every 16 master clocks. Therefore, VBL can begin at 16 different positions within a CPU clock. VBL occurs every 312341 PPU clocks. There are 5 master clocks in a PPU clock, so VBL occurs every 312341*5=531960 master clocks. This is a multiple of 8, but not 16, so VBL's position within a CPU clock will alternate between two points, each a half CPU clock apart. For a given power/reset, it will never fall on anything other than these two points in a CPU cycle. Since there are 16 points available, 16/2=8 possible states it could power/reset into'

But maybe there's an error somewhere

Got a request for a smb 2 JP skill wizard with an real Famicom. On world d-4 where the hammer bro is on the pipe. Can you wind assist glitch through the pipe by hitting back 🔙🔙🔙 ? I've seen it done but no dice for me.

[fierce estuary]

I can't think of a reason it wouldn't work

[pseudo phoenix]

Could llapi core be a reason?

I'll try the vanilla too but I'm frustrated now 😆

[fierce estuary]

I have no idea if that's up to date or anything

[fierce estuary]

is there any way to get the first line of pacman on real hardware capture?

like the very first line

I have this issue

there is some debate over whether that orange dot on the first line should be there or not on the real hardware

but it's very hard to get a real hardware capture with all the overscan

[vague sigil]

Oops thats namco pacman. I'll try tengen too

[fierce estuary]

hmmmm

I cant tell if line 0 is there or not

[vague sigil]

I see it now after messing with the scaling/cropping some more.

It seems to disappear and reappear as the game cycles through the attract screen

[fierce estuary]

holy shit

orange dot of accuracy pride

thank you so much for that @vague sigil

[vague sigil]

No problem

[fierce estuary]

that orange dot actually is a rare situation, and it proves that sprites can be on line 0

the game loads 00 FF FF FF as the first sprite erroniously on line 239

the 00 is in range of scanline 0 as a y coordinate, and FF points off into memory space where an orange thing lives

FF as an X coord is dot 255

so you get an orange dot on line 0 at dot 255

[half pasture]

This core is FFreakin accurate!

Is there a way to check for the missing pixel on SMB3 on real hardware using the same approach used for the 🍊 ?

Or is it confirmed it was an issue on the core?

[fierce estuary]

okay last one here, just make sure I didn't break anything horrible

so that orange dot is very special

it's a new discovery that fiskbit and I made

the other thing is this

this is testing the way that scanline corrupts there, and it's really hard to have it look perfect

it has to do with the behavior of disabling rendering mid-scanline

[grizzled tusk]

This core is awes00me!

[fierce estuary]

im not afraid to say that it's the most accurate nes emulator there is, right now

[hasty trout]

Just caught up, amazing work 😄

[fierce estuary]

I can't speak for every mapper but the cpu, apu, and ppu are really stellar

[steep yew]

What have you done

[fierce estuary]

[fierce estuary]

anyone have any more bugs, pixels that aren't there that should be or vice versa, or other behavior that doesn't match the original?

[clever scarab]

hooray! you're awesome!

[steep yew]

Ridiculous accomplishment

[tepid umbra]

Woah, good job Kit! Real good job!

[steep yew]

I will wait for 100th coin to update their video.

[fierce estuary]

lol

[tepid umbra]

The NES core and the MiSTer in general brings so much joy to my bleak life. Thank you so much for that.

[steep yew]

But you are the star of your village

[tepid umbra]

Not since the mister pi gave them running water. Now they're all about "hygiene" and have no time for stinky old me.

[steep yew]

Ungrateful

[echo night]

Grats on such a rad core!! 🔥

[main narwhal]

it's really an amazing job. I know a lot of work went into it, but you made it look easy

[glacial turtle]

Kitrinx fast running out of things to implement. Only a matter of time lads until there is nothing else for her to do and we can kill rabbits by blowing into an old PC microphone. Core endgame. 🙂

[urban meadow]

Gotta add obscure modern mappers for weird games like that RPG that doesn't look like an NES game and has a stupid amount of animation. I forget what it's called.

I'm joking of course. I would be surprised if that ever worked on the core.

[dry lynx]

🏆

[dry lynx]

Back to the Atari mines

[glacial pecan]

I never want people to question mega drive cram dot crawl ever again.

[half pasture]

Who would think that this post would start a new era of perfection for the NES core?

@slow mulch don’t you dare challenging Kit again! 😂

[slow mulch]

I was watching the video and then I ran to discord to see if anyone else had posted it 🙈

[half pasture]

Good luck finding new videos like that it seems

[slow mulch]

It was the spark that started this revolution and I still don't even know what a lot of this stuff means. Lol

[half pasture]

Core is beyond perfection now! That’s everything we need to know!

[slow mulch]

At least it seems like it was fun for Kitrinx.

🤣

[keen pasture]

I didn't even have the time to check the core yet, but reading about the development has been more fun than 99% of the NES library. Thanks Kitrinx!

[gray plaza]

Testing out the new core Kitrinx provided, can't seem to get R08 files to play back at all (probably something I am doing wrong), and I just noticed making a savestate or loading one changes my settings for overscan and ram initialisation

[fierce estuary]

ill check this

im not getting that

[gray plaza]

also should ask if this input file works, i tried it with no success. used frame and polling (with and without cooldown) along with all possible offsets

[fierce estuary]

tas stuff isnt really ready for prime time

[gray plaza]

ah gotcha, no worries

[fierce estuary]

some of them dont work at all, some are too big (I think 260ish kb is the largest that will fit atm) some need specific versions of a game, some need to be toggled between "Polling" and "Polling w/Cooldown (frame)" and some need 0 or 1 blank frames

offset

however that one seems to work fine

method polling, offset 1

memory bizhawk

[clever scarab]

man, I ain't one to judge but Pepsi isn't a healthy beverage

[cursive sable]

Former Dawn, I actually do hope it would work someday. I think they are releasing the details of their mapper? It's not supposed to be the equivalent of some ARM cpu that the game just runs on

[cursive sable]

One of the devs of Sonic 3D blast, Sonic R, and a few other games had written homebrew back in the day to take advantage of the cram dots to display images with thousands of colors on the screen

[gray plaza]

weird, i can't seem to get it to work

[glacial turtle]

What is limiting the size? Is it amount of free ram on the core/DE-10 Nano?

[cursive sable]

There was also a recent NES demoscene rom that called out Former Dawn as wasteful, since the whole point of the demo was that it didn't use a mapper XD

[glacial pecan]

Surely that coould be streamed from hps after poc stage

[clever scarab]

why would it be wasteful? Genuine question

[fierce estuary]

is that game actually out? it looked like the kind of thing that was going to just be in development for like 8 years til they lost interest and it fizzled out

[cursive sable]

I think it was just them having a playful jab at nes games that are impressive by using complicated mappers

[cursive sable]

Not yet, last big update they posted on their Kickstarter was a month ago so dosen't seem like it has fizzled out, at least not yet. Yeah, I meant if the game does actually come out someday then I would love if it would be possible to support it.

[fierce estuary]

I wouldn't count on it

unless you think it's reasonable for a nes emulator to have to contain a modern ARM chip

more complex than the entire rest of the core

[cursive sable]

I thought the mapper was not just an ARM chip?

[fierce estuary]

I have no idea, it keeps evolving but I thought it played mp3's and stuff

[cursive sable]

That was some other game I think

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/NES_2.0_Mapper_451 <--- This one plays MP3s, and apparently there are two versions of that game, one that has MP3 support and one that does not

[fierce estuary]

I hate fake mappers

I feel like if you can't make your game on vrc6 or mmc5 then you are fucking up

[cursive sable]

Seems like a big "feature" of that mapper 451 is just simply copy protection

Well, I can understand the need for mappers that support flash for new games since where are you going to get new stock MMC5s these days

[fierce estuary]

on an fpga

[cursive sable]

Speaking of, they claimed that the NES RGB mods that rely on a FPGA or a CPLD(whatever that is) will apparently screw up displaying the game, but there are other RGB mods that will work.

[tepid umbra]

Fpga? Never heard of it.

[cursive sable]

Just what is it doing to break RGB mods?

There was some more information about their mapper in the latest update but it didn't have much details

[fierce estuary]

I like the sound of this game less every time it comes up

they should have just made this game for SNES instead

[cursive sable]

Now now, just because it can support the SNES controller and mouse does not mean...

[jade zenith]

the most recent trailer does make the game look and sound more like a snes title honestly

[tepid umbra]

So why make games for old consoles of you're not planning to stay in those limitations and make it as compatible with the hardware/emulators as possible?

[mint lichen]

The whole thing is just a big contradiction. They want to say everything can be done on NES, but it's using a ridiculous custom mapper and is using a CDs worth of storage, so you are actually limiting who can play it on NES. They are fully making it on PC too, so why not just make a PC game? It's all really bizarre and uninteresting to me, as a huge NES homebrew follower, seems like they worked backwards from what they wanted. They keep announcing new features so I'd be surprised if it comes out within a couple years, or at all.

[tepid umbra]

You could probably play crysis on nes of you put the whole pc in the cartridge. Guess the only limiting factor would be how much power the nes can supply to the cartridge slot? But then you could just be a sphincter and just make the "cartridge" use an extra outlet.

[jade zenith]

i remember a video from a few years ago of a guy who got doom "running" on nes, but it was just playing the game on an rpi and piping the video output through the nes

[fierce estuary]

fwiw https://tasvideos.org/Movies-verified-obs-nes-fds

[fierce estuary]

I feel exactly the same

[dry lynx]

I’d be pretty annoyed if I was a core dev and every time a shitty piece of homebrew came out, everyone asked why the core didn’t support it

Same thing happened with the MD and perineum

[fierce estuary]

it is very annoying

people keep adding new crappy mappers rather than just using established ones and also trying to change existing ones to do dumb things

"lets just make mmc3 support 8 megabyte roms"

[dry lynx]

Developer equivalent of thinking you’re special

[fierce estuary]

so now we're on mapper number 600 and something

the vast majority are minor revisions of existing mappers

most of them for games nobody will ever play

5 mappers covers something like 88% of the library

[steep yew]

it’s always xkcd 927

[granite pivot]

The US/EU version of estique uses an odd mapper to switch between the two MMC3 roms and doesn't even work correctly half the time.

[dry lynx]

Lemme guess… Standards?

[cursive sable]

Well, I can't comment on it myself, but the dev claims that the mapper is designed to have been technically feasible to produce around 1994 or so, it's not (at least they claim) basically just tossing a super powered ARM CPU on a cart and running the game off that.

Really, that's why I'm even showing any interest. If it turns out it really is just going the Doom route then I would lose all interest

Also for the record I have been trying to mess with the TAS files on here, hit or miss which ones work but I know the TAS feature is still just a test. https://github.com/alyosha-tas/NES_replay_files

[main narwhal]

or PC Engine...

[fierce estuary]

im not really sure I have tas implemented correctly yet

so it might be desyncing because I implemented the feature wrong

[cursive sable]

I assumed that most would have problems since the feature is still unfinished, just wanted to see what would play. So far most either desync early or don't play at all.

Managed to get the SMB Max Score and Solar Jetman ones to play fully

[fierce estuary]

several play fully for me

you can weed out any that are larger than about 250kb

they wont work

[cursive sable]

Am I using the feature wrong? Load the rom then load the r08 file right? Or are there other steps?

[covert crypt]

Sorry to swing this in the direction of Sega (again), but this is more an FPGA emulation question in general. The current Mega Drive core is a "wire by wire" replication of the original hardware which makes it super accurate (afaik). Based on my current understanding, the NES core isn't the same deal but it's also super accurate. I guess the question is how important is the wire by wire replication when it comes to accuracy?

Is it a "more than one way to skin a cat" deal?

[hasty trout]

There actually is a wire by wire core for Famicom now and I asked Kitrinx about it on GitHub back when it released.

This is her response(which I agree with now!):

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/issues/337#issuecomment-2263041410

[covert crypt]

That got pretty techy pretty quick but my understanding is that it can be accurate without needing to replicate all the unnecessary stuff?

[hasty trout]

Basically we would lose dejitter, ability to pause the core, save states, the simulation of ram decay, extra sprites and maybe more plus the code would be very difficult to work on

And at this point, I don’t know that we could even point to any tangible improvements

The current core is already absurdly accurate

It’s probably useful to simulate and compare but not so much as a direct port for users

[covert crypt]

Hmm, I wonder if that would cause issues for the Mega Drive core in the future

I.e. it fails accuracy tests

[hasty trout]

I do think that the old Genesis core shouldn’t have been shelved. The MegaDrive core is amazing but the Genesis one is much easier to work on and realistically, not that far from being perfect

I think it just needs the bus arbitration fixed

[covert crypt]

Yeah I noticed that it doesn't do the border thing in the Overdrive2 demo

I've also noticed some issues with CRAM dots not being accurate.

[hasty trout]

On the MegaDrive core?

[covert crypt]

Genesis core

[hasty trout]

Ah, huh

That’s good to know

[covert crypt]

Megadrive core is fine with the CRAM dots and border.

But back to NES, I've really been enjoying using the core in conjunction with Evercade playlists.

Good to know the core can run Bee 52

[fierce estuary]

the difference is the old megadrive core did have a lot of accuracy problems, because the bus arbitration was not modeled well and nobody was acctively working on improving it

but I think the new code is so hard to work with and so hard to synthesize that basically development on the core is frozen because of this

the other problem with a wire-for-wire nes core would be that more than half the code in the core is it's mappers, not the system

[covert crypt]

Thanks for the explanation! I understand some of it 🤣

Kind of a shame about the old and new Megadrive cores tbh.

Not that the end user is going to notice an awful lot but it's kind of a shame that the new core is so complex that it's hard to work on.

My understanding is that most (if not all) mister core development is done for free, so I'd prefer that developers enjoyed working on the cores

[fierce estuary]

it's not really complex, it's not human readable

it's like trying to edit a program after it's already been compiled

all those things are stuff the compiler would do under the hood if the code was written properly, but it's implementing them directly instead, which makes it just an unworkable pile of wires

[dry lynx]

How many of the cores are wire-by-wire/netlist based? Is it just Mega Drive and… Neo Geo?

And Jaguar before it got cleaned up?

[fierce estuary]

I think so. a couple of chunks of atari 2600 are written that way but not much

jaguar

jaguar is still very much a netlist

[dry lynx]

Thanks for clarifying

[fierce estuary]

sort of a special one though because it was a generated netlist

it was based on some old data format found on a discarded atari drive

generated into verilog, so they were able to add clock enables programattically

[dry lynx]

Wasn’t ao486 generated somehow too? I seem to remember someone mentioning some old Java code or something

(Java that did the generation)

[dry lynx]

That’s really cool 😄

[fierce estuary]

ao486 I think was somehow converted from the source code for Bocks

it's confusing to me

[covert crypt]

This has all been very interesting. I heard a lot of good stuff about the Mega Drive core being incredible due to it being made out of beheaded chips but it seems like there are a lot of downsides to that too.

[fierce estuary]

i'd really be sad if someone tried to throw a netlist NES in there, because you'd lose a lot of cool stuff

[covert crypt]

And if the NES core can be this accurate without being wire for wire...

[fierce estuary]

and it wouldnt really be better

[dry lynx]

The NES core is absolutely incredible

[fierce estuary]

im really happy with it right now

[hasty trout]

Yeah the NES core is in an amazing state! I haven’t found any issues and I’ve tested a lot the past week or so

[dry lynx]

Do you play it much? 😅

[hasty trout]

There weren’t many issues before the recent changes anyway of course, it’s been good for years

[steep yew]

she beat accuracy coin

[dry lynx]

Can’t argue with that

[tepid umbra]

The perfect core for perfect rpgs.

[glacial pecan]

does it have speedup?

[tepid umbra]

Dunno I never speed up.

[dry lynx]

It doesn’t need it

[tepid umbra]

I know there are people who want to speed everything up but for me it just ruins the atmosphere and the vibes.

[dry lynx]

RPGs are slow games that deserve to be savoured

[ember bone]

Just tried the Uncharted Waters save on the latest beta (10-10) and it loads again just fine. So this can be closed on that end.

[jade zenith]

i love the nes core as it is, and the improvements as of late only solidify that. i don't think we need a new ppu implementation, especially if it meant losing a lot of cool features we have now

i love the old genesis core too, and still prefer to use it over the newer mega drive one. i hope to see it come back into active development sometime

[cursive sable]

From my understanding it's just easy to do wire-by-wire since you're basically just kludging the original chip wiring into a FPGA, but it's not at all ideal because it's not made for a FPGA. You can still have just as accurate if not better with a core designed to run on a FPGA, you don't need wire-by-wire to do that. Also on top of all the other issues mentioned, it takes a large chunk of the FPGA to do. IIRC I recall it mentioned that it takes up nearly the entirety of the FPGA, pretty nuts when it takes up as much if not maybe even al ittle more of the FPGA than the PSX core. This also means that it's too big to add a 32X or CD to it so the SegaCD and 32X cores are still using the old Genesis core because of this.

[blissful prairie]

Well, wire-by-wire is just the ultimate preservation goal. Being as close as possible. Maybe the Sega CD core can be made to play standard Mega Drive games as well? That could keep it being developed. Just indirectly.

Jotego had once a post that explained why netlists are a pain to work with. But even he ended up using itforbhis Sega System 18 core.

One the other hand that core is one that he is still battling with.