(shouting)

VIP 5 2019 - To everyone there is a boon, and a time to every rom hack under heaven

this is the place where lps are being talked about. it's important to talk about games being played on the internet.
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Sebby19
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like barf bags to plane passengers with inner ear problems

Post by Sebby19 »

Well the main difference is that M&L was designed with the physical placement of the buttons in mind. Reversing that would trip me up to no end.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like barf bags to plane passengers with inner ear problems

Post by KobaBeach »

hating on powell?

don't you dare.

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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like the compass to a pre-GPS mariner on cloudy nights

Post by FourteenthOrder »

Powell is such a good music thing.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like the compass to a pre-GPS mariner on cloudy nights

Post by KobaBeach »

poison is a normal ditto you nerd

also fun fact red athletic is by carol, you can tell because every bit of asm in it was condensed into one sprite file and also they're not well programmed

raocow wrote:
also your momentum is capped if you press left or right on the d-pad so

you'd only know this if you played the athletic special brutal mario demo or have yoshi's island in recent memory
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like the compass to a pre-GPS mariner on cloudy nights

Post by tangy »

not excited for tomorrow.

hornet hole is kind of a thing

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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like barf bags to plane passengers with inner ear problems

Post by This Eye o' Mine »

Dragon Fogel wrote: 4 years ago The idea behind re-binding isn't that it would somehow cheat the pausing, but rather that in the past (in a different level which he mentions in the video), raocow was struggling with the physical location of the pause button on his controller and had a lot of trouble when he needed to press other buttons shortly after unpausing. So rebinding it would take that awkwardness out of the equation.
Yeah my bad. I remember seeing that video but I must've been thinking of some other game where control screwery like that could actually be bypassed by changing control settings.

So the I Choose You!! level was one of the levels that would crash everytime you tried to play it in the newest version of the hack, specifically the secret exit path. The reason for it is Carol's AddMusic, but not in the way you would normally expect. Get ready for another wall o' text.
So normally when a hack crashes "because of AddMusic tools" it's because music data is uploaded into an area of Audio RAM that is normally reserved for echo data. ZSNES doesn't emulate storage of echo data properly, so it doesn't disturb that region, but a real console will overwrite that region anytime something with echo plays, causing the audio processor to hang when it tries to play music it's expecting to find there, which then crashes the game when it tries to communicate with the APU. This crash had nothing to do with that, as it happened even on ZSNES. What ended up happening is that this AddMusic tool is broken in the way it counts the amount of data it's inserting into the ROM.

The game uploads sound and music data to Audio RAM in chunks. There are two 16-bit values of data (also called 'words', the size of two bytes) at the start of each chunk that say how many bytes to upload and where to upload it to. Once it gets to the end of a chunk, it reads the next word to determine whether it's the end of music data, or whether it should continue uploading. If it finds a value of $0000, that's the end, and it's usually accompanied by another $0500 value (which is only necessary for the first upload to the APU as it tells the booting process where to start code execution; the routine that handles uploading after that just ignores it). otherwise it interprets it as the amount of bytes to upload from there, rinse and repeat.

Another concept is RATS regions. For those who don't know, RATS is the term for protected regions of custom data in hacked ROMs. In order to allow tools to know whether some region of bytes in the ROM has been used by another tool already or not, any well-mannered hacking tool will put a little tag at the start of its data containing information about how much data it has inserted. Tools looking for free space will typically scan the ROM until it finds a sufficiently large region of space not covered by one of these tags (which is also not in the vanilla data, but the location of that is typically known in advance). This way, tools do not trample over each other's data. Make sure not to confuse 'music chunk size tags' with 'RATS size tags', as they're used for entirely different purposes.

But what if a tool screws up the way it counts the amount of data it's inserting when writing the RATS tag? That's exactly what's happened here. This AM tool counts one word too few when calculating the size of its own RATS regions, and as such the final $0000 end marker falls just outside it. At some point during the 1.05 update, some tool inserting new data saw that as free space, and overwrote it with its own data. Thus, it's no longer an end marker, the game sees it as more data to upload, and starts writing unpredicted data to ARAM, almost definitely overwriting large parts of the sound engine. The result is that the APU crashes and the CPU deadlocks while waiting for a response from it anytime it tries to upload that bit of music at a screen transition or level load.

I already noticed that the vestigial $0500 value mentioned before appears two words too early in any music chunks created with this AM tool, and then there's another $0000 word pasted after it where the APU would expect to find one based on the initial (wrong) music chunk size tag. The development process I'm guessing happened (disclaimer that I do not assert that this is what actually happened) is that first the tool author calculated the initial music chunk size tag to include the end tags rather than stopping at them, and wrote the RATS tag calculation at that point. They noticed during testing that the upload process was looking for an end marker past what was first expected, which might've taken a while as free space is typically full of zeroes anyway. Then to fix that, rather than adjusting the music chunk size calculation to not include the end marker, they just put another end marker after it which they forgot to incorporate into the RATS size calculation.

The programming lesson here is to always consider the implications of design changes when writing software (and ideally write it in such a way that later changes have a low chance of having bad side effects in the first place). Given how popular this AM tool was, I'm genuinely surprised not more hacks suffered from this problem, though I could imagine someone who uploaded custom music early into their project without making backups encountered this problem at some point during hack development and either re-uploaded their music, or couldn't find the cause and just gave up. Anyway, fixing the problem in this hack was as simple as just making sure there was an end marker where the APU expected to find one.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like the invention of cardboard to stealthy serpents

Post by Grounder »

KANTOOOOOOOOOOOOOERKRH4HE4UKIRR *dies of foam in the mouth*
Why don't you eat me?

I am perfectly tasty...

AND I'LL STEAL YOUR SOUL! :twisted:

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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like the invention of cardboard to stealthy serpents

Post by Peliptia »

ahhgosh⚟ the pokémon level was adorables⚊like its totally ߳⟪ all ߳⟫ visual charm, but its super duper cute!ꜝ id bet there are entire hacks which focus on switching out mario enemies and stuffs for the pokémon❢

ALSOTHETREEATTHEENDISTHEBESTTHINGEVER〜☽°
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like the invention of cardboard to stealthy serpents

Post by Piesonscreations »

I'm pretty surprised with how much stuff raocow remembers. Then again, i have a pretty bad memory, so anyone remembering most things is rather surprising.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like the invention of cardboard to stealthy serpents

Post by Ashan »

I cannot remember anything from any romhacks other than ASMT and Vip 4.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like an athame to a non-illiterate hacker cornered by team a

Post by Sebby19 »


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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like an athame to a non-illiterate hacker cornered by team a

Post by KobaBeach »

Making the hitboxes take up the entire 32x32 tile like they were some mega mole instead of having them be a bit inwards to more closely cover the actual sprite part of the graphic
like you can make custom hitboxes (you set the origin point in relation to the sprite's spawn point, how much it extends to the right and how much it extends below), im pretty sure sprites with custom hitboxes were already a thing by the time of vip5
and if not, you can just reverse engineer the hitbox routine for the sprites

this is so dumb!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

EDIT: hornet hole's speaker box is a reference to VIP1's 1-1改 (^ω^)
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like an athame to a non-illiterate hacker cornered by team a

Post by tangy »

this thread title is hilarious
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like an athame to a non-illiterate hacker cornered by team a

Post by Zummorr »

Regarding honey's edibility. I'd imagine that there is some straining of commercial honey to separate it from the still edible wax, but honey is edible straight out of the hive. Honey itself is primarily sucrose.

Humans have been eating honey since the dawn of humanity, and humans have raised honey bee hives for over 5000 years iirc.

Regarding which species of insects produce honey. Honey Bees are primarily but not solely responsible for all of human eaten honey. Some species of stingless bee and bumble bee produce honey but the later is small in quanities. All of this honey is produced by the Hymenoptera family Apidae. However honey production is not unique to Apidae.

Brachygastra mellifica, the Mexican Honey Wasp, is a Vespidae wasp that produces significant amounts of honey. It's quite a bulbous little thing ,and it's useful for pollinating Alligator Pears.

I'm pretty sure, I did a similar write up on bees somewhere else on the forums. I've got to do a thing, otherwise I'd go dig it up.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like an athame to a non-illiterate hacker cornered by team a

Post by Ashan »

"Why would I want fire? You can't set fire to a bee."

Tell that to Mega Man 9
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like an athame to a non-illiterate hacker cornered by team a

Post by J. J. W. Mezun »

Donkey Kong Country graphics in SMW rom hacks always look like bootlegs, what with their subtly less-detailed palettes, less-fluid animation, cut-off, &, as seen, wrong hitboxes. Reminds me a bit o’ Super Donkey Kong 99, but without that amazing Super Mario All-Stars: Super Mario Bros. coin heaven remix.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - this is just like one of my japanese animes

Post by Awoo »

I have no idea about Canadian food import thingies, but would it be legal/possible to send raocow some raw honeycomb for the box-thing later this year?


raocow don't read that
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like artificial light to those who like staying up at night

Post by Grounder »

Why not just spinjump off the Eeries in that one reset room instead of trying to coax the Boo Block?

Could have saved so much time.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like artificial light to those who like staying up at night

Post by raocow »

didn't think about it, was in 'use the boo blocks' vision :I
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like artificial light to those who like staying up at night

Post by Piesonscreations »

Did you know? Super Mario Bros. 2 in the USA is actually a game called Doki Doki Panic! :kood: :kood: :kood: :kood: :kood: :kood: :kood: :kood: :kood:
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like lip balm to a high-altitude mountain climber

Post by KobaBeach »

also, yeah, I realised I forgot to read that last culture note, we'll be starting next video with that
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like lip balm to a high-altitude mountain climber

Post by Peliptia »

ahhahahgosh the ⚞ question orb ⃝﹖⚟ jumping was amazing#♡ ♡ its the little things that cause so much trouble⚊ and that makes all the difference⁝⁛⁙ i felt bad for laugh, i knew hat mean replaying the entire level▵ it was just such a comically unfortunate turn of events (≧▽≦)
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like lip balm to a high-altitude mountain climber

Post by Ashan »

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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like lip balm to a high-altitude mountain climber

Post by Crow »

today, raocow was GDQ raocow. he had an unhealthy obsession with orb
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like lip balm to a high-altitude mountain climber

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

Cyril wrote: 4 years ago today, raocow was GDQ raocow. he had an unhealthy obsession with orb
🔮
ORRRRRRRRRRRRRRB
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