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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the traffic killed my website (I apoligize, it looks like my backend cache may have been misconfigured).

The Google cache is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:minimax...

It's impressive, but would the same input timings work on a real SNES, or does it depend on emulator inaccuracies?

There's a SNES9X movie downloadable from [1] which should theoretically automate the timings, if you have both SNES9X and the ROM.

There's also a video there that apparently shows the timings on a real TV.

[1] http://tasvideos.org/1945M.html

Safe to assume it is a faithful emulation.

edit: Because that's the expectation of the scene in which this video has made waves.

Far from it. Many emulators over the years have had small but important quirks, and although they generally don't affect normal gameplay they _may_ affect this sort of thing, after all this is depending on the precise behaviour of the PRNG and how many times it has been called.

True, the best way to tell without real hardware is to playback the input on bsnes [1] (in accurate emulation mode) and see what happens.

[1] The name of bsnes recently changed, but I forget to what.

There are techniques out there for running TAS input files against real hardware for most of the common platforms. Some of the TASes on tasvideos.org are specifically flagged as "console verified" [1], indicating that someone's confirmed that they don't depend on emulator quirks.

[1]: http://tasvideos.org/ConsoleVerifiedMovies.html

Thank you, that's just the sort of thing I was curious to look at.

bsnes is now distributed with / renamed to a project called "higan", which is a multi-system emulator. See:

http://byuu.org/higan/

Most emulators are not accurate. This makes some game's behavior quite unexpected. Here is an article describing the issues and how so much processing power has to be devoted to achieve full rendering

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

Wow. The people hyping whole brain emulation should take note.

They have, but note the corollary to 'perfect emulation takes huge amounts of computing power': imperfect emulation can often be done cheaply.

The question for WBE is whether brains are the very rare SNES game which must be perfectly emulated to work at all... or one of the others. The success of machine learning stuff like deep belief networks, while using a fraction of the brain's computing power and minimal biological plausibility, suggests human brains aren't very special snowflakes.

I don't know much about RAM corruption, but at 2:10 in the video Mario loses Yoshi then magically brings him back. Is this video stitched in some way?

I used to be infatuated/obsessed with the Mario series. But right now I don't recall if it was possible to call Yoshi back like this.

Any clarification?

You can't. That's another glitch. (listen to the sound effects)

That's explained in one of the threads linked: "I spawned two Yoshi's by hitting the block with Mario and the p-switch at the same time. I jumped on one Yoshi, got the p-switch in his mouth and let him die, so the second - invisible - Yoshi becomes visible and have a null sprite in his mouth."

A lot of tool-assisted speedruns are verified on a real console: http://tasvideos.org/Movies-Verified.html

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