Dolphin Progress Report: November 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Dolphin Progress Report: November 2014

dolphin-emu.org

98 pointsmikexstudios16 comments

If the idea of speedrunning intrigues you, allow me to present the zelda 64 world record, which stands at 18:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq6pGJbd6Iw

It starts to get weird at about 12:30

It's quite something. The commentary is an insight into a whole world. Not quite as crazy as the some of the other recent console memory hacking stuff but its the constant need for frame-perfect timing that makes it impressive.

i was into listening to the commentary more then i was watching the speedrun. ever speedrun i've seen never has commentary so you don't know what the heck the runner is doing. it was really kewl knowing what the thought process was in pulling these off. Awesome find!

ever speedrun i've seen never has commentary

Search youtube for "AGDQ" or "awesome games done quick". It was a charity speedrun livestream. They have cameras on the people in the room doing the speedrun and talking, the amount they actually talk about the game varies from video to video.

the super metroid 4 way race is good. the game is insanely optimised by now and the commentary is comprehensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmfV8IhsHq0

The next one is actually happening.4-10 Jan 2015, so keep an eye out for it on twitch, great event.

This video[1] did the same for me. I was so confused the first time I saw it I ended up spending the rest of my saturday reading speedrunning forums and watching caps of live speedrunning competitions.

[1]www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYmqJl4MoNI

heh, a somewhat different style of commentary.

The commentary is truly amazing. This is the best speed runing video I've ever seen.

In case folks were wondering, from their wiki: "Dolphin is an open-source Nintendo GameCube, Wii, and Triforce emulator for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (Intel-based)."

And for those wondering what the Triforce is, in this context:

The _Triforce_ is an arcade system board developed jointly by Namco, Sega, and Nintendo, with the first games appearing in 2002. The name "Triforce" is a reference to Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda series of games, and symbolized the three companies' involvement in the project. The system hardware is based on the Nintendo GameCube with several differences, like provisions for add-ons such as Sega's GD-Rom system, NAND memory, and upgradeable RAM modules. As with most arcade systems, each Triforce game has it's own custom peripherals and functions.

https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Triforce

I dont have time to play games these days, but love keeping up on the progress of emulators, the detail here is great.

Especially with Dolphin - I was surprised how gripping those progress reports were. And I like how it feels like you're reading about the latest victories of a bunch of superheroes. Which is a nice way of looking at open source projects.

These are a great read every month.

So, what exactly are the bounding box effects?

I tried looking it up, but couldn't find any information about it. Is the Wii able to do some weird tricks with bounding boxes?

Check out the previous month's update for an explanation of bounding box effects with pictures: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2014/10/31/dolphin-progress-rep...

Yeah. On the GC, games can reset some "bounding box" registers, draw some 3d geometry, and then read out the 2D coordinates of the bounding box of the things drawn. Games like Paper Mario uses it to make a copy of that region and apply various effects to it, and if the region is wrong weird things happen.

There are no such bounding box registers on PC GPUs, so you have to either software transform the coordinates and ignore that your results won't be perfect (some pixels might have been thrown away due to z tests etc and wouldn't be counted in the bbox), or you use some modern shader tricks to simulate it in hardware, which is what the current Dolphin authors have now implemented.

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