That explains it. Videos are downgraded to 30fps after uploading. YT does the same thing for videos under 720p. Avidemux should open most codecs and it's an easy way to check accurate time of your original video. VLC works for this also, but you need to enable "show milliseconds".
Right, I was thinking about Media Player Classic. With MPC you just right click on the video time and select "high precision". You would need to download a plugin to get it to work in VLC.
All that discussion on the first page of this thread, about what emulators should be allowed and what options could be checked, for a run to be accepted had been kind of moot... until now. There didn't seem to be any reason to doubt emulators or settings with the videos posted, but in the last couple of weeks, a new user has posted three runs with unbelievably low times. So much that Ordos 9, for example, doesn't even match what can be timed in the video. We're looking into it, but for the moment have refrained to take any action.
The first thing I'm personally going to do, is write a message to this runner so he can read this thread and provide us with the emulator/settings he's using, so there's the option to confirm why movement of units is so fast and why there's no lag at all. In absence of said verification, his runs will eventually be rejected.
This is the reply I got from the runner:
"I played on an accelerated mednafen, yes, it doesn’t lag at all, unlike the gens (I thought that the timer of the game itself doesn’t lag along with the game)"
From when I played on the real thing, I can say than under heavy slowdown, the internal timer can also be affected. Back then my best time on the Sega Mega Drive was 21-22 minutes, on the emulator I was later able to bring it down to 19-20, with the exact same strategy (basically the same game played in another platform). That's a 10% lag slowdown, on the internal timer. Since I record videos, I've seen that the external clock is even worse, and adds another extra minute or two. You've obviously been able to get rid of all that and more, because I noticed that estructure construction and unit movement was faster. You didn't just get rid of lag.
It would be a good thing if we could replicate your experience, to maybe get rid of the lag while maintaining normal speed. I've also tried mednafen, but I didn't know you could accelerate play rate. Is that trough setting or a hack?
mednafen was originally intended for playing dune PVP, talked with the creator and he said that mednafen increases the power of the SEGA engine in 3 time, in fact this is a banal increase in speed ;( it is much more comfortable to play,but in the field of speedrunning, this is most likely not fair in relation to other runners, except to distribute such a mednafen to everyone, because it is really much more comfortable to play the dune this way
the last stable version is 1.29 would that one be overclocked out of the box? if not, anyone could use it instead of retroach/gens or kega fusion, which are the most widely accepted there's nothing wrong with any given emulator as long as normal speed isn't increased, as for avoiding any lag, that's a more complicated question; if it gets rid of lag completely, then it's not emulating the original hardware 100%, and that's frowned upon (not by me in particular)
As discussed previously, Genesis emulation should be similar to og hardware, lag and all. I believe current emulators should achieve this. Boards need to be kept open to people using actual consoles and it wouldn't be beneficial cluttering this page by separating genesis boards for console and emu runs.
Just for the sake of discussion, do you think anyone will ever post a run played on the original hardware? So far, ALL are emulator runs, including the only one that forgot to mention it, for Ordos 9 (you can see the cursor at the beginning of the video).
Maybe not, but that's beside the point. Console hardware was standardized to certain clock speeds etc., unlike PCs or Amigas. It wouldn't be fair to previous emu or (unlikely?) possible future console runners to start using boosted emu setups. Maybe someone wants to play with even faster emu setup later? So competitive runs should be done with coparable to og hardware emu setup.
Cleaned house. Looking ahead, these are the changes to the rules as far as emulators are concerned.
I would recommend everyone to use Kega Fusion 3.64. It works well with W10 and emulates original hardware without speedups. For better performance between these parameters, I also recommend the settings below. These are just recommendations, BUT before using something different, I'd ask for help first. Anything that looks like it's running faster than it should be, is open for rejection.
You should remove runs played with boosted emu speed from the board. Those were only added because of auto verification being enabled (for several years) and shouldn't have been added to the board in the first place. Rules were not very clear before so Svarschik can submit again when he's ready if he wants to play with recommended settings.
I wanted to give him a chance to come trough, I'm of the opinion that the best mod is the one you don't notice, but OK, done.
The recommendation of a couple of posts above was changed to compulsory use of the mentioned emulator, as reflected in the latest version of the rules 3 months ago. Despite this fact, I've had to reject 6 runs from 3 different runners since.
I don't know if it's normal for the majority of players to ignore the rules, or if it's something particular to this game, but I'd invite prospective players to read the rules before engaging the community.
The default category is MS-DOS which has no overtly obvious specific DOS rules, so its quite easy to make the mistake just pressing "show rules" and seeing the short common rules and thinking thats all there is.
I suggest adding "runs must be run on MS-DOS or official Dosbox" to the DOS ruleset, so new genesis runners get the hint to go looking for the genesis rules instead.
Eino's the MS-DOS expert, so I'll deflect this one in his favor. But good suggestion, as far as I'm concerned.
@0zymandias It's very common for new people on the site to not read rules before posting runs. Obviously they haven't read this thread either.
@rattus128 Added a mention about using official DOSBox in DOS-rules. Might help if people do read at least the default category rules ;)
Regarding the Genesis version, people should pay attention to the wording of the rules. Runs are still being summited where you can't see the whole desktop, taskbar included. That's not windowed mode, properly speaking, because the emulator is run inside another application running full screen instead. It's been 8 months already, grace period is over, I will be rejecting submissions which don't conform to the rules.
While I'm not running the game (yet). I am still interested why you'd need a full desktop capture? From some other games I run it is needed to show the top bar of the windowed mode, showing the program name & specifics. I'd think that to be enough for this case too, so why would you need to see the taskbar?
It was brought up, while discussing the topic, that people with video editing knowledge could doctor a fake video under those circumstances. Given the fact that there are big differences both in lag as well as playing speed among emulators, it's better to make sure that such a process (of faking the emulator) to be made as difficult as possible,
