Hi all,

some weeks ago I was running this game on my Amiga Emulator (WiUAE), after beating it in a decent time I was comparing it with the runs submitted at this site. Well even if I dont utilize the short warps by killing myself, my time is faster then the current WR. The biggest difference is in the Level transitions which are way faster in my run. We are not sure but this seems to be the case that I am using a A1200 to run this game and thats why it is so fast. Is there a general basic setup we should use to play this game? Or is my run legit? You can check it out here:

Btw: I am not able yet to get my version of the game to run on a A500 to test this, lets see if this is really the reason.

You are probably running the game with either turbo mode floppy emulation or you are running a version of game that uses WHDLoad which basically removes all loading times. The current WR time is using normal floppy disk emulation.

I would guess that it is WHDLoad, because it requires Kickstart 2.0, which would explain why you can not run your version of the game on an Amiga 500, which only has Kickstart 1.3.

WHDLoad should work on an Amiga 500+, which has Kickstart 2.0 and the same 68000 processor as the normal Amiga 500. Using WHDLoad on an Amiga 1200 with the faster 68020 processor could also reduce the loading time, because the time needed to copy the floppy content in RAM would be shorter. But that should only make a small different compared to actual floppy speed.

I'm not sure how to handle this. The Amiga is basically a PC and there is no fixed speed. There are different CPU speeds available and for games that run from harddisk it would also matter how fast the harddisk is. For actual hardware that would be a problem, but as long as all runs are done on emulator it should not be a problem to have the same settings for everyone. I would recommend that you just try to get an ADF disk image to run the game. That should not be too hard to find. Otherwise runs would have to be retimed to remove the loading times.

Hi,

thanks for this awesome answer :)

Yes thats right I switched my Floppy-Drive Speed to Turbo (makes sense in hindsight :) ) I've used an ADF-File, Kick 1.3 is also available. Maybe I was just screwing something up while changing my Settings to an A500 at the time I was testing this ...who knows (will try it again).

Cant you just define in the Rules the Basic-Setup? Or we change to IGT (but who wants to (re)count all of this^^).

So to sum this up: Basic A500 with Discdrive-Speed = 100% ?

Bye

Yes, also I'm not a moderator, I would say the most basic setup is the best to compare times for now and even if someone will do a run on actual hardware a standard Amiga 500 is probably the most common system people will have.

If you play with loading times you will notice that you can only press the button to advance to the next level after loading has finished, if you mash to early it sometimes doesn't work, so having the right timing is relevant for the overall time and removing loading time is not as easy as it sounds.

Hi,

alright then good suggestion.

No I was reffering to counting the IGT as; Looking at the Timer in the upper right screen. Level starts with 99, your time is 76 so IGT would be 23 for Level 1. Level 2 your timer stops at 70 so we needed 29s for this stage and so on. Then we add every time from the stage to a total to get the final IGT (this is also much work but propably fair?)

Trying to count the time with removed loading screens would be insane I agree :D

Yeah both Moderators seem to be inactive for a while, dunno how long to wait until they show up again. (yes was mistaken you for a Moderator :) )

Hey there :)

after attempting a few runs by myself and also watching all of them here available, i came to the conclusion that the only reliable measurement option would be to actually count the real in-game time without loading. At least without making all currently submitted runs obsolete because of the not defined settings for the emulator.

Counting that time isn't such a deal. It took me about 20 minutes to cut my run frame-perfect on every level from the first non-black Frame after the text to the first black frame after the level ending. I think i will also do this for all the submitted runs the next days, and post them here, just for comparison.

Maybe an issue would also be capture-options. Since the game runs at 50 fps, i wanted to set my Monitor to 50Hz refresh rate using CRU and also captured at exactly 50 frames. I also checked the frame-accuracy by looking at the timer countdown at the end of the level. Each second should last exactly 2 frames. But i guess we don't have to be so precise yet ;)

I think all this should also be an issue with all of the Amiga (and other non-console) games here. Another option would be to just define every possible setting, including kickstart AND game-version in the rules (it should be the original non-cracked release). But this would totally exclude many people who play on real hardware, which is a big deal in my opinion.

As for the moderators. I saw there's an option to contact a site-admin if the mods of a game are not responding. Who knows how many submitted runs are still in the pipeline. And I also want to submit my run also as soon as i think it's good enough ;)

I'm just wondering how few runs there are in total for Giana Sisters, since it's obviously one of the biggest amiga-classics, as far as i know.

Hi Mike,

thanks for this good answer and figuering out a solution (and all the other stuff of course), I think your suggestions makes the most sense yet :)

So in general you just stopped the time between the "black/loading" screen and summed the seconds all up at the end right?

About the Moderators: We faced the same Problem for Loom so I just wrote in the forums that all Moderators are not available for a long time and that I could not contact them via other channels. The result was that firefyte and me were promoted to the new Moderators. So you (or someone else....if no one want to that, I will do it) has just to tell some person who is in charge here about the absence of the moderators....case closed :)

Hey Milktoast,

Thank you for your appreciation :) Yeah what i do is just time the pure in-game-time. One way to do this is to just take the video and cut out every part that isn't on the game screen (=every frame with a black background / level text on it). I'll describe that seperately in another thread. It's not so much work. About 15 minutes per run. This should be the one-to-catch-them-all method for timing i guess (hope) :)

About the Mod: Yeah i surely will do that. I would really like to write down some more specific rules and maybe bring some more life into this games speedruns. I will write in the Mods-Forum as soon as i submitted my first own run, guess that's also a requirement :) I'm also currently working on an autosplitter to make timing overall much easier.

Was possibly interested in running the game, but trying to find steps to run it with the main configuration. Any help would be appreciated!

Hi! What do you mean by steps?

Sorry, I meant like guide or process to play/ emulate the Amiga. I tried my best to emulate Amiga, but had no luck. Haven't had the issue before, but I may just need to be more patient and give it another try in the future.

You probably need the kickstart rom, which doesnt come with the Emulator itself.

FS-UAE does not need the original Kickstart ROMs, it has a free AROS reimplementation of the Kickstart included. Most games will not use the Kickstart anyway, so those games should work fine with it. Giana Sisters seems to run fine.