[CSDb] - User Forums - Emulator Awareness Campaign

Welcome to our latest new user Rodrigo Yeowtch ! (Registered 2024-11-24)

You are not logged in - nap

CSDb User Forums

Forums > CSDb Discussions > Emulator Awareness Campaign - your help needed

2004-02-12 12:43

Cupid

Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 83

Emulator Awareness Campaign - your help needed

Evening Ladies and Gentlemen,

I want your help and support for an idea I had when I saw the emufuxxor of Krill/Plush a year or so ago.

The Emulator Awareness campaign.

In a nutshell, it is a small program that you can link to any release (or allow it to load the main part) that will show a "nag screen" in emulators, explaining that the user is using an emulator and has to be aware of the experience he will get not being the real thing.

This can prevent a lot of wrong criticism and bug reports, and, at least in our book, is a more mature and efficient way to deal with the emulator phenomena than not caring about "emulamers".

Read about it here:
http://www.cupid.de/eac/

What I need from you now, is a list of problems that emulators have, what bad experience users get and that there is not a way around them for the developer.

This data will be used to fill the "where emulators fail" section on the site, which will be featured in the nag screen.

Thanks for your attention, flame away

... 47 posts hidden. Click here to view all posts....

2004-02-12 23:13

TDJ

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 1879

I heard many good things about Zenith but I've never seen any issues or tpb's of it yet. Same for St.Swithin's day and his other older stuff :(

Btw, check out this thread about Morrison: http://www.millarworld.biz/index.php?showtopic=20698

I used to be on Barbelith.com, they had some real good discussions there, but a while ago they closed all the lurker accounts .. and a lurker I was.

Say, is anybody interested in my Invisibles rap?

2004-02-13 12:19

Krill

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969

Quote: The nag screens will disappear when the emulator behaviour difference, that the fuxxor routine uses for detection, is eliminated. Depending on the routine and encryption used, bypassing it by a "cheat" as you suggest can be hard..

Btw. another question, if the nagrequester acts as a loader, will the program to be loaded be heavily encrypted? People will perhaps reverse-engineer this, just for the challenge if not otherwise.

Urgh.. I hope Rich doesn't get into the defuxxoring business (possibly with a fakelabel), if this becomes popular :)

The check routines used are actually quite hard to come by. According to Graham who started working on a really really sophisticated emulator, to emulate the things some of those check routines test (i.e., sprite display bugs in extreme sprite positions, register update each cycle instead of each line, etc.) would slow down the emulators massively.
yet, there will be the time when pc's are fast enough to run such an emulator.
at that point, it might be hard to find things that are not perfectly emulated. still, reaching this point will take years, imho. but then, when the hardware emulation is that sophisticated, all demo effects should work on that emulator. together with the already implemented pal emulation, the experience will be close enough to the real thing to prevent us from inaccurate demo reviews, imho.

but things like bad display timing emulation and inaccurate sound synchronicity due to the non-real time environment and the pc monitor's refresh rate not being exactly the one of a c64, resulting in dropped or double frames here and there, will always remain. yet, these are problems common to pc demos, someone regularly watching demos on the pc won't even recognize that. real 50 fps effects without frame drops and with synchronous sound is a thing only a real c64 nerd pays attention to, and such a person does most likely possess a real c64 and knows the difference.

as for encryption, i won't use that feature again. a nag screen is something different than blocking an emulator, it's easy to press space. and removing such a screen that is just plainly linked in front of a program would be rather ridiculous than challenging, in contrast to removing the emu protection emu-fuxx0r imposed on a program.
fenek/arise succeeded in coding an automatic un-fuxx0r, which is quite an impressive thing to do. but then, having a look at the source code of that, i once more realised that you only have to find that one single weak point of the protection chain and break it there. very similar to cracking a copy protection or hacking into a network computer =) trying to code a protection hard to overcome, you'll always only end up with playing cat and mouse with the crackers while you could rather code stunning demos.

2004-02-13 15:10

Cruzer

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 1048

Instead of wasting valuable effect-coding time on emu-detectors, how about just writing a message in a scroller or something, explaining that IF you run it on an emulator, you're missing out because of this and that.

2004-02-13 16:01

cadaver

Registered: Feb 2002
Posts: 1160

Hey, you probably honed emu-detection to science :) so I definitely believe you but this phrase arouses my curiousity "register update each cycle instead of each line" .. aren't CCS64 and VICE supposed to be doing that already if they claim to be "cycle exact"? Or hmm.. do they still emulate the chips in "chunks" of several cycles by kludging the mid-line chip reads/writes somehow? (not directed to Krill in particular, anyone can answer)

2004-02-13 16:44

Cruzer

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 1048

By registers I think VIC-registers is what's meant (not a/x/y/etc.) For instance $d016-splitting doesn't seem to work on any emulators.

Another thing is that updating of gfx-data during a rasterline is inaccurate. This can be seen in my old vertical raster routine from "Produkthandler Kom Her"/Camelot, where each bar has a bug on the top.

2004-02-13 17:18

Krill

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969

cruzer: well yes, chip registers, of course. not only vic, also cia and sid registers, afaik. and well, i did not intend to find emu-check routines in the first place, they just came naturally when i saw that some of my code just didn't run as expected in the emulators. most noticable where update bugs with kefrens bars and other stuff using mid-line updates (use an emu to have a look at the vandalism news 34 intro i made some time ago, some areas that ought to be black aren't and thus, display garbage, iirc). and yes, current emulators do perform a heavy load of tricks to speed up the emulation for the expense of accuracy.

2004-02-13 17:54

hollowman

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 474

tdj, in sweden zenith was published in the magazine magnum,
but i believe there was another episode later on which
didnt appear there. another swedish magazine called inferno
included stuff such as grant morrison's doom patrol, alan moore's swamp thing, sandman,hellblazer and shade the changing man. ofcourse a magazine with such content only survived for like 10 issues or something.

kill your boyfriend by morrison was not weird enough,but felt quite fresh anyway and along with arkham asylum it is
one of the few albums by him i have been able to find in the shops around here. until the invisibles, which i
for economical reasons havent really started checking out yet

2004-02-13 19:36

Cupid

Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 83

Hollowman, TDJ and others:

My GIVE-A-FUCK-O-METER about your graphic novel discussion here is below zero, same as yours about the topic at hand. Could you please have the courtesy to take that discussion somewhere else? Thank you.

2004-02-13 19:48

TDJ

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 1879

Quote: Hollowman, TDJ and others:

My GIVE-A-FUCK-O-METER about your graphic novel discussion here is below zero, same as yours about the topic at hand. Could you please have the courtesy to take that discussion somewhere else? Thank you.

But .. but .. I want you to spank me .. isn't that obvious?

Snif ..

2004-02-14 00:56

Steppe

Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 1510

Erm, wouldn't it be the easiest way to simply ask the VICE team or Per Hakan Sundell to implement such a nag screen into the emulators? ;-)))

Previous - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 - Next

Refresh

Subscribe to this thread:

You need to be logged in to post in the forum.

Search the forum:
Search for in
All times are CET.

Search CSDb

Advanced

Users Online

Jazzcat/Onslaught
LMan
Asphodel
Copyfault/Extend^tsn..
Fresh
Yogibear/Protovision
Alakran_64
fegolhuzz
Frostbyte/Artline De..
wil
blitzed
Guests online: 102

Top Demos

1 Next Level  (9.7)
2 13:37  (9.7)
3 Coma Light 13  (9.7)
4 Edge of Disgrace  (9.6)
5 Mojo  (9.6)
6 The Demo Coder  (9.6)
7 Uncensored  (9.6)
8 What Is The Matrix 2  (9.6)
9 Wonderland XIV  (9.6)
10 Comaland 100%  (9.6)

Top onefile Demos

1 Layers  (9.6)
2 Party Elk 2  (9.6)
3 Cubic Dream  (9.6)
4 Copper Booze  (9.6)
5 Libertongo  (9.5)
6 Rainbow Connection  (9.5)
7 Onscreen 5k  (9.5)
8 Morph  (9.5)
9 Dawnfall V1.1  (9.5)
10 It's More Fun to Com..  (9.5)

Top Groups

1 Performers  (9.3)
2 Booze Design  (9.3)
3 Oxyron  (9.3)
4 Nostalgia  (9.3)
5 Censor Design  (9.3)

Top Graphicians

1 Mirage  (9.7)
2 Archmage  (9.7)
3 Mikael  (9.6)
4 Carrion  (9.6)
5 Sulevi  (9.6)

Page generated in: 0.056 sec.