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Lunar Magic suggestions and discussion (LM v2.52)

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The only thing that annoys me is that everything is so small in LM (especially in the OW editor). There should be a "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out" button. It's pretty annoying if someone has a high resolution on his/her computer.

EDIT: Yeah, and some patches would be good because I hate using Xkas.
Originally posted by Alcaro
FuSoYa would need to either fully support both (which would be a bad idea until all our tools treat headerless ROMs properly) or keep the current method.

Ideally, LM and the other tools would need to add support for headerless ROMs at the same time. Otherwise, why would we need tools with support for headerless ROMs if LM doesn't support them, or LM supporting headerless ROMs if the other tools don't support them?
I see no reason why LM couldn't support both at the same time. Headers are pointless and useless except to muck things up, but they don't do anything catastrophic (unlike the issue with old addmusics).

There's no need to enforce either way. Standardization's nice and all but with only two possibilities it's not a huge deal.
Originally posted by K3fka
why would we need tools with support for headerless ROMs if LM doesn't support them

Future proofing or something, in case LM adds support later. It does no harm.

Originally posted by Kaijyuu
There's no need to enforce either way. Standardization's nice and all but with only two possibilities it's not a huge deal.

Something tells me imamelia read this.
I can't really say I disagree with it, but sometimes byuu seems to force his standards on others a little too much.

I think the main problem is the IPS files. If we allow those to be destandardized, nobody knows what'll happen.
Maybe we could solve it by switching to an IPS patcher based on this (we could keep using LIPS for making them)? IPS Anti should be very easy to tweak to make an IPS patcher.
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation

***CAUTION! BULLSHIT AWAITS. I LET THE POST HERE INCASE SOMEONE IS WONDERING WHY BYUU OR ALCARO ARE REFERING TO ME***


I don't get the thing that unheadered is better then headered.

I respect Fusoya's opinion more than byuu who acts like a child if you try to discuss about the "accuracy" from his super emulator while it even can't properly emulate the fuckin ORIGINAL SMW...lol

And besides, Fusoya has started with Lunar Magic in February 2000 while byuu in 2004-10-14 So why again is latter's opinion better?

(In fact I think byuu's article started the header thing to spread, I never heard before about header/no header)

Originally posted by Alcaro

I can't really say I disagree with it, but sometimes byuu seems to force his standards on others a little too much.


^This

And

***BULLSHIT ENDS HERE***

EDIT: I did NOT itended to post that, that's why the "And" is there...sorry. I thought I didn't post it, but I noticed it now.
Originally posted by Shog
byuu [...] acts like a child if you try to discuss about the "accuracy" from his super emulator

I have not yet seen one argument against getting your stuff to work on a real SNES, not counting various forms of laziness.
Also byuu himself is rarely directly involved in these discussions. Most discussions he participate in are with people who agree with him, he's smart enough to stay away from the more heated and childish discussions.

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while it even can't properly emulate the fuckin ORIGINAL SMW...lol

[citation needed]

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And besides, Fusoya has started with Lunar Magic in February 2000 while byuu in 2004-10-14 So why again is latter's opinion better?

I think FuSoYa made header adding obligatory to save us some headaches with third-party tools not accepting unheadered ROMs (translation: backwards compatibility).
I also fail to see how those dates matters.

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(In fact I think byuu's article started the header thing to spread, I never heard before about header/no header)

This article may have started a bunch of stuff, but header problems have existed previously. Example: Snes9x 1.43 debugger removes headers, and some ROM sites offer headered ROMs while some offer unheadered ones, with no obvious indication on which applies.

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And

ok
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation
Originally posted by Alcaro
Something tells me imamelia read this.


The problem with Byuu's article on copier headers is that he restricts himself to discussing technical details and historical origins while deliberately ignoring the only aspect of headers that most people really care about: compatibility. There are times when the technically superior solution is not always the correct one... and copier headers may fall under this category.

While arguably we might be slightly better off if SNES copier headers just suddenly ceased to exist, in reality it's not that simple. There are countless existing IPS patches and utilities spread over not just emulation community sites but also personal web pages that will cause problems. If this were 1995 and everyone was on board, it might make sense. But this isn't 1995, and the SNES emulation scene has gotten rather long in the tooth. Such an initiative now would be difficult at best, and of questionable worth.

Originally posted by Alcaro
I can't really say I disagree with it, but sometimes byuu seems to force his standards on others a little too much.


If you mean to the point where Byuu unfortunately tries to deflect criticism for his own decision in removing copier support in Bsnes onto myself, I'm afraid I'd have to agree. While he's perfectly within his rights to develop his software as he wishes, it would be nice if he afforded others the same respect.

And from what I've seen of him over the years I think he normally would, he just hasn't been himself for a while now. Which is why I let his original comment slide along with some other one he made some months back on another topic regarding source code.

Originally posted by Alcaro
Also byuu himself is rarely directly involved in these discussions. Most discussions he participate in are with people who agree with him, he's smart enough to stay away from the more heated and childish discussions.


It goes rather deeper than that I believe. He's mostly isolated himself on his own board to avoid having to deal with others. I can understand why... I too once considered doing something similar several years back. I consider myself fortunate that I didn't go through with it in the end.

Which is why in discussions like this, it's important not to get carried away *cough*Imamelia*cough* and start turning things into personal attacks . 0x200 bytes of harmless data is not worth getting obsessed over. Stay respectful of others, whichever side of the debate you happen to be on.


And apologies in advance for singling anyone out. I'm normally reluctant to involve myself in something like this, but this is one of those things that's probably better said than left unsaid. :(
"Because that's the way we've always done it" is never a good reason for anything. I will agree that copier headers are pretty small thing (as I said in my earlier post), but still a thing.

Originally posted by Ayosuf
While arguably we might be slightly better off if SNES copier headers just suddenly ceased to exist, in reality it's not that simple. There are countless existing IPS patches and utilities spread over not just emulation community sites but also personal web pages that will cause problems. If this were 1995 and everyone was on board, it might make sense. But this isn't 1995, and the SNES emulation scene has gotten rather long in the tooth. Such an initiative now would be difficult at best, and of questionable worth.

I don't think anyone's asking that everyone be forced to switch to header free ROMs. Just given the option. So, no intrusive initiative is needed.

Should not tools be designed with the ideal in mind? Your comment regarding compatibility is an excellent reason why support for headers should remain, but not a good reason why support for non-headered roms shouldn't be implemented. And assuming you didn't use a bunch of magic numbers in LM's source code, changing that 0x200 offset to a variable instead of a constant shouldn't be difficult at all.
Originally posted by Kaijyuu
"Because that's the way we've always done it" is never a good reason for anything. I will agree that copier headers are pretty small thing (as I said in my earlier post), but still a thing.


That would be oversimplifying. When the costs of a change outweigh the potential benefits, it only makes sense to question if the change should be implemented.

Originally posted by Kaijyuu
I don't think anyone's asking that everyone be forced to switch to header free ROMs. Just given the option. So, no intrusive initiative is needed.


I believe users of Bsnes have been asked to do without them, unless that's changed recently. And hence why it's become an issue for some lately.

Originally posted by Kaijyuu
Should not tools be designed with the ideal in mind? Your comment regarding compatibility is an excellent reason why support for headers should remain, but not a good reason why support for non-headered roms shouldn't be implemented.


In SMW/LM's case we do have the luxury of having effectively already standardized on headered ROMs for over a decade. Which does have the slight benefit of less confusion regarding IPS patches and discussing offsets. Supporting both now would remove that benefit.

As you said, a small thing, but a thing nonetheless.

Originally posted by Kaijyuu
And assuming you didn't use a bunch of magic numbers in LM's source code, changing that 0x200 offset to a variable instead of a constant shouldn't be difficult at all.


1500 or so magic numbers actually, though the way LM handles other ROM maps means I wouldn't have to change those. I'd be more concerned with other possible bits of oddness from easy to miss code that didn't expect to have to handle non-headered ROMs.
Originally posted by Ayosuf
In SMW/LM's case we do have the luxury of having effectively already standardized on headered ROMs for over a decade. Which does have the slight benefit of less confusion regarding IPS patches and discussing offsets. Supporting both now would remove that benefit.

As you said, a small thing, but a thing nonetheless.

Which is why we'd need the defaults to be rejecting headerless ROMs, with an option with a clear warning message (or maybe registry-only, the ones who wants headers gone are smart enough to know how to edit that) if you want to enable it.

My tool should be able to solve the confusion with the IPS patches. However, your point about our users discussing offsets is an argument I can't refute. I'm not sure how to solve that, and considering how angry some users get when we change stuff...
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation
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he's smart enough to stay away from the more heated and childish discussions


Most of the time, but I do have lapses of judgment and snap, like that PC Jr. comment I made here a while back.

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while it even can't properly emulate the fuckin ORIGINAL SMW...lol


That's news to me. I had a ~4-pixel black line in two or three levels of the game for two or three months, but that was fixed a long time ago. It was an instance of more accuracy revealing more timing issues. The game modifies the scroll register in the middle of a scanline, something scanline-based renderers don't have to worry about at all.

If that's what he was meaning, that's a pretty sad thing to laugh at.

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There are times when the technically superior solution is not always the correct one...


Only in matters of pragmatism, never in idealism. We live in a pragmatic world, I grant you that.

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If you mean to the point where Byuu unfortunately tries to deflect criticism for his own decision in removing copier support in Bsnes onto myself, I'm afraid I'd have to agree. While he's perfectly within his rights to develop his software as he wishes, it would be nice if he afforded others the same respect.


I don't know what you're talking about. bsnes is GPLv2, it's a one-line change to ui/cartridge/cartridge.cpp:bool Cartridge::loadCartridge(): if((size&0x7fff)==512) { size -= 512; data += 512; }

You are more than welcome to re-add header support, and to share your build with others. I don't blame you for not having header support at all.

As I've always said, it's about practicing what I preach. Imagine if I were to go around calling alcohol evil, yet I were to sell alcohol in my restaurant because that's what people like to drink with their meals? How can I support headers while trying to eliminate them at the same time? It's hypocritical.

Which is why I'm okay if someone else makes a fork to do it. I will practice what I preach, but respect your right to do whatever you want. We have SSNES now, which is pretty awesome. I am still hopeful that someone will make a badass integrated GUI for bsnes/libsnes one day.

It's basically simple: I give you this for free, and so I do things my way. That people complain about me giving away seven years of my life, free of charge, because I don't cater to some arcane format of theirs, it's ... see below.

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And from what I've seen of him over the years I think he normally would, he just hasn't been himself for a while now.


I honest to god tried to be the most polite person in the world for a good six years. See the old bsnes thread and forum from the Zboard for proof. Eventually, I dealt with enough people like Shog above that I just snapped. I swear, a minimum of 95% of threads outside my own boards have personal attacks on me or my emulator. It's incredulous.

Was right about bsnes v071 that I snapped. Honestly, I'm a lot happier now than I have been. Which can only be good for the future of the project.

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He's mostly isolated himself on his own board to avoid having to deal with others.


I just realized there was no point in arguing. With a few aforementioned bad decisions, I mostly stay out of pissing contests. It just makes everyone else think I'm a dick. And it seems I could sooner convince someone their god wasn't real than I could convince them of something to do with emulation >_<

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And assuming you didn't use a bunch of magic numbers in LM's source code, changing that 0x200 offset to a variable instead of a constant shouldn't be difficult at all.


Oh, that's easy. LM won't write directly to disk every time. It'll load the file into memory, and write it all out when saving. Simply load the headerless ROM into a bigger array, set a boolean flag saying the user didn't have a header, and respect that upon saving. No need even to change hard-coded offsets.

He just doesn't want to support it. Just as I don't want to support headers. You have two people stubborn as mules, and unfortunately you guys have to deal with the fallout instead of us.

In my defense, I at least give you the source code. FuSoYa won't even give you that courtesy, and yet I've never seen a personal attack here on FuSoYa like every last thread I see here has on me :/

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And besides, Fusoya has started with Lunar Magic in February 2000 while byuu in 2004-10-14


Dates have nothing to do with respect, but check the 1998 changelogs for ZSNES some time anyway ;)
Originally posted by Ayosuf
In SMW/LM's case we do have the luxury of having effectively already standardized on headered ROMs for over a decade. Which does have the slight benefit of less confusion regarding IPS patches and discussing offsets. Supporting both now would remove that benefit.

Heh, I'm not you (or one that consistently helps out newbies on this board) so confusion regarding header vs no header isn't something I'd have to deal with. So, to me, that's not a tangible benefit. I can see some people being adverse to having the option so they didn't have to constantly explain to newbies why certain tools don't work on their ROM, though.

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In my defense, I at least give you the source code. FuSoYa won't even give you that courtesy, and yet I've never seen a personal attack here on FuSoYa like every last thread I see here has on me :/

Oh don't worry, I at least have given him plenty of shit for that. I only hold back if I'm afraid of scaring him off with my incessant whining about it.

We certainly would not be having this conversation (hell this thread wouldn't even exist) if we could make these changes ourselves... cough cough hint hint
I just want to clarify that my post should be totally ignored, it's something stupid i wrote. It doesn't make sense and it's full of bullshit. And incase you don't believe me, the wierd "And" shows that I wanted to delete the post, and that it's unfinished, but somehow it didn't worked. Well, again sorry.
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Eventually, I dealt with enough people like Shog above that I just snapped.


Hopefully you know now that I DON'T "want" to be looked at like the "people" *gasp*

...

But simply my drama? That looks wierd in a important thread like that, so I want to know something(atleast what fit this thread a bit):

Why is Lunar Magic not open-source? I'm just wondering, that's it. No offense. No critism. Simply curiosity. If there is a statement from Fusoya, a simple link would be nice. Thanks
Originally posted by Shog
Why is Lunar Magic not open-source? I'm just wondering, that's it. No offense. No critism. Simply curiosity. If there is a statement from Fusoya, a simple link would be nice. Thanks

I'm not gonna bother looking it up, but basically he doesn't want the project splintering into a dozen different distributions made by different people.

For example, person A might add sprite tool like functionality, while person B adds addmusic functionality. Now we have two different Lunar Magics that do different things and are incompatible with each other. Merging them isn't exactly feasible either, as it's never so simple as copy/pasting code.


IMO the benefits outweigh the consequences (as a "main" distribution that has an organized way to submit changes would eventually arise), but whatever.
Originally posted by byuu
I am still hopeful that someone will make a badass integrated GUI for bsnes/libsnes one day

What's a "badass gui"?
Originally posted by Ayosuf
it's important not to get carried away *cough*Imamelia*cough* and start turning things into personal attacks . 0x200 bytes of harmless data is not worth getting obsessed over. Stay respectful of others, whichever side of the debate you happen to be on.

My apologies. I guess that post was a bit more accusatory than I meant it to be.

Originally posted by byuu
He just doesn't want to support it. Just as I don't want to support headers. You have two people stubborn as mules, and unfortunately you guys have to deal with the fallout instead of us.

Yeah...it's two sides of an argument, and we're kind of caught in the middle being pulled both ways.

I guess I should admit that I don't even use bsnes unmodified; in fact, my reaction every time a new one is released is something like "There's a new version of bsnes out? Cool. Hey, Alcaro, could you compile a few builds for me with header support?" Compiling on Windows apparently takes a rocket scientist, from what I've seen, and switching operating systems really isn't an option for me (yet). And, of course, Lunar Magic not supporting headerless ROMs is certainly not enough to prevent me from using it. (After all, there are plenty of other things about Lunar Magic—some the editor's fault and some mine—that are much more inconvenient...to name one thing, most of my levels will look like garbage in Lunar Magic due to the fact that I use custom objects a lot and hacked the tile animation routine.) So I suppose for the time being, it's more of an ideal than a necessity.

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I'm working on a hack! Check it out here. Progress: 64/95 levels.
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What's a "badass gui"?


I suppose something more feature complete and pretty than even my old Qt GUI, that had the ability to optionally replicate ZSNES/Snes9X even closer, since that seems to be what most people want.

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Compiling on Windows apparently takes a rocket scientist


It requires all of four steps. Install TDM/GCC, download DX headers, download GL header, put headers into TDM/GCC/include folder. You're done. You should try compiling ZSNES sometime if you want to see real pain :P

EDIT: so that doesn't seem like trolling, I should elaborate.

ZSNES requires a specific version of NASM, the newest ones have syntax errors, the older ones have macro expansion errors. You also need GCC of course. Then you have to build three or four separate project libraries (zlib, ncurses, libpng, etc) and install them to GCC/lib. One of the libraries you basically have to download off of some Russian mirror site from a directory list of 20,000+ archives. And to build on Windows you have to edit something in one of the build configuration files to exclude a Linux-only library.

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And, of course, Lunar Magic not supporting headerless ROMs is certainly not enough to prevent me from using it.


It's not as though I'm truly bewildered that other people complain about my "forced" standard while they're perfectly fine with FuSoYa's, even with the open-source part put aside.

There are no alternatives to LM, whereas there are multiple alternatives to bsnes. I've seen the same thing when I was a ROM hacker. I took an unbelievable amount of flack for any minor thing for Dragon Quest 5 because Dejap also translated it. But never heard a bad thing said on Der Langrisser because nobody else did that one.

I will say that Alcaro has the right approach. Complain like I do and the other tool authors will dig their heels in. Of course, I've already tried the "catch more bees with honey" thing.

Nach and I got along for many years at first, from 2004-2009'ish. Even after all of that time of talking with him, I was not able to convince him to remove even a single excess file extension from ZSNES.

I didn't ask him to remove SMC, but weird ones like MGD/MGH/UFO. No dice. Some people simply won't change no matter what you do. If you deal with that for many years, you end up with a bad attitude like I have.
Originally posted by byuu
It requires all of four steps. Install TDM/GCC, download DX headers, download GL header, put headers into TDM/GCC/include folder. You're done. You should try compiling ZSNES sometime if you want to see real pain :P

And the best part?
This is a one time operation. The next time you want to compile bsnes, double clicking on a batch file and waiting a few minutes is enough (if you're happy with the defaults, including using the accuracy core, but it takes less than five minutes to paste the header support from a previous version and replace "accuracy" with "compatibility").

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It's not as though I'm truly bewildered that people complain about my "forced" standard while they're perfectly fine with FuSoYa's, even with the open-source part put aside.

Nobody really complains about Lunar Magic because there is no viable alternative. If ZSNES and Snes9X did not exist, and there were a suitable alternative to LM, I am confident the situation would be reversed.

This thread is about stuff we don't like with LM, and considering it got over one hundred replies, I belive it's safe to conclude that some of us are complaining about LM, even though no alternative exists.
I belive the reason why people are complaining about you and not FuSoYa is that FuSoYa was first. If your emulator came before LM, I'm pretty sure everyone, including FuSoYa himself, would happily use unheadered ROMs. Sadly, none of us can change history.
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation
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I belive it's safe to conclude that some of us are complaining about LM, even though no alternative exists.


Poor wording, I was meaning about the header issue. imamelia's really the first person I've seen outside of my own forum agreeing with me on the header issue. I've taken a world of criticism on almost all forums I've seen for not supporting headers.

But yeah, people will complain about anything =)
(and constructive criticism is always welcome.)

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If your emulator came before LM, I'm pretty sure everyone, including FuSoYa himself, would happily use unheadered ROMs.


I think it's more that I'd need to be the dominant player in the SNES scene. It's exactly like IE6 and their "CSS" support. Overcoming that inertia takes a very long time.

I had hoped that I could pull off a Firefox-style building of support to eventually push for *gradual* standardization, but that failed to happen because my emulator's also substantially slower. I basically gave up and did it all at once. Which annoys everyone else, but makes me feel a lot better about my own project.

I don't think there even is a dominant player anymore though, ZSNES has become too stagnant since Jan. 2007. Even if they tried to fix anything now, people would just stick with the older versions. Just like xkas v06 here. Too much old baggage to make a clean start.
Originally posted by byuu
It requires all of four steps. Install TDM/GCC, download DX headers, download GL header, put headers into TDM/GCC/include folder. You're done.

Shoudn't there be one more step, like using a batch file or something? Not to mention I haven't the slightest idea where to get said headers. I was more referring to compiling things on Windows in general, though, not just bsnes specifically.

Originally posted by byuu
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And, of course, Lunar Magic not supporting headerless ROMs is certainly not enough to prevent me from using it.


It's not as though I'm truly bewildered that other people complain about my "forced" standard while they're perfectly fine with FuSoYa's, even with the open-source part put aside.

There are no alternatives to LM, whereas there are multiple alternatives to bsnes.

Yeah, that's the thing. It's likely that the main reason why people are so much more willing to accept FuSoYa's standard than yours is just that: there is no alternative. Lunar Magic also can't be edited, while bsnes can. Not using headerless ROMs means people will just have to use a different emulator or edit the source code and recompile. Not using headered ROMs means people won't have an editor for hacking at all.

Originally posted by byuu
imamelia's really the first person I've seen outside of my own forum agreeing with me on the header issue.

I'm fairly sure that p4plus2 is on your side as well. I know his editor is supposed to support headerless ROMs (not to mention be cross-platform and open-source). He doesn't even use Lunar Magic, but I wonder why he hasn't posted in this thread much?

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I'm working on a hack! Check it out here. Progress: 64/95 levels.
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