User:Bisqwit
My name is Joel Yliluoma. I have been a long-time NES enthusiasist, and my specialty is dealing with NES music.
In 2003 I also created TASVideos, a website specializing with tool-assisted speedruns (TAS) of classic videogames. Relatedly, I have had hand in the development of a few emulators for different consoles; mostly dealing with adding "rerecording" support, a key feature involved in the creation of TAS videos.
A TAS is an input recording for a video game. When the game is run in real time, the input is fed to the game, and the game reacts to the input as if the player was playing it; however, the input has been crafted at the author's leisure, and may involve maneuvers that are way too difficult for a real human player to perform. This creates entertainment that appeals to people for a number of reasons. Personally, I take it as a form of art.
For this to be possible, however, an emulator must pass certain requirements. Most importantly, the emulator must be completely deterministic. The emulator must contain no random components, such as fluctuation in thread synchronization. It must run identically on every single invokation, when the same input is provided. For the most part, real consoles are also deterministic, and indeed, some TASes have been replayed on an actual NES console. Then there are features which make the creation of TASes significantly easier. If you are an emulator author, please try to ensure your emulator fulfills most of these requirements.
If your emulator is accurate enough, you can use TAS videos as a test material to automate your emulator testing with games. The TAS inputs go quickly through large amounts of the game's code and data, invoking bordercase behavior within the games, making very good testcases.
Note that not all TAS videos have been created on an accurate emulator. For the movie to sync, you must replicate the same timings as the emulator the TAS was made on, except with some games (such as SMB) that are not really picky. Note that you may need to delete or add a few idle frames in the beginning of the movie before it syncs.
In December 2011 I wrote and published an original NES emulator... at YouTube.
For now see my web site and my user pages on other wikis:
Page layout shamelessly copied from [user:Tepples Tepples].
