It's quite something. The commentary is an insight into a whole world. Not quite as crazy as the some of the other recent console memory hacking stuff but its the constant need for frame-perfect timing that makes it impressive.
i was into listening to the commentary more then i was watching the speedrun. ever speedrun i've seen never has commentary so you don't know what the heck the runner is doing. it was really kewl knowing what the thought process was in pulling these off. Awesome find!
Search youtube for "AGDQ" or "awesome games done quick". It was a charity speedrun livestream. They have cameras on the people in the room doing the speedrun and talking, the amount they actually talk about the game varies from video to video.
This video[1] did the same for me. I was so confused the first time I saw it I ended up spending the rest of my saturday reading speedrunning forums and watching caps of live speedrunning competitions.
In case folks were wondering, from their wiki: "Dolphin is an open-source Nintendo GameCube, Wii, and Triforce emulator for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (Intel-based)."
And for those wondering what the Triforce is, in this context:
The _Triforce_ is an arcade system board developed jointly by Namco, Sega, and Nintendo, with the first games appearing in 2002. The name "Triforce" is a reference to Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda series of games, and symbolized the three companies' involvement in the project. The system hardware is based on the Nintendo GameCube with several differences, like provisions for add-ons such as Sega's GD-Rom system, NAND memory, and upgradeable RAM modules. As with most arcade systems, each Triforce game has it's own custom peripherals and functions.
Especially with Dolphin - I was surprised how gripping those progress reports were. And I like how it feels like you're reading about the latest victories of a bunch of superheroes. Which is a nice way of looking at open source projects.
Yeah. On the GC, games can reset some "bounding box" registers, draw some 3d geometry, and then read out the 2D coordinates of the bounding box of the things drawn. Games like Paper Mario uses it to make a copy of that region and apply various effects to it, and if the region is wrong weird things happen.
There are no such bounding box registers on PC GPUs, so you have to either software transform the coordinates and ignore that your results won't be perfect (some pixels might have been thrown away due to z tests etc and wouldn't be counted in the bbox), or you use some modern shader tricks to simulate it in hardware, which is what the current Dolphin authors have now implemented.
It starts to get weird at about 12:30
It's quite something. The commentary is an insight into a whole world. Not quite as crazy as the some of the other recent console memory hacking stuff but its the constant need for frame-perfect timing that makes it impressive.