Over the course of 32 minutes, the Real Time Clock in TiKevin83’s original Crystal Cartridge drifted enough to cause differences in Crystal’s RNG, desyncing the run.
But nothing ever works perfectly the first try. With the new improvements in hand, MrWint exported a TAS for TiKevin83 to test using Extrems’ Game Boy Interface. Many other improvements were ported from Sinamas’s emulator, the original Gambatte which was recently resurrected and which Gambatte-Speedrun is built on. MrWint was able to port Gifvex’s RTC improvements from the emulator used in the speedrunning community (Gambatte-Speedrun) to BizHawk so that it can be used for TASing. When the Pokemon Speedrunning community needed perfect emulation of Gen 2 to verify specific RNG patterns, Gifvex improved their Gambatte-Speedrun emulator to perfectly handle the different cartridge model used in Gen 2 (MBC3) which includes a real time clock. Here’s a bit of history and how the team was able to overcome some of the challenges:Ĭonsole verification efforts require perfect emulation of the target console. MrWint’s original submission to TASVideos can be found here:
MrWint used rapid prototype TASes to iteratively tune the real time clock estimate, so they’re waiting to produce higher quality console captures until fully satisfied with the optimization of the TAS. This was made possible by a combination of efforts from TASVideos members and Pokemon Speedrunners and has allowed MrWint’s Pokemon Crystal TAS to be verified on original hardware using Game Boy Interface.
The video above shows the first successful full sync of Crystal Glitchless, which is longer than any other published console verification on TASVideos by more than an hour.