Comment by xg15
6 years ago
Even then, some of the timing accuracy required still mystifies me. E.g., if I got it right then, for the RNG manipulation to work, you have to press "A" on the menu screen in one particular frame, counted from when the console was switched on. At the standard PAL framerate of 50 FPS, this gives you 1/50th of a second to react, with no visual indicator that the frame you're looking for is about to come up. I have no idea how to even begin training this.
There are some cues you could use to get very close, particularly the rhythm of the music.
I've heard that a decent drummer can hit a note within 15 milliseconds of the mathematically correct point on average, and that makes it plausible that you could use rhythm as a cue to hit within the 20 milliseconds that this would require.
But obviously this would become less likely to succeed as the length of the game continues and timing errors that affect the soundtrack compound.
Fighting game players regularly hit 1/60th of a second frame links.
For example, Guilty Gear XX's "one frame jump" is required to escape some pressure strings. This requires one-frame precision (1/60th of a second), pushing "Barrier" on frame 3.
If you push Barrier on frame 1 or 2, you're grounded and won't jump. If you push Barrier on Frame 4, it doesn't make a difference (because your character's animation is the same by frame 4). Its literally a 1-frame button timing.
Street Fighter IV had a fair number of 1-frame combos as the bread-and-butter for many characters. These 1/60th of a second links may be character specific (since all enemy hitboxes change based off of their relative sizes). They're also position dependent, because wall-bounce vs corner combos are a thing in most fighting games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIXuOx8WbFU
Most people, with enough practice, can execute this. Just most people don't realize that they can. This isn't even elite musician level.
Now what the expert fighting game player can do, is do the 1-frame link reliably during a tournament while the crowd is yelling and overall in a distracted environment.
> I've heard that a decent drummer can hit a note within 15 milliseconds
I find that easily believable. I think human reactions can be very fast and very precise if there is some kind of feedback - e.g. a clue, pattern or rythm to latch onto.
What I find harder to imagine is precision without any feedback - e.g. a human player pressing a button after exactly 15 milliseconds, without any kind of clock.
...but as you say, there may actually be some clues.
> At the standard PAL framerate of 50 FPS, this gives you 1/50th of a second to react
PAL is 25FPS, no?
For broadcast programs, yes.
The NES, and many other early computer/game systems, don't bother sending an interlaced display. Basically, they omit the half scan line at the end of one frame that positions the next frame lines in between the prior frame.
That's what 288p is.
And the result is half the vertical resolution but at full frame rate. 50fps
Pal, intended for viewing movies, television broadcast does output that half scan line for the full vertical resolution, and the result is a full frame is seen every other frame.
That's what 576i is.
Twice the vertical resolution, half the frame rate or 25fps.
Ok, so standard PAL is 25FPS, but half vertical resolution PAL is “50FPS”. Thanks for the detailed explanation of why you call it 50FPS (as seen from game’s perspective, not the PAL spec as GP implied).
> And the result is half the vertical resolution but at full frame rate
This is incorrect. It would be correct if you said “full field rate” here. The PAL standard is 50 fields per second. Two fields comprise one frame.
Now as to the NES specifically, this link breaks down more precisely the game’s FPS (tl;dr, it’s neither PAL or NTSC’s frame or field rate exactly):
https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=492
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