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Retrobot: A Discord bot that plays emulated games with friends over chat

github.com

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Re: Retrobot: A Discord bot that plays emulated games with friends over chat

#5

Post by soulofmischief »

hyperhopper wrote: post #4

> Retrobot simplifies control by auto-forwarding through idle parts of games, such as conversations or battle animations. How is this possible? Isn't this the halting problem?

I assume memory hacking, most of these memory tables for popular old games are well known.

Re: Retrobot: A Discord bot that plays emulated games with friends over chat

#6

Post by metadat »

ross-squires wrote: post #2

I spent a few weeks building a Discord bot that allows you to play NES/SNES/GB/GBA games over chat. Think “TwitchPlaysPokemon”, but with GIFs. It accepts button presses, emulates the result, and encodes a GIF to view!

Really great work, thank you for sharing and making it open source!

Edit: Erm, have you decided on a license yet? I don't see one in the repo. Personally I'm a fan of the permissive MIT license.

https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/blob/main/MIT-LICENSE.txt

Re: Retrobot: A Discord bot that plays emulated games with friends over chat

#7

Post by hyperhopper »

soulofmischief wrote: post #5
hyperhopper wrote: post #4

> Retrobot simplifies control by auto-forwarding through idle parts of games, such as conversations or battle animations. How is this possible? Isn't this the halting problem?

I assume memory hacking, most of these memory tables for popular old games are well known.

"popular" isn't what the site claims. It claims this is at the emulation level, not game level. If I can't make my own rom and have it work, what it advertised is a lie.

Re: Retrobot: A Discord bot that plays emulated games with friends over chat

#8

Post by kevincox »

hyperhopper wrote: post #4

> Retrobot simplifies control by auto-forwarding through idle parts of games, such as conversations or battle animations. How is this possible? Isn't this the halting problem?

Maybe it tries to emulate extra frames with different buttons pressed and if it doesn't make a difference it plays those frames for you?

Of course detecting "doesn't make a difference" is very difficult because most games will keep at least the current and last frame of input in memory somewhere. So you would need to be careful enough to ignore that.

Re: Retrobot: A Discord bot that plays emulated games with friends over chat

#9

Post by g_hn_liaison »

kevincox wrote: post #8
hyperhopper wrote: post #4

> Retrobot simplifies control by auto-forwarding through idle parts of games, such as conversations or battle animations. How is this possible? Isn't this the halting problem?

Maybe it tries to emulate extra frames with different buttons pressed and if it doesn't make a difference it plays those frames for you? Of course detecting "doesn't make a difference" is very difficult because most games will keep at least the current and last frame of input in memory somewhere. So you would need to be careful enough to ignore that.

Looks to me like that's exactly what it does. This line seems to check for a divergence of possibilities: https://github.com/rossimo/retrobot/blob/master/src/emulate....

Re: Retrobot: A Discord bot that plays emulated games with friends over chat

#10

Post by ross-squires »

metadat wrote: post #6
ross-squires wrote: post #2

I spent a few weeks building a Discord bot that allows you to play NES/SNES/GB/GBA games over chat. Think “TwitchPlaysPokemon”, but with GIFs. It accepts button presses, emulates the result, and encodes a GIF to view!

Really great work, thank you for sharing and making it open source! Edit: Erm, have you decided on a license yet? I don't see one in the repo. Personally I'm a fan of the permissive MIT license. https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/blob/main/MIT-LICENSE.txt

Added!
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