Explain this glitch in Battle Toads?

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psycopathicteen
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Explain this glitch in Battle Toads?

Post by psycopathicteen »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U34vUdSIBtE

This guy is playing PAL games on NTSC systems, and I can understand most of the glitches, but why is the HUD showing up on top of the BG? Is this some kind of CRT problem?
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pubby
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Re: Explain this glitch in Battle Toads?

Post by pubby »

HUD is sprites and unaffected by PAL/NTSC timings. Black bar is cycle-timed and affected by PAL's longer VBLANK.
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tokumaru
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Re: Explain this glitch in Battle Toads?

Post by tokumaru »

That HUD is way too big to be made out of sprites.
psycopathicteen
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Re: Explain this glitch in Battle Toads?

Post by psycopathicteen »

I'm guessing that Battle Toads might be flickering between showing the gameplay, and showing just the HUD and a black screen, and the camera doesn't pick up the brightness difference.
lidnariq
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Re: Explain this glitch in Battle Toads?

Post by lidnariq »

psycopathicteen wrote:I'm guessing that Battle Toads might be flickering between showing the gameplay, and showing just the HUD and a black screen, and the camera doesn't pick up the brightness difference.
Quickly loading the PAL ROM in FCEU-0.98 and emulating as NTSC shows that's exactly what's going on.

The PAL build seems to spend enough time that the game logic is only evaluated every other vblank when run at 30kcy/vblank instead of 33kcy/vblank. And relatedly, after it misses a real vblank, the status bar is is delayed by an extra 16 scanlines.
psycopathicteen
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Re: Explain this glitch in Battle Toads?

Post by psycopathicteen »

lidnariq wrote:
psycopathicteen wrote:I'm guessing that Battle Toads might be flickering between showing the gameplay, and showing just the HUD and a black screen, and the camera doesn't pick up the brightness difference.
Quickly loading the PAL ROM in FCEU-0.98 and emulating as NTSC shows that's exactly what's going on.

The PAL build seems to spend enough time that the game logic is only evaluated every other vblank when run at 30kcy/vblank instead of 33kcy/vblank. And relatedly, after it misses a real vblank, the status bar is is delayed by an extra 16 scanlines.
So does that mean it is flickering?
lidnariq
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Re: Explain this glitch in Battle Toads?

Post by lidnariq »

Yes.
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