I'll try to announce my streams in advance here.

Next stream planned for: These things are getting harder to plan. I'm doing one today. Maybe 6 PM CST, maybe before or after, but it's happening. I'll turn on the stream banner when I start.

www.twitch.tv/hypstermindwipe

I've gotten several requests for help with doing game corruptions. So, I've decided to make up a little beginner's guide to doing them. First, you'll need 3 things: The Vinesauce ROM corruptor, game ROMs, and emulators that can run said ROMs. I'm too lazy to hunt down links, so Google is your friend in finding these things.

Now, run the Vinesauce ROM corruptor. I'll point out the things you need to familiarize yourself with. First, notice the "ROM Directory" box on the top-left. Use the file browser to find the folder with your ROMs in it, and set it to that. You should see all available ROMs appear in the box under it. In "Save Corrupted ROM To", just pick a directory that exists. For me, I save in my main ROM folder; you can use desktop or whatever is easiest for you. I'd keep "Overwrite File" checked, unless you plan on saving multiple corruptions to play later. In "Emulator To Run", browse to find the desired emulator to play your selected ROM; have "Run Emulator After Corrupting" checked for ease of use.

Now, with that basic stuff out of the way, there are 3 ways to mess with your games that you'll notice: Text Replacement, Color Replacement, and Byte Corruption. You probably won't have much desire to mess with the first 2, but I'll give you a brief overview. Enabling "Text Replacement" will let you replace words in the text with other words, provided they have the same number of characters. Also note that they are case-sensitive, and the NES generally only uses capital letters. That's about it. "Color Replacement" is mostly the same. I've never messed with it, but I believe it only works with NES games. Just pick a color to replace with another color. That's it.

The right side is where all the magic happens. Click the checkbox next to "Byte Corruption" and buckle in. Now, the methods and difficulty in corrupting a game depends mostly on the game. A general rule of thumb is also that games become harder to corrupt the larger they are. To put it simply, NES games are relatively easy to corrupt, SNES games are much trickier, and N64 games are really hard. I've only messed with NES and SNES games so far, so I'll give you a step-by-step guide to corrupting NES games, and then explain how to modify the approach for SNES games.

* Check the box next to "Auto End"
* Set "Increment" to 1000 (should be the default)
* "Corrupt Every" should generally be a number between 500 and 4000. Lower numbers equal more corruption.
* Choose either "Add" or "Shift Right" and set the number to 2
* Choose your starting byte by clicking the + button after "Start Byte". You can try to start on byte 0, but it will crash more often than not.
* Click "Run"

You may get something playable, or you may get a crash. To get different corruptions, increase Start Byte, Add, or Shift Right, or change the Corrupt Every number. Do note that if you set your Add or Shift Right numbers too high, it simply won't do anything. Also, note that you can check the "Enable NES CPU Jam Protection" box if you keep getting CPU jams. This will lessen the amount of corruption you get, but may prevent crashes. I suggest using the emulator Nestopia for NES corruptions, since its rewind feature can help you deal with some of your corruptions' bullshit.

Now, for SNES games, you'll need to make some changes. First of all, since the games are much bigger, I'd recommend setting your Increment to 5000, or 3000 if you're trying to be precise. You also may have a very hard time getting any corruptions to work with "Auto End" turned on, especially if you're using a lower number in "Corrupt Every". Generally speaking, you'll need to adjust both the Start and End Byte numbers. Get them relatively close to each other, but not too close; a couple thousand apart, at least. Also, when doing it this way, you can feel free to set "Corrupt Every" to a very low number if you like. One thing to bear in mind (that I just learned) is that different data is stored in different bit ranges. For example, the early bit ranges may control the background, while the mid controls sprites and the high controls music. Don't be afraid to move your Start Byte all around.

That's about it. Corrupting is certainly not a science, and requires a lot of trial and error. Also, some games just don't want to corrupt at all.

Which programm do you use for streaming?

Is there anything worth using besides OBS?

Xsplit



I haven't looked into that one. Is it easy to use? Because, you know, I'm pretty handicapped when it comes to technology.

Yeah it's really simple and doesn't hog resources like Xsplit. For what you're doing it probably doesn't matter but the bloat on Xsplit makes it really hard to stream some games. Right click in the scenes panel to add a scene, right click in the sources panel to add a source (window or screen region,) do audio shit in settings > audio, add your stream key in settings > broadcast. That's about all there is unless you want to change broadcast quality in the encoding tab.

And here I thought you'd actually bought into that whole PS4 thing where you can stream games as you play them.

... does anybody even use/want that feature?

I want and would use that feature on my current consoles.

That'd be pretty cool. I like streaming; it's fun even with a small audience.

So, I downloaded OBS and started checking it out. Looks like it has pretty much everything Xsplit has, but for free instead of putting 50+% of it behind a paywall. I haven't tried streaming anything with it yet, but there are some things about it that still confuse me. I've set my streaming service to Twitch, but I don't know what the Play Path/Stream Key is. I would assume it needs my Twitch account, but there's no place to enter it, unless it asks for it right before you start streaming. Also, OBS doesn't have the convenient bandwidth test that would tell me if my current settings were working properly for my stream. Neither my internet connection nor my laptop are the best, so I always had to drop the bitrate pretty far to get a smooth stream. I suppose I could just copy my settings from Xsplit, but I'd like to have that test all the same.

www.twitch.tv/login?redir...t%2Fdashboard%2Fstreamkey

And yeah just mess with the settings until it's as high as you can go without dropping frames (should say Frames Dropped: or something on the bottom.) Make sure to put audio encoding to AAC instead of SPEEX. I don't know what the default is but that's the main reason OBS is so much better.

Ah, thank you for that.

To give you all a taste of what this stream will likely be like, I've been playing a randomized file for practice (not the same file I'll be using for the stream). I just got into Viridian Forest, and this is my party:

Raikou (starter); Plus; Frenzy Plant, Sludge Bomb
Regice; Cloud Nine; Dragon Claw
Seadra; Shadow Tag; Fury Swipes, Destiny Bond, Nature Power, Solarbeam
Torchic; Water Absorb; Psycho Boost, Smellingsalt, Return
Ekans; Speed Boost; Bullet Seed, Knock Off
Larvitar; Sand Veil; Counter, Air Cutter

I also just picked up a Focus Band inside the forest.

Here you can look for the best settings for your connection: <<obsproject.com/estimator|OBS Estimator>>

Hey guy, been a while since i've seen you around.

Anyway, there was a big flap about twitch and PS4's "Play Room" feature, since it features real live video feeds with AR features, and you can kinda picture the rest of what happened...

So, yeah, just a reminder that I'm doing this tomorrow.