We just hit 400 current console verified TASes! Another hundred milestone hit about 14 months after the 300 one, relatively quick progress.
Despite this being a big numerical milestone, it all is still coming from the same systems. There is however a lot of interesting development happening that could lead to some verifications on newer systems in the not so distant future.
There is a big PR open in melonDS (
https://github.com/melonDS-emu/melonDS/pull/1955 ) that implements a lot of the complicated cache stuff. Seems to fix some timing issues so it could be a big step forward in DS accuracy once it gets merged. Looks like it still needs a bit of work but pretty exciting to see such a complicated thing being worked on. DS seems like it is the next likely console where a mature console verification pipeline can be built up. I'm looking forward to seeing this happen.
The N64 situation in Ares is also looking good. N64 has RDRAM initialization though, which could impact determinism to some extent. I'm no expert so I don't know how bad it could be. Obviously some runs sync reliably on N64, but this might not extend to more of the library.
If anyone was watching the Team 0% stuff in Mario Maker, they know that the last level was uploaded using TAS playback tools for the Wii U. I found this really surprising and it's cool too see stuff like that come out of nowhere. I haven't researched any of the technical details, but presumably the inputs were hand crafted similar to the Mario Maker 2 demo by TASBot folks. Maybe this approach has some potential for longer runs with some more work to make it less painful?
I personally don't have time to start any new big projects, so I'll be grinding out GBA verifications for the foreseeable future. There are still a lot I want to do.
Onward to 500,