Emptyeye

So awhile back I completed a speed run of the NES game Astyanax. I let it sit on my DVD recorder for a bit, and then tried to get it from the recorder’s hard drive onto a DVD. Weirdness then commenced.

On my first attempt, I burned the run, put the DVD into my computer….then realized that I hadn’t finalized the DVD. Oops. Out of the computer and back into the recorder the DVD went and I took care of that step. Out of the recorder and back into my computer…and what the heck happened to my run?!

There was a weird white line at the left edge of the visual area, almost denoting where the recording began. Even stranger, though, was that the recording as a whole had been moved up some, and on the bottom was a row of what appeared to be memory addresses from the game. Well, clearly, this wouldn’t do. Thinking maybe it was somehow due to my forgetting-to-finalize snafu, I went and made a second copy of the disc, following the proper procedure. The line was gone, but the memory addresses remained.

The strange thing is that I can put the disc in the recorder and it’ll play fine–no memory addresses displaying. The same goes for when I put the disc into another DVD player and watch it on another TV–it plays just like it should. The memory address problem only comes up when I watch the disc on my computer. Further, while it’s hard to tell (Because the video quality is awful), this playthrough of the game (Which is slower than mine by a good amount, if you’re curious) suggests that I’m not the only one with this problem–note the row of white below the LF/SP section.

I guess the next step is letting the administration of SDA know about this and asking if there’s anything that can be done about it.