[Marth]

Don't forget, though, boss fights use artificial intelligence. Ring boxes probably don't.
In other words, a boss is designed to react to certain moves done by the player,
and that is supposed to be known (although it is probably meant to be a bit unpredictable).
A ring box only gives random numbers of rings.

I don't know if the ring boxes in SA are truly random, but they aren't affected by anything I can see.
I almost always do homing attacks (same speed), and it's at roughly the same time (haven't checked
the centiseconds), and I already know it's not anything about the number of rings Sonic has at that time.

About DS emulation, why is it so nowhere? I thought the big problem would be the touch screen.
It's basically a slightly-improved N64, right? (Or maybe the dual-display is hard to emulate.)

[Groudon]

About DS emulation, why is it so nowhere? I thought the big problem would be the touch screen.
It's basically a slightly-improved N64, right? (Or maybe the dual-display is hard to emulate.)

I just downloaded DSemu and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and the damn thing won't even load.  It stops responding too often, and when it does respond, it stops right away.  I'm downloading the Rush ROM and that might be causing it.  After the ROM is downloaded, I'll see if the problem is fixed.

edit: Nope.  DSemu 0.4.6 is a piece of crap.  Absolutely nothing works on it when I start a ROM.
edit2: NDeSmuME works.  And it plays Sonic Rush way past the title screen.
edit3: Actually, it works until you select Gameplay.  Then it stops working.

[Crowbar]

Don't forget, though, boss fights use artificial intelligence. Ring boxes probably don't.
In other words, a boss is designed to react to certain moves done by the player,
and that is supposed to be known (although it is probably meant to be a bit unpredictable).
A ring box only gives random numbers of rings.

I don't know if the ring boxes in SA are truly random, but they aren't affected by anything I can see.
I almost always do homing attacks (same speed), and it's at roughly the same time (haven't checked
the centiseconds), and I already know it's not anything about the number of rings Sonic has at that time.

There's no such thing as true randomness in games or anything related to computers. In Megaman TAS people can cause enemies to drop particular powerups they need by doing very specific, frame-perfect dances before killing them. The same sort of thing will hold true of ? ring boxes in Rush and any other game that has them, but since we've come a long way since the NES the method used to "randomise" their output may be too complex to be manipulated practically.

[nitsuja]

It would be simple for the game to do something like "if the player is in Boost mode, add a 10% chance of getting more rings" or "add a 2% chance of getting more rings for each enemy the player has killed in the level". Until someone disassembles the game's instructions to see what it's really doing, it's hard to know or notice that sort of thing.

As for bosses, I know that a surprising number of the Sonic Advance 1/3 bosses use a random number generator to determine their actions, and aren't reacting to the player in any meaningful way. Even if you somehow do the exact same things during the fight, the boss can still do completely different things as a result of whatever happened before the boss fight. (Ice Mountain, Angel Island, Sunset Hill, Ocean Base, Toy Kingdom, Chaos Angel, are the only ones I am sure do that.)

[Groudon]

As for bosses, I know that a surprising number of the Sonic Advance 1/3 bosses use a random number generator to determine their actions, and aren't reacting to the player in any meaningful way. Even if you somehow do the exact same things during the fight, the boss can still do completely different things as a result of whatever happened before the boss fight. (Ice Mountain, Angel Island, Sunset Hill, Ocean Base, Toy Kingdom, Chaos Angel, are the only ones I am sure do that.)

So your jumping around on Toy Kingdom Boss in your TAS video of SAdv3 was just to make it entertaining.  I thought at first that would make the boss do a certain action, but since you said that, I get it now.  That explains why every time I try to beat my TK boss time, I do the same exact thing and it's never the same.

And I assume the bosses in Rush use a random number generator as well, since I had a lot of trouble getting my Night Carnival boss time with Sonic, despite me doing the exact same thing (sometimes the electric shield on the spiked ball drops at the right time, sometimes it doesn't drop).  And my Leaf Storm boss record with Blaze... I can never get under 1:50 anymore since I got the record.  Anyway, if a working ROM of Rush is released and the slowdown method can be done on a DS emulator, a TAS run can be done, which might mean people would find exactly what can produce max rings from the ? ring box and if the bosses are like the ones in SAdv1 and 3 random-wise.

[Marth]

There's no such thing as true randomness in games or anything related to computers. In Megaman TAS people can cause enemies to drop particular powerups they need by doing very specific, frame-perfect dances before killing them. The same sort of thing will hold true of ? ring boxes in Rush and any other game that has them, but since we've come a long way since the NES the method used to "randomise" their output may be too complex to be manipulated practically.

It's close enough to random, though, and it isn't necessarily possible to manipulate.
Maybe the ring boxes change all the time, but maybe they don't.
The numbers could be preset from when the stage loads or at least from when Sonic approaches
the ring box and when it pops into view. I think earlier Mario Party games did this with the Dice Block.
But we can't know for sure unless the Chankast people develop a savestate system
or unless someone does some special hacking or something.