European Speedrunners start off their 8th iteration of ESA Marathon

[Suicide machine 53]

ESA Marathon, which stands for European Speedrunner Assembly (not to be confused with European Space Agency, which shares the same abbreviation) is an annual speedrunning event organised by European speedrunners in a similar vain as USA based GDQ (Games Done Quick), which had its 8th iteration started yesterday.

Marathon is generally described as more speedrunner friendly version of GDQ, due to its lighter requirements for participants in regards to language on stream and games accepted.

Just like year ago, marathon is divided into 2 streams - Stream One, which is scheduled to be online for entire duration of the event and Stream Two, which generally is online between 10:00am and 1:00am. Schedules for which you can find either on ESA main website  or Horaro (Stream One / Stream Two).

This year, donations gathered during the marathon are being donated to Swedish Alzheimer Foundation.

Streams can be watched at:

and

Personally, I have put a bit of effort in preperation of some of the games you'll see during Awful Games block and of course Asghan: The Dragon Slayer, so make sure to check out those 😉

--Sui

[Andytizer 269]

Thanks so much for posting this! Please come back and post highlights/updates as well.

Can you also tell us a bit more about the prep work you did for the games, did they need to be modified to be tracked correctly? 

[Suicide machine 53]

58 minutes ago, Andytizer said:

Thanks so much for posting this! Please come back and post highlights/updates as well.

Can you also tell us a bit more about the prep work you did for the games, did they need to be modified to be tracked correctly? 

In a sense, yes. Asghan: The Dragon Slayer has real compatibility issues nowadays, so I was hoping Havrd with it to set up a virtual machine using Windows XP to get it running. It is technically possible to get it running on Windows 7 and 10 using dgVoodoo and SDB profiles, but Havrd was insisting on stability first and so we ended up settling on VM in the end to make sure the game crashes as little as possibile. To be more specific, it involves a VM with 3D acceleration, but still using nGlide on it to wrap Glide API to Direct3D9, which can be handled fast by VM we are using. The game itself support Direct3D6 if I remember correctly, but it was causing too many issues to be worth solving, even with VM.

[Andytizer 269]

I would encourage people to watch the Asghan stream as it's hilarious and short (30mins). Amazing what a broken game it is and what does/doesn't work from the era of early 3D platform/action games in the vein of Tomb Raider but amusingly bad.

Watch #ESASummer19 starts TODAY at 14:00 CEST! Schedule can be found at https://esamarathon.com/schedule from ESAMarathon on www.twitch.tv