Submission #1745: Randil's NES Tiny Toon Adventures in 11:18.25

Nintendo Entertainment System
baseline
FCEU 0.98.12
40695
60
22482
Unknown
Tiny Toon Adventures (U).nes
Submitted by Randil on 11/2/2007 3:05:21 PM
Submission Comments

Tiny Toon TAS by Randil

Tiny Toon is a short and fast platformer, with varying levels and nice music and graphics. This run improves the published run by 635 frames (10.583sec), due to optimized movements, a new trick that allows me to accelerate faster, and a new "hyper jump", that allows you to jump ridiculously high.
  • Emulator used: FCEU 0.98.16
  • Abuses programming errors in the game.

Goals, in order of priority:

  • Aims for fastest possible time.
  • Aims for maximum amount of carrots.
  • Aims for maximum score.

About the game:

Tiny Toon Adventures has a lot in common with Super Mario bros. You can walk around, jump on enemies to kill them, and pick up carrots, just like you can pick up coins in Super Mario Bros.
You can trade 30 carrots for one extra life if you meet up with the pig Hampton, but this wastes time, so I'll have to carry around with all my carrots. If you finish a world with an amount of carrots that is divisible by 11, you will go to a bonus level, which of course, wastes time in a TAS, so I avoid this. That is why I end the run with 98 carrots instead of 99.
You can transform into other characters besides Buster Bunny. You choose at the beginning of each world what character you want to be able to transform to. You transform into another character by hitting a balloon, and picking up the ball that falls out of it. The only other character I use in this run is Furball, because of his wall climbing abiliity. The fastest way to climb walls is to hold down the A button for 11 frames on each jump.

About the left+right glitch:

This game has a nasty bug lurking inside. If you press left+right at the same time, you will turn left and start accelerating to the right very fast. This way you can reach a higher top speed than you normally can. Obviously, this trick is used almost everywhere since it allows me to reach the end of the level faster.
There is also a trick that allows you to accelerate faster. Once you have reached a certain speed, you can press down+jump to make a super-jump, or down to dash. This will give you a speed boost, that allows you to accelerate to top speed a little sooner. This trick saves about 2 frames compared to accelerating normally.
There is one more weird thing with the left+right glitch, which I call the "hyper jump" (super jump is already taken :P). If you make a dash jump when you've reached top speed, you will jump to to left at top speed, instead of right! Not only do you instantly change direction, the jump you make is also extremely high, allowing you to get deal with vertical section better. The downside to this trick is that you can only do this when you're moving at top speed to the right, and you always jump to the left.

Improvement information:

Besides using the new left+right tricks to save time at several places, I manage to optimize movement here and there, by looking at subpixels. Another standard TAS-trick is to avoid bumping into walls, since this will set your speed to 0.
The boss on level 3-3 is killed significantly faster, both because I make him appear sooner, and because I do a hyper jump to hit him as soon as possible. Speaking of which, I also use hyper jumps to hit the last boss, but this does not save any time, it's only a stylistic choise.
I try to be more entertaining on the bosses where I have to wait before the door appears. I also do more interesting stuff on the pirate boss, such as standing inside the wall for a short period of time. :)
I also end the game with 98 carrots (highest possible), and a slightly higher score.

Useful RAM addresses:

0061: Your X pixel position.
0060: Your X subpixel position.
0064: Your X speed, measured in 16*subpixels.
0069: Your Y pixel position.
0068: Your Y subpixel position.
006C: Your Y speed, measured in 16*subpixels.
0070: In-air-flag. You can jump when this is 0.
07E8: In-game clock: 100-seconds.
07E7: In-game clock: 10-seconds.
07E6: In-game clock: seconds.
07E5: In-game clock: Frames.
I hope you enjoy watching this run! :)

NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots of this movie and placed them here. I'm not sure I got the right ROM though. (I tried Tiny Toon Adventures (U).nes, which was the closest match to what you wrote.) Well, here goes! Feel free to clean up the list.

adelikat: Accepting for publication as an improvement to the published movie.
Last Edited by TASVideoAgent on 11/6/2008 9:13 AM
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