Submission #5869: sugarfoot's Arcade Double Dragon in 07:13.06

(Link to video)
Arcade
baseline
MAME-rr 0.139 v0.1 beta
24877
57.44482853375637
2437
Unknown
ddragonw.zip
Submitted by sugarfoot on 3/20/2018 3:50:21 PM
Submission Comments
This is an optimization of my previous Double Dragon TAS submission - with smarter use of damage tables and new combos, please enjoy as I beat the game in under 7 minutes! (6:58)

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: Mame-RR 0.139-v0.1-beta
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Get through game as fast as possible
  • Take better advantage of enemy AI
  • kill multiple enemies with single weapon toss (knives, dynamite, etc)
  • Show new out of bounds area I discovered for Stage 3 Boss

Comments

This 6:58 run is an improvement of my previous TAS completed in 8:03 (#5849: sugarfoot's Arcade Double Dragon in 09:42.33). New combo use, better routes, and better understanding of enemy AI allowed me to complete a much cleaner run.
With some more research on knockdown behavior for Adobo/Green Bolos - and some minor cleanups on new combo strats, I think it's possible to shave an additional ~20 seconds off Double Dragon TAS's

Stage by stage comments

Stage 1

New bread and butter 13-point damage combo shaved off a lot of time (punch, punch, knee, knee, elbow) = (2 dmg, 2 dmg, 2 dmg, 2 dmg, 5 dmg) = 13

Stage 2

Very minor cleanups from previous run. Discovered Y-offset of 90 or 91 is the key to getting enemies to fall off stage. The boss is on a global timer after the first round of enemies dies - so there's no point in killing the two whip girls any faster, the boss will still come out at exact same time.

Stage 3

Sacrificed style for speed in Double Bolo fight
Found a new out of bounds area for Green Bolo fight! There is a cliff in the bottom right hand corner

Stage 4

Hot Potato time with dynamite. Figured out how to gather weapons and bundle Bolos together and kill everyone at same time. Intentionally take damage to keep enemies right over the dynamite (glancing blows can do less damage)
Cleaner path up to boss on ledge with less movement
Found a little fun with garbage memory after the enemies clear out of boss area (you can make them drop whips and boxes too). The only common theme I see from what shows up is - it could be unfreed memory from enemies that are thrown off ledges

Other comments

Did I mention how frustrating Hot Potato Time was in Stage 4???
Please visit arcade thread if you want to stay up to date on RAM tables, combos, and new submissions: Forum/Posts/466495

RAM Addresses Of Interest

000003C1: Player 1 Health
0000041F: Player 2 Health
0000047D: Enemy 1 Health
000004D2: Enemy 2 Health
00000527: Enemy 3 Health
0000057C: Enemy 4 Health
000005D1: Enemy 5 Health
00000626: Enemy 6 Health
0000067B: Enemy 7 Health
000006D0: Enemy 8 Health
00000725: Boss Health

feos: Judging...
feos: Replaced the movie with a trimmed version.
feos: As was said in the thread(s), Easy is the fastest difficulty for this game, and the harder ones are only harder due to enemies' HP. 2-player run would lag lake crazy, even this one does. What looks unreasonable in this run is in fact either lag reduction or enemy manipulation.
Overall, nice run, good audience feedback, accepting to Moons.
Note to publisher: This movie was started while unpaused, and mame-rr beta autopauses on any movie load. So use alpha version, run with avi enabled, then manually open the movie replay dialog while unpaused and start the movie. The emu will restart, avi will also restart, not putting any garbage video at the start of the encode.
fsvgm777: Processing.
Last Edited by adelikat on 10/25/2023 1:36 PM
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