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To start things off, here is a comparison video which shows the level 4 from my new TAS on the left, and the level 4 from my old TAS on the right:

In the first section of this level (the first 3 checkpoints), I save about 12 frames by moving in a way that reduces lag. This also has the effect of not messing up the level’s scroll function, so unlike my old level 4 TAS, the graphics aren’t corrupted in the second half of this level.

At 0:31 in my level 4 comparison video, I use a new strategy to save about 15 more frames. What I do here is that I hold right at full speed while I jump against a wall, and keep holding right after I hit the wall. Then, once I’ve fallen far enough, I pause, switch to holding left on the next frame, and unpause on the frame after that. The result of all of this is that I go from moving right with max-speed to moving left at max-speed in a handful of frames, which lets me land past the first ice pillar when I land from this fall (which I couldn’t do in the old TAS). Additionally, I bonk my head on a specific point on the ceiling of this section which allows me to start falling faster than I normally could otherwise (the ceiling here is a series of zig-zag lines like a zipper, and only one specific spot pushes me down really quickly after I jump).

The next spot where I save time occurs at 0:40 in my level 4 comparison video. In my old TAS, I held Left+Right at the same time until my y-position wrapped around past 255, at which point I fell down through the floor. I then held L+R again after landing out of bounds to clip further down into the next hallway. In this new TAS, I start holding L+R while I’m sliding backwards on the slippery slope. As a result, I fall off of the slope while my y-position is increasing, which causes it to keep increasing while I’m falling! (normally, your y-position only changes in level 4 when holding L+R while standing on the ground). Additionally, once I clip through the floor, I hold L+R to clip further down into the next hallway without landing on the out-of-bounds platform first. As a side effect of all of this, my y-position is too low to be able to pick up the upcoming ice-block, so I have to hold L+R a little longer to rise up high enough to grab the next block. I also save a little bit of time in this hallway by alternating pressing right and neutral to clip through the invisible walls, which is faster than what the old TAS did of holding down to clip through the walls (which also reduces your speed by a lot). These invisible walls seem to exist because the room was loaded in a bizarre way, and the checkpoint-walls haven't had time to correctly load into place, but truth be told, I'm not really sure what creates the two of them. All told, this segment finishes with me gaining another 20 frames over the old TAS.

In the final section of the TAS (1:08 in my level 4 comparison video), I save about 15-20 frames over my old TAS by hitting the end-of-level marker slightly faster using better lag reduction.

After all of this, we finish level 4 almost a second faster than the old TAS did!

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In this level, I’m able to save a nice chunk of time by using faster jumps off of the springs. Normally, you jump off the springs with a speed of 64, but if you press and release right frame-perfectly, then you can jump with a speed of 192, which speeds things up quite a bit.

The biggest timesave in this level comes about as a result of reducing lag on the 4 sections with red faces that blow bubbles. By pressing select a random number of times, you can alter RNG, which alters the direction and number of bubbles that the faces blow. This in turn alters the number of lag frames that the faces cause. Since the faces blow for a fixed number of non-lag frames, all the lag frames you save translate into frames of real timesave, which saves about 3 seconds-worth of time.

In order to find the fastest pattern of bubbles blowing, I wrote a lua script to help simulate through many possible outcomes. What my script does is that it starts on a specific frame, and then tries pressing select a random number of times until the timer in address 0X0B reaches a specific value that it hits when the faces are done blowing wind (0X0B is a timer which increments by 1 on every non-lag frame, and stays the same on lag-frames, so it acts pretty much the same as counting the number of lag frames). My script would simulate through 100 tries of pressing different combinations, and then report which frames to press select on to get the least number of lag frames. Technically speaking, I made 4 copies of this script, since each one needs a different value for 0X0B, but since they’re all basically the same script, I’m just listing my script for the first red blowing face here:

Red Face Lua Script:

  math.randomseed( os.time() )
  file = io.open("resultsOfScriptFile.txt", "w")
  io.output(file)
  currentBestNum = 370
  tempBest = 600

  for numTrials = 0, 100 do
  	io.write("Try: ", numTrials, "\n")
  	io.flush()
  	savestate.loadslot(1)
  	tempSelectArray = {}
  	for i = 0, 400 do
  		tempSelectArrayi = false
  	end

  	frameNum = 0
  	while memory.readbyte(0XB) ~= 110 and frameNum < 399 do
  		if math.random(0, 7) == 0 then
  			tempSelectArrayframeNum = true
  			joypad.set({Select = true}, 1)
  		end
  	frameNum = frameNum + 1
  	emu.frameadvance()
  	end


  	if frameNum < tempBest then
  		tempBest = frameNum
  		io.write("New best of ", tempBest, "\n\n")
  		io.flush()
  	end

  	if frameNum < 399 and frameNum < currentBestNum then
  		io.write("New best of ", frameNum, ":\n\n")
  		io.flush()
  		currentBestNum = frameNum
  		for i = 0, frameNum do
  			io.write(i + 65400, ": ")
  			io.flush()

  			if tempSelectArrayi == true then
  				io.write("s\n")
  				io.flush()
  			else
  				io.write("_\n")
  				io.flush()
  		end
  	end
  		io.write("End_Of_Sequence\n\n")
  		io.flush()
  	end

  end
  io.close(file)

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