About the route:
If you play in GBA mode, you can buy a Gasha Seed from the Advance Shop, which would be faster than getting the one in D1. It also means that you can plant both Seeds before entering D1 so there's a good chance you don't have to farm kills later on.
After getting the Gasha Nut at the farmer's spot you can do another Toilet warp, savewarp and hold up while respawning, which gets you to Yoll Graveyard faster.
Savewarping after rescuing Nayru is probably faster than using the harp.
There's quite a long cutscene after you defeat Veran that also counts towards the final time so it would be nice if you could call the credits directly. Although I have no idea if that's possible at all and how long it would take.
I've uploaded scripts that help determine drops to my userfiles. You should use the ones labeled "(slash)" when you use a swordslash to kill an enemy, and the other ones in any other instance. Hopefully they'll make luck manipulation a bit more enjoyable.
Another thing that is going to become important is health management since you don't need to carry a potion around anymore and deathwarps are faster than savewarps on the English version.
A bunch of great suggestions! The warp to yoll graveyard is completely new to me :O
It should be possible to call the credits, using sockfolder's setup for arbitrary code execution. But it'll take some time, it might not end up being very much faster than just going through the cutscenes. Should be interesting to mess around with, though.
Here's the route I have in mind: http://pastebin.com/2VyMtk7q
I'm interested in helping to make the TAS for this. I'm not sure if anyone else (SBD?) wants to help at the moment. If not I'll just work on it myself. Of course, I'll post WIPs, so that the keen eyes of the TASing community can let me know if there are any tricks I'm not using. But I'll do a sloppy run-through first, to make sure the route works.
Probably the iffiest part about the route is how to get 40 kills for the gasha trees to grow. Inevitably we'll need to farm some kills. The best place I could think of is the feather room in d2 since it has a bunch of keese, but, it will be a pain...
I know I'm not the first to suggest it. At least now it could be more useful, since you don't need the essences, you never need to return with text warping shenanigans.
Do you know what happens when you return to save Nayru? The guards should be gone, but since you have the mystery seeds it should try to start the cutscene...
It should be possible to skip most of d2 in a TAS.
In d2, you would go as far as getting the feather. With a bit of pitwalking, all that's required is a miniboss fight, not even a small key is necessary.
Now, normally, you need to finish d2 to trigger the event where moosh appears at Yoll Graveyard. But if you have the feather, a bomb, and pegasus seeds (obtainable via the text warp + pitwalking), it is possible to cross the holes without moosh. You can't pitwalk because they're 1 tile wide. But with a precise bomb jump, you can cross the 4-hole gap to get cheval's rope, which triggers the rest of the events to get to Tokay Island.
I've tested this with walk-through-walls instead of pitwalking, and it appears to work, at least up to tokay island. The text warp is a significant detour, however you can get a bomb chest to skip the cutscene at Ambi's palace, and you'll also get the pegasus seeds pretty early... so it's probably worth it.
Also you can get the red ring while you're at it, for a quicker final battle.
Can you get any ring you want? Because in that case the Dbl. Edged Ring would be a lot faster. (The Whimsical Ring could be even faster than that but the luck manipulation is really difficult.)
The rings you obtain are based on a bunch of event flags and "present map visited" flags. I don't know if they can be manipulated to get that particular ring. The red ring just happens to be there without us doing anything special.
Edit: turns out you can one-cycle veran with the red ring anyway.
Yes, it warps straight to veran's final form. There's no seasons equivalent... you can't do the text warp to get out of bounds, as far as I know.
mabdulra is posting a highlight on his twitch for a setup to warp to veran. It's not 100% consistent, but I'm sure it would be a piece of cake in a TAS.
This skips dungeons 7 and 8 entirely. Most of dungeons 4 and 5 can be skipped - you just need the switch hook and the cane of somaria. Dungeon 6 must be completed to save Nayru and get the tune of ages. Then you can warp straight to veran.
Also you can get the red ring while you're at it, for a quicker final battle.
Hitting the switches is slower, I think the fastest way is to enter the passage from inside the castle, then savewarp. Note that both the 3rd underwater room, and the area above it, both set the "been here" flag. The underwater room is closer, so you'd savewarp there.
Oh, and I found a way to do the ring glitch with a portal on-screen. You need to get into the correct x-position to trigger the ring box glitch, and go close to the top of the screen (I don't know why this is necessary). Use the rocs feather and pause on a frame where the shadow is displayed. The shadow overrides the time portal's x-position.
Then walk down to roughly the y-position of the portal and trigger the glitch again. This saves travelling through time twice to get the red ring. (Or the pegasus ring. Whatever floats your boat.)
It should take less than a minute to get the red ring. It's still possible to get the positioning glitch without a time portal on the screen. It would be even faster if there were a way to get the glitched ring box with a time portal on-screen, but I haven't been able to do it.
Is it not slightly faster to travel to level 7 with the glitch (ignoring the time needed to visit the tile)? Remember, you can scroll to the right side of the screen as well. Four screens up, two screens right, dive (cancelling the glitch), visit king zora.
Also, it should be faster to visit the area from ambi's palace, rather than from out of bounds, since you'd get stuck in a wall.
I don't think it matters what you have equipped - the important thing is that the pegasus or ember seeds are loaded into the seed shooter (whether or not it's equipped).
Also, check your ring box. You now have the like-like ring. Congratulations. (the ring obtained is based on in-game events which I don't think can be manipulated at this point.)
By the way, I mentioned earlier you need to visit a specific tile on the map for this glitch to work. That tile is actually in ambi's palace. The quickest way to do this is to enter the palace through the front door, then go to the 3rd underwater screen in the secret passage, then savewarp back to the entrance. This takes 26 seconds. But in total, by my calculations, it saves a bit less than a minute if you use the glitch to reach dungeons 7 and 8 (most of the saved time is for D8).
I guess this is an alternative to the cutscene glitch discussed on page 29. An advantage to this method is that you don't need to watch the cutscene where you get the bombs, assuming you do the toilet warp very early to get a bomb chest.
jlun2 wrote:
If you want help, you can try recording the input for it while doing it on emulator so others with better knowledge of the game's memory can see what's going on.
In this case it's not difficult to duplicate, though I could share my save file, which certainly seems to affect things.
Video
I was messing around with the glitch, just to the left of the leftmost black tile. Twice, it booted me into gba mode... usually it did something else. Then once, my restore point disappeared, and I tried to exit, but the 3ds froze when I hit X to close the software. Then I couldn't boot it...
Okay... I would advise extreme caution doing this glitch on a 3ds. Somehow, I rendered oracle of ages permanently unplayable. I wiped the SD card and redownloaded it, and still, I couldn't boot it. Luckily I use a hacked 3ds with emunand, so I was able to roll back my system to a previous state. Someone doing this with an unmodified 3ds may not be able to fix it...
Anyway, I noticed a potentially useful effect of the glitch in gambatte. It glitches link's position so that he is stuck on the left end of the screen... yet somehow he can scroll both left and right? Anyway, this lets him re-enter the map. I haven't gotten it to work on real hardware, though, only with gambatte. The way I did it, was I didn't move horizontally at all, and I moved up to the correct row of the map. I played the harp on the second tile from the bottom to go to the past. I activated the glitch, closed the map, then quickly opened it and did it again. Then link was stuck on the left side of the screen. I was able to glitch over to the eighth dungeon, and I cancelled the effect by playing the harp.
Apparently, bizhawk uses gambatte's core. This could save time travelling to dungeons 7 and 8, though it doesn't seem to be consistent with real hardware.
Edit: actually, this works on other emulators if you simply equip the ember or pegasus seeds with the seed shooter... it might work on a real cartridge, but I can only test with a flash cartridge at the moment, which may be more prone to crashing on bad memory writes.
So, the data that would be manipulated is event data, followed by map data. You wouldn't be able to trigger most new events, but you could re-trigger old ones, which might lead to other glitches. Using rings, you could re-trigger old events by overwriting stuff with the friendship ring. Also, somehow I moved the pirate ship to the forest by zeroing out the events... not sure how that happened.
Then there's the map data for the present starting at address 0xc700. Each byte is a "sector" of the map. You can seriously screw up some areas by setting bit 0 of these bytes, but there may not be much point, this late in the game. Though I did manage to get into the cave of ordeals by doing this (non-linked game), there was no escape from it.
Unfortunately, the more interesting and useful data is just before the ring list. Oh well, this is hypothetical anyway.
Oh, and scorpianman, it would be great if you could figure out how to semi-consistently reboot into GBA mode. I haven't been able to - the save file probably makes a difference.
I'm trying to get Vasu to not crash the game. Here's what I know about the ring box level.
If you have visited the top-left area of symmetry city in the present, the results will be less interesting. So, that tile should be blacked out on your map screen.
Assuming you've never visited there, and you've restored the tuni nut (which is probably necessary), there is one more factor which affects the ring box level - your shield level. Level 1 shield gives you the ring box level 10 (0x0a). Level 2 shield gives you ring box level 15 (0x0f). You don't need to have a shield, just check the shop to confirm the shield level.
The level 10 ring box seems to crash in a consistent way.
The level 15 ring box usually crashes the game, but in many different ways... one time, it actually let me go to the ring screen, though it was graphically glitchy. I can't figure out how to do it again.
The level 11 ring box (0x0b) doesn't crash, but I don't think there's a way to get it with the glitch - only through memory editing.
If I could talk to vasu without it crashing, I could probably manipulate the RAM past the ring list. I'm not entirely sure what it contains, though.
scorpianman42 wrote:
It seems that the rings in the glitched list depend on what rings you currently have in your actual list (the normal one accessible through Vasu), if you appraise a ring after getting the glitched ring box it will change the rings in the glitched list (assuming it's a new ring)
I think one of the rings is the same as the number of unappraised rings you have. If you have 2 unappraised rings, it should be the power ring level 2.
Pokota wrote:
SBD wrote:
If the majority of people wants to see a linked game TAS, it could easily be changed right now since the run needs to be redone from scratch anyway.
In a linked game TAS we wouldn't bother with the Gasha Trees and just get the rings we need from the Ring Secret.
I don't know if that's such a good idea... did the Seasons TAS even pick up any rings?
Alright so I noticed an odd side effect of selecting the tile while at 7a. the second start screen is glitched (as found before). the screen looks like it has been taken over by rings. you can select things on screen like normal, however if I go to where the ring box should be, It instead says the text for bombs, but I cannot equip them.
also, If I select the last ring I have and hit right, which should bring me back to the first item, it instead goes to another ring. I can scroll through a huge list of random rings, most of which are the friendship ring. I can equip any of the rings and gain the effects of the ring. I have seen the pegasus ring, and the power ring LVL 3. I don't know what determines what rings are in the giant list, but will look into it on another file and see
Edit: I tried a different file and different rings are in the list
also, the poe clock was in the list (after I have the upgraded sword) and I can equip it
Yeah, my experience is mostly consistent. The "bombs" is actually the ring box level 100 or whatever. I got lots of friendship rings, the red ring, pegasus ring, various others. I guess the rings are pulled out of adjacent RAM, but I'm not sure what that data represents. Unfortunately, it crashes if you look at the ring list with the jeweler. Pity... it would be cool to overwrite data with rings.
...wait, did you say you can equip the poe clock?
That is an interesting tile, I found another tile that lets you regain control of link, as I stated originally, and after experimenting with it for a few minutes I can conclude that it is not as complex as I thought, it involves making a time portal at (5,4) (the upper left tile of the middle of the 'X' on screen), then digging the tile to the left, hitting select on the second frame of the digging animation (the shovel is on the top-right of link's sprite). then selecting the tile within a small frame window (normally it works after half a second of the arrow showing your current tile appearing). this will give a similar result of being at 7a, but the game will crash upon doing much of anything else.
I did this result after regaining control from 7a, and it reset the game, but the game was much brighter than before.
Edit: after doing both selections a few more times, It doesn't always return the result of resetting the game with a brightness error
I have no Idea what all affects this outcome, I can only get it to work a small part of the time. (I also thought that it might be tile specific, but have gotten it to work on other tiles now)
Also, when I select the buggy tile while at 7a, I lose 30 rupees, not gain
It seems that the digging animation will override the portal's x-position... that is, it will use the x-position for the lump of dirt that flies off. Or maybe if an item comes up, it will use that. I dunno, it sounds like you just happened to hit a specific x-position with the lump of dirt, but I could be wrong.
"game was much brighter than before" - sounds like it reset into GBA mode... I bet the advance shop will be open.
Because I couldn't get the bug working on emulator, I went to test the "This would correspond to whether you've visited that tile" part. I went OOB and checked every tile as I proceed across that row, I was able to get the bug to work after I visited the tile right of the bugged one (D 15). Could you explain the "If there's no time portals or anything on the screen" part of your post? if there are time portals on screen, what happens to that value?
If there's a time portal, its x-position seems to take precedence over link's, so the value will be fixed. Of course, that might be a good thing, since it's precise. If there's a seed on-screen, it looks like it will use the seed's x-coordinate about 50% of the time.
If VBA (or whatever you're using) has a memory viewer, I'd suggest using that to get the most out of this. Anyway, to get coordinate 7a (the most interesting so far) you need to stand a hair in front of the rightmost black tile. Just one of link's pixels should be in front of it when facing right. It writes over a bunch of variables (rupees, ring box level, heart pieces).
...ahm... one more thing - value 7a screws up your status screen. I think I have 255 rings now, and I have "L-" pieces of heart, to which the game protests "Ewww!!!".
So I've found a bit more info.
In order for any of this to work, bit 4 of address 0xc8e2 must be set. This would correspond to whether you've visited that tile, but it's overflowing into some other data. I don't know what this corresponds to, but a 100% completed game has this set. (edit: or, maybe just walk there? :P)
The primary factor which determines the effect, is the variable at address ff8d. This corresponds to the x-position of a sprite. If there's no time portals or anything on the screen, it corresponds to link's x-position.
It goes through a loop with this variable, and each iteration, it decrements the value. So, values 84-89 (for instance) have the same effect because they all eventually execute the loop with [ff8d] == 83. This particular value has a glitchy effect which ends the loop somehow.
Here are the values I've tested... some effects seem to vary between games:
06-12 = nothing (sometimes changes music tempo ???)
13 = crash
14-22 = nothing (?)
23-25 = shooting gallery "strike" sound effect (sometimes crash?)
26-2f = crash (invalid opcode)
30-3c = crash (because of 2f)
3d-5e = crash (because of 3c)
5f-77 = crash (because of 5e)
78-79 = graphical map glitch
7a = graphical map glitch + get rupees (???) (second time crashes)
7b-81 = crash (because of 7a)
82-83 = crash (different cause)
84-89 = graphical map glitch (1st time), use A button item (subsequent times)
8a-92 = graphical, audio glitches (1st time), crash (subsequent times)
93-9a = crash (because of 92)
That's the range of link's possible x-positions. It might be possible to get higher values (I don't think lower would matter).
There's not much particularly useful so far, but perhaps some of those crashes could be studied further, who knows.
I found another save file which works, and studied it a bit in bgb. Naturally it's a chaotic mess, so I haven't made much progress. However, it all starts with a jump which will land the program counter into the OAM (sprite) memory. It does this at a time when video hardware is inaccessible, so it receives 0xff as an opcode. I'm not even sure if that's the correct behavior, but I know that some emulators don't bother emulating the inaccessibility at all. So, this could be a source of emulator incompatibility.
I was messing around with the out of bounds areas in OOA, and came a cross this glitch. When I selected that tile (It would be C 15 on the map) it locked the game. I messed around with it a bit more and each time it seemed to just give a graphical error and lock the game. one of the times selecting the tile sent me to the screen that comes up if you put the game into an original game boy (the one that says it can only be played on GBC). I came to believe that what happens after selecting the tile is based around what is drawn on screen, and I eventually found a pattern that allowed me to regain control after selecting the tile, but the game locks shortly after doing anything. One of the times, the game took me back to the file select screen, all of the files were erased, and the game was locked. when I reset the game, all of the files were indeed erased. I was wondering if anyone had any more information about this odd bug, a few google searches revealed nothing.
I also found that it does not work on Visual boy advance, but does work on 3DS/GBC.
I advise caution if messing with this bug, I have had it wipe my saves (as stated above) and crash my 3DS (it was fine after resetting the console)
Edit: forgot the link, thank you Patashu for linking it
Very interesting. I got some results once - just some weird graphical glitches in the map screen, then I closed it and everything was normal.
On another attempt, it crashed and the save file was wiped. I didn't think that was a problem since I have other saves... but I can't get the trick to work anymore. Could you share some of your save files that have interesting results?
Also, what is it that you mean by what's drawn on screen - on the grid map, or on the screen with link?