(Link to video)
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Paperboy is a unique game where your goal is to deliver papers to customers for one week. Each day adds more and more difficult obstacles. This run follows the same rules as Randil's original run, getting perfect deliveries on each day and then completing the obstacle course on Sunday.
Uses NesHawk on BizHawk version 2.3.2

Comments

There are two main improvements over Randil's run. One is crashing against motorcycles to end stages early, and the other is lag management (although possibly Randil wasn't concerned with lag since he tried to be more varied and entertaining.)

Emulation differences

Power on timing

The original run of this game has a house distribution that as far as I can tell is not achievable on console from a clean power on state (or even a first frame reset as that run has.) The reason for this is that FCEUX adds an extra power up frame that is not representative of an actual NES. This was my main motivation for making this run.

DMC

This game uses the DMC channel for various sound effects. Car horns, dog barks, crashes, and broken windows all produce DMC channel effects. Whenever the DMC channel is used, there is the possibility of the DMC hardware glitch being encountered. In order to give a higher chance of console verification, I avoided all of these effects whenever possible, except for car horns which are unavoidable. FCEUX does not emulate the DMC glitch.

Optimal route

As demonstrated by CLChambers00, this is not the fastest possible route. A faster route (basically a less laggy one with better motorcycle hits) is possible from a restart, but not from power on. This run is about 200 frames slower then that one.

Memory: Judging
Memory: At first glance this submission appears to aim for the same goal as the published run: it aims for perfect deliveries every day and performs the obstacle course on the last day. However, that run aims for entertainment whereas this one does not and aims for pure speed. The published run has a mediocre entertainment rating of 5.5 and this run cuts out what little entertainment there was to be had. This submission does not have good audience reception and I felt it was in fact incredibly repetitive and dull. As such this movie is not able to be accepted to Moons tier.
However, this movie cannot be accepted to Vault either. The presence of the obstacle course prevents it from being any sort of vault category. The obstacle course can be done on any day of the week and every day of the week, it is not a one time achievement to be tracked, yet the game can still be completed without the obstacle course with essentially no difference. Either perfect deliveries every day or high score could be argued to be full completion but this run is not any of that.
It was suggested that the run be truncated to exclude the obstacle course but the author did not wish to do so.
As such, rejecting.

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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #6493: Alyosha's NES Paperboy in 11:19.76
Spikestuff
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I rate this a newspaper out of 10 which apparently doesn't equate to anything useful here so I guess a yes vote it is then. Also shotgun to pubs.
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Shame how lag doesn't allow him for crazy deliveries anymore :p I could vote Meh, but I prefer voting Yes since we are going to obsolete a run which has emulation inaccuracies.
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That was a matter of time when someone would make an improvement movie on this game because Randil's footage was laggy at times. Unfortunately, I prefer entertainment over speed, if it's not much faster. Voting Meh, but it worth publishing.
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Alyosha
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Thank you for the temp encode Spikestuff. Yeah I definitely exchanged tricks for lag in this run, but I figured the original really isn't all that entertaining, so I wasn't losing much going for speed. there's enough optimization potential to just make it a normal speed record. That being said, it would probably be faster to just lose customers each day since that means less paper delivery lag and generally less laggy obstacles, but I thought that would just be too boring.
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Nothing against the run, but how did you figure out what distributions were impossible? That sounds like a fascinating read.
Alyosha
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jlun2 wrote:
Nothing against the run, but how did you figure out what distributions were impossible? That sounds like a fascinating read.
It’s actually not. The game just runs a code loop from power on / reset until a certain point then checks how long it took. It’s a rather long code loop, so we’re not talking about cycle accuracy here , it just needs to be close, within several scanlines. FCEUX is just too far off. There is even a comment about default house state in the rules at speedrun.com. If you look around you’ll also notice most videos and other emulators have the same house state. All FCEUX runs have this same issue. But unless you have sensitive RNG routine it’s not really noticeable, and even if you did it’s not accurate enough in many other respects for it to matter, since it will be wrong anyway. This just happens to be an obvious example. EDIT: actually the FCEUX house arrangement could theoretically be possible from a sub-frame reset on a top loader model NES, because this model doesn’t reset ppu with the reset button, only cpu. Still impossible from power on though. Maybe future work would be to use subframe resets to get an optimal house arrangement , but the emulator currently doesn’t emulate top loader behavior.
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Good improvement for a game that is largely an auto-scroller. I'm not wild about including the obstacle course in the main category, but I also don't care that much. I could see there being two branches, though I doubt the idea would have much support. That said, yes vote from me
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This run has some fairly weak reception currently so it would be likely to go to Vault... which begs the question whether or not this run CAN go to Vault with the obstacle course present. The obvious fastest completion definition would be to do all 7 days but doing the obstacle course doesn't really fit with that. One option could be to define it as a sort of full completion but given how the Obstacle Course is NOT a one time achievement, I'd argue it fails the typical Full Completion Rules.
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This extra course doesn't look like an explicit in-game option. There's a certain point after which if you die you just go to the next level and skip the extra course. But it's not clearly visible to the player. If it was possible to just die before the flagpole in SMB and still finish the level, I don't think we'd argue that jumping on the flagpole is vaultable extra content. For Moons we'd welcome extra content like this, but it wouldn't count as full completion, because of how minor this route appendix is. So I think it should be trimmed away to make the movie complete the game ASAP.
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Alyosha
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Will the truncated movie still obsolete the current run?
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Sure!
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Alyosha
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I've decided not to just truncate this. I did not optimize for any%, only the same rules as the current run. there are many other variables to consider, I'll leave it someone else. Feel free to reject.
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You can just cancel it.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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