TASVideos discussion board

[NesVideoAgent]

This is an automatically posted message for discussing submission: #1354: Bisqwit & FinalFighter's NES Rockman in 15:38

See details at: http://tasvideos.org/1354S.html

Submission status: published
Last edited by: Bisqwit

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The submission message follows:

Surprise! It's a new Rockman TAS time. This movie is 10.2667 seconds faster than the published movie. How did this happen? I won't spoil you. Watch the movie. You'll definitely know it when you see (and hear!) it. Hint: Wily2.

Attributes

• Aims for fastest time
• Abuses programming errors
• Manipulates luck (for refills and for random involuntary movements)
• Uses death as a shortcut
• Utilizes a robot player (refills, Wily3 boss, Wily4 boss, death, seizures)
• Utilizes frame counter, frame advance, RAM watch, subpixel positions etc.

Contributors

AngerFist, Morimoto, Vatchern, Hanzou, Blechy, 4matsy, Feitclub, Truncated, Spider-Waffle, Boco and others.

Bisqwit's comments

You will never know when a TAS is "final". Especially not with this game. I don't honestly expect Rockman 1 ever to be completed in less than 10 minutes, but with these advances, you can never be 100% certain of the final limit.

Naturally, the page Rockman Tricks, which has the purpose of explaining every trick and glitch known in NES Rockman games, is becoming rather outdated. It does contain the foundation of Rockman glitching, but the applications surprise us, and are hard to describe.

The first six stages of this movie are identical to the previous movie. The first changed stage is Wily 1 (collected 1 refill less there).

In this submission, I list FinalFighter as a co-author, because he is basically the architect of this submission. His contribution in this movie outweighs anyone else's, only equal to perhaps mine. The movie retains certain portions played by AngerFist (described in the previous submission), and I thank him for that.

Ps: I'm finally ready to state that this game has been broken.

FinalFighter's comments

This newly discovered technique is very interesting, especially in that it makes it possible to cross walls in various places.

Because it also causes the game sound to shift, people who are interested of glitches should definitely try it.

This technique was found two years ago, but because Megaman died when the technique was used, it was judged unusable by me, Bisqwit and Morimoto.

It was very fortunate that an insight struck me to try the technique once more before throwing it completely away, for it enabled yet another kind of Megaman 1 TAS to exist.

Many people ask me how to discover new techniques.

• Continuously use slow playing speed.
• Test known techniques, and remember them.
• Love the software.

These things are vital in my opinion.

I am thankful to people who make the TAS-movies when I find new techniques, despite the tough work involved in it.

Thanks to Bisqwit for creating the computer program for optimizing this new idea. Your programming ability amazes me once again.

PS: Please enjoy this new TAS!

(FF's comments translated by Bisqwit)

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Truncated: Accepting as an improvement to the previous Mega Man movie.

[BoltR]

Yes for reasons of it being more broken than it was before.

[shallow]

Wow, you broke this game so much that you even broke the music. How the heck did that happen!?

[adelikat]

Seriously, how can a glitch hater find this objectionable anymore? It is just sooo over the top broken that it doesn't even count as glitching a game. It has become a whole new game. A game where a hero zips around like a madman and occasionally fights a bad guy that he doesn't feel like zipping past.

[moozooh]

Quote:

[parrot14gree]

wow,what's happen with the new glitch?
anyway YES YES of couse a YES vote !!!!

[moozooh]

BTW, I believe it's "4matsy", not "4matsu". ;)

[FODA]

I think if someone had pulled off this run 3 years ago we'd all be scared to death.

Of course, there's no need to vote. Congratulations.

[Bisqwit]

Here's the technical explanation of the trick.

When a boss battle begins, there are only three ways to end it:
* Kill the boss
* Start another boss battle
* Die

When I enter the Cutman battle, and escape it, the battle does not end.
It goes on. Cutman is still alive.

Momentarily after escaping the room, Cutman throws a scissor.
However, because Cutman is no longer visible, the scissor does not appear. Cutman thinks he has a scissor, but there is no scissor.

This is when things go awry. You see, as long as Cutman thinks he has a scissor, he will use some kind of telekinesis to manipulate the scissor back to his hand (for catching). In other words, the game adjusts the scissor's position every frame to make it meet Cutman's hand.

The method it does that, is that it first looks up the object table, searching for a scissor type object. Then it alter the properties of the found object (the sprite number, and the Y coordinate).
It does the lookup using a common function in the game code.
However, Cutman is so certain that a scissor exists, so the return value of the function is not checked. So when a scissor doesn't really exist, it writes into a random memory address instead. (The actual value returned in an error case is the number of alive objects.) This memory address happens to coincide mostly with Rockman's data. The rest is pretty obvious.
The glitching stops when the Clone robot fight begins, because at that point, the previous boss fight is over and Cutman with his magic scissor powers exists no more.
However, Megaman maintains a weird pose for a few frames, because his object properties (mainly, an action delay counter) were messed up.

[Baxter]

adelikat wrote:

[Bisqwit]

By the way, here is the source code of the program snippet of BisqBot used to navigate through the involuntary movements. It is my first FCEU bot to use a genetic algorithm. In addition, it uses paraller processing using a dual core CPU. (Click to zoom)



[Edit: Now links to actual source code instead of a snapshot of it.]

[anubis]

Amazing glitch - gotta love memory violations. Yes vote for sure.

Bisqwit, whatcha use to create that code screenshot?

[Zurreco]

Interesting glitch. A bit hard to follow, but it wasn't so hard that I couldn't appreciate it.

[Bisqwit]

anubis wrote:

[Sami]

Oh WTF! That game is totally destroyed :D Hell Yes!!

[JXQ]

(not sure if this is common knowledge to those who aren't as familiar with improper speaking English)

whatcha = what do you, what are you

In this case, when the "do" is dropped (due to laziness, for lack of a better word), it turns into "what you" and words with a hard ending followed by an "e" sound (which is what "you" gives, like "eww") often get churned into a "ch" sound.

[DonamerDragon]

Haha, is this even a game anymore? Still don't think you could mess this game up that bad with a game genie. Do you think you'll ever find a way to beat that first boss? I know why you choose him first, but that must bug the crap out of you, haha. Wow...almost makes me wonder if that fireball glitching is possible elsewhere?

[Bisqwit]

DonamerDragon wrote:

[KennyMan666]

And just when I thought that this game couldn't be smashed into any smaller pieces.

[DonamerDragon]

JXQ wrote: