Submission #10686: arnaud33200's SMS Astérix in 23:24.976

• 2-3 ladder glitch discovered by GoodShowSir
• 5-3 wall jump discovered by CucaSpeedrunner
• 7-1 tornado skip discovered by arnaud33200

Comments

• I’m calling “V2” the current submitted TAS made by the8BitBeast
• I keep everything the same as V2 exception 3 levels with the new tricks
• Few times I found some improvement for some stages, especially when I got some trouble to resync
• Some stages requires re-manipulate the chance to keep the same route as V2
• Because each other frame is a lag frame, it can be annoying to resync the TAS, it involves adding a frame and remove one later, especially for levels with Obelix
• For the end of level door, I always tried to remove some frames to see if it’s possible to enter earlier, few time I was able to save some frames
• When enemies drop items it adds lags, especially when it’s the big coin, I manipulate chance to avoid drops.
• To make sure I resync the inputs properly, I open another Bizhawk on the side with V2 so I can look at the asterix/obelix exact position and other details

Timing

Stage by stage comments

Stage 2-3

• L+R on the ladder wrap you at the top of the screen, it only works for the 2nd and 3rd level of this screen
• when wrapping at the top on the 2nd level, you immediately scroll to the 3rd level because of the ladder trigger. If there is a way to skip it, we can potentially go to the next screen from the 2nd level
• When doing it at the 1st level of the screen, Asterix goes through the floor and zip/slides to the next screen, but cannot reach the correct door (on the right), at least couldn’t figure out a way.

Stage 3-3

• Some minor RNG manipulation to have the boss to jump to the left and start the rumble right away
• Manipulate RNG with some UP key that doesn’t affect the movement and a bit of RIGHT+LEFT at the same time

Stage 4-1

• 2 bats to manipulate, it requires them to be at specific position so Obelix can jump on it early and high enough
• first bat is simple, just doing UP and DOWN which doesn’t affect the movement, sometimes replace the 1 DOWN with many DOWN when I don’t have any success
• The last bat to skip to the final door was a big pain, it travels a long distance and because direction randomly changes every frame, it’s difficult to manipulate without changing Obelix position too much. Then when I got the right
• was able to save frames by entering the door earlier, probably I got the bat at a better position by chance

Stage 4-3

• Many sync issue after the second half, some lag frames didn’t match
• This is a good example where I really needed to V2 side by side to compare exact positions
• A room as random rocks, it spawns for me but didn’t affect the lags

Stage 5-1

• I got a bit of desync when moving around while waiting the bird with the key to dive
• Save a bit of frames by opening the door earlier, maybe because of the small resync

Stage 5-3

• Skip with a “wall jump” which avoid waiting for the weight go down and up later, it saves 88 frames. Do it as high and right as possible to quickly to jump to the right
• Reduce lags as much as possible with DOWN + JUMP, simply look for less red frames in the TASStudio
• Spiders are a pain! There are 3 RNG to manipulate: direction, timer before each movement and item drop
• For the last Spider, the timers has to be exact so we jump on it at the right position, it took a lot of rerecords

Stage 6-1

• Green drops are random, each drop has their own random timer.
• Did a first chance manipulation before entering, did a bunch of UP inputs
• I had to manipulate the chance again for one of the last drops, I added a UP to an existing DOWN and I got a tiny boost, which save 1 frame

Stage 7-1

• Do DOWN + JUMP when going over tornados to reduce lags, also jump as early as possible.
• Before the 2nd tornado, do LEFT just long enough so the 3rd doesn’t bounce up
• Jump to 3rd tornado as early as possible because tornado move faster than obelix
• After going over the pit with the 3rd tornado, stay on the right side of the jar (with key) to prevent a cactus enemy to spawn, which cause a lot of lags
• Doing the same damage boost as V2 to quickly grab the key and kill the cactus to reduce lags
• After picking up the key, I do the same strategy as V2
• I needed to manipulate the chance avoid the last torch enemy to drop an item, I lost 1 frame because of that but I saved 2 frames later before getting into the final door

Stage 7-2

• I got a different movement for the mummies and it desync the rest of the stage because of some lags.
• Mummy behaviour depend on Obelix X possible, even if I got the same pixel and sub-pixel as V2, the behaviour was different
• to fix it I added some UP inputs when Obelix jumping above the screen (after going down the pipe)

Stage 7-3

• I got some sync issue with the damage boost to get to the secret top part (spike circle around a block)
• for the secret part, I did the same jump but much earlier, I could save 4 frames

Stage 8-1

• This level has a lot of lags so everything was desync
• I did a quick resync and I notice some parts were faster
• When Asterix jump out of the chariot, it’s faster to jump from the the middle of the screen instead of the end of the screen
• adding some jumps round the spikes on the ground helps to reduce lags, I basically try different jumps until I got less lags (red bars on TasStudio)
• When reaching the end of the auto-scroll, it’s faster to not jump when Asterix exit the chariot, I was able to save 28 frames

Other comments

Special Thanks

• The8BitBeast for sharing some resources and answering questions
• GoodShowSir & CucaSpeedrunner for finding and sharing those new tricks

Potential Improvements

• 2-3 ladder glitch zip through the floor and find a way to get to the right door
• Hunting more lags reduction for 8-1

Ram Addresses

Bats

• Every 4 frames, randomly change direction to be up or down
• because direction change often, it’s a pain to manipulate the bat to a correct position

Spiders

• Spiders spawn off screen and start with a random direction
• here is 2 random timer for the spider to wait before moving in and out

8-1 Autoscroll

• The scrolling is constant, asterix movement or position doesn’t change the speed of the scroll.
• The scroll goes through 3 cycles (0x01AA), a counter (0x0072) increase by 2 every frames, in total the scroll is 3456 frames long
• When the game is lagging, the scroll count doesn’t increase. To make this stage faster we just need to reduce lags as much as possible
• Enemies never clear/despawn in RAM so that explains why this stage becomes more and more laggy. Probably the developers rushed this level and didn’t take the time to optimize it.