Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle improved by about 79 seconds (4738 frames).
Thanks to Foda for the previous movie, which helped me a lot! nesrocks also gave me feedback that helped improving this movie.
There are 11 levels in the game. These are the improvements:
- 0.5 seconds were saved in levels 1-8 due to better precision.
- 0.5 seconds were saved in level 9.
- 6 seconds were saved in level 10 by using the bike to gain speed.
- The rest of the improvement comes from a completely revised route for level 11.
My route for the final level abuses two new tricks:
- The bike can be used to gain enough speed so that you get stuck in a wall. Then you can ascend by jumping inside the wall. This trick is used four times for shortcuts.
- If you get damaged when you are using the bike or the helicopter, you sometimes get warped upwards the height of approxximately 7 blocks. This trick is used once by equipping the helicopter, touching an enemy and warping to the screen that is located above.
Here are useful RAM addresses:
| Alex's X-axis sub-pixel position | 00FFD01A |
| Boss HP | 00FFE126 |
I'm sure that some sub-pixel optimization is possible in the final level (and maybe in level 9), but I'm not used to it, so I can't understand how to do it perfectly. So go ahead and improve the movie further, if you can handle the sub-pixel world. I would enjoy seeing any improvements to this. :)
The movie attributes are the same:
- Plays at hardest level
- Aims for fastest time
- Abuses programming errors in the game
- Genre: Action
- Genre: Platform
Enjoy!
NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots
of this movie and placed them here.
I'm not sure I got the right ROM though. (I tried
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle (U) [!].gen, which was the closest match to what you wrote.) Well, here goes! Feel free to clean up the list.
Bisqwit: Replaced file with a new provided by the author. Apparently, it is 21 frames faster now.
adelikat: Accepting for publication as an improvement to the published movie.