- Emulator: lsnes rr2-beta23
- Rom: Final Fantasy VI (J)
- Aims for fastest time
- Manipulates luck
- Executes arbitrary code
- Features mid-frame resets
- Corrupts save data
- Ends input early
Here is an improvement of 8661 frames from the previous submission, thanks to a route change. Most of the tricks and glitches leading to ACE are identical to the previous submission, so we will only describe the changes in the present text. Comments are embedded in the above video and are available here.
Route change
To reach the Phantom Forest, Sabin and Cyan are mandatory. We choose in this TAS another way for them to join the team, by doing the Kefka at Narshe section. Normally, when you leave Narshe the first time with Locke, you cannot enter Narshe again until much later after the 3 scenarios. However, if you overwrite the events flags stored in the savefile with the ones from the beginning of the game before Locke joins, you can freely enter Narshe. By heading north to the snowfield, you will be able to trigger the fight against Kefka. After that, you can form your team, which contains Sabin and Cyan. Because they did not actually join the team yet, they are replaced by their Moogle placeholder. After that, the route is pretty much the same.
Executed code
The code executed to trigger the ending was improved a bit. We were very lucky this time to encounter the Goblin*2 fight, so we only had to kill one enemy, which shortened the code.
3A DEC A = 0xFF 9E 55 3E STZ $3E55,x [$3EEC] Unflag enemy death, to avoid an XP/Gold message 0C 3A 3A TSB $3A3A Remove enemies from the fight C2 20 REP #$20 16-bit accumulator A9 62 13 LDA #$1362 Loads the ending sequence event address 0C 4F 1F TSB $1F4F Set NPC event bit to avoid the ending softlock 9D 4E 12 STA $124E,x [$12E5] Set event pointer to the ending 69 7F 02 ADC #$027F A = 0x15E1 1B TCS Fix the stack pointer 5C C9 18 C1 JML $C118C9 An address in the C1 bank that contains SEP #$20 then RTS
Also, the offset in the color configuration to write this code was optimized to minimize the number of color values to change. Both changes accounted for a total improvement of 7 seconds.
Suggested screenshots
Frames 62280, 95655
Fog: Judging.
Fog: This is a great run that alleviates all of the prior issues that were had with the previous publication, as well as the rejected submission. The use of the new route makes the entertainment factor of the submission much better than the previous publication, where you needed 52 game over screens, while also being faster than the previous publication. Unlike the previous publication, this movie does not start from dirty SRAM (albeit empty). However, there has been some chatter in the submission comments about how this submission seeds the RAM by adjusting the RTC. This is a feature that is built into Higan, the most accurate SNES emulator, and the core that lsnes uses. For it to be used, the TASer must turn on initialize random values in the emulator settings.
And here lies the problem with this run. The movie rules state that there are to be no randomized or unverified initial RAM states. If this run can be completed without using the randomized initial memory, then that run would be accepted. However, it's not possible to accept this run under it's current form.
Rejecting for using randomized initial memory.