NINTENDO WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS 1990
This tournament cartridge consists of 3 distinct games, Super Mario Bros, Rad Racer, and Tetris. The objective of the game is to get as high of a score as possible within the 6minute 21second time limit. You do this by collecting 50 coins in Mario, you then race one full lap in Rad Racer. You then achieve 99% of your total points by clearing 4-line clears in Tetris on progressively higher levels.
This TAS scores over 14 million points thanks to getting further in tetris than any other TAS. this allows it to make use of later level tetrises that are worth nearly one million points each. Thanks to that, the TAS rolls over the score counter at 10 million. The true score can either be calculated or seen by adding 10mil to the displayed score at the end. This is a TAS improvement on a unoptimized TAS of 8,613,245 points by IrishLinkHub and is the first optimized TAS of this game.
Super Mario Bros.
The Mario segment was made by Zel and input on routes from Gaster. In the first life the underground coins are collected with 2 jumps which deviates from the RTA 3 jumps. this means that this segment saves a framerule over a top human run.
On the second life Mario collects 11 coins from the multicoin block despite it being possible to collect 12, this is due to the 50 coin requirement not needing the extra coin.
On the third life mario collects 12 coins from the multicoin block by doing frame perfect jumps and aligning the multicoinblock framerule(yes it runs of framerules) to allow for a 12th coin. collecting 50 coins without going right.
A faster method to play mario has been made but that run does not get 3 goomba stomps. This is sadly a requirement for the tetris route that was used in this run. Fortunately the Tetris segment is not close enough to a longbar or another line clear to make significant use of the extra time.
Rad Racer
This segment has very little to talk about in a TAS context. the car accelerates up to top speed and maintains that until the end of the course. There is no possible timesave here. At some points i mess around by getting close to cars or being next to the edge of the road, this is only for show
At the end of the course The goal is the decelerate the car as fast as possible from 255 km/h --> 0km/h while crossing the finish line. Traditionally people have driven into trees so slow down 4km/h per 2 frames. You can drive on dirt and break to slow down 5km/h per 2 frames. The latter method is used as it slows down the car the most. only a tiny bit of the car needs to touch the dirt to get the full deceleration.
But there is another way to slowdown the car, and that is by crashing into an NPC car. this sets your speed down to the speed of the NPC instantly. This trick is used in the TAS to save 3 frames over non crash setups. The player car slows down a bit to line the NPC car up with the point that a crash into it followed by breaking and touching dirt puts the player just over the finish line. if this was not done then the playerwould end up short of the finish line.
Tetris
This segment consists of the most improvements to the Prior TASes. the TAS makes use of many tricks and weird things, these include:
-- RNG scouting
-- Tree strat
-- Row20 clears
-- L+R tapping
-- Natural dropdown abuse
-- Framerule shenanigans
-- Pushdown abuse on Level 19+
-- Some pushdown optimization
-- Extra singles
RNG Scouting
The whole Tetris sequence is predetermined. This means that no pause abusing or other methods are possible to change the RNG, If there is a stretch of 20 pieces without a longbar then that has to be dealt with. So it important to pick a seed that is good for speedrunning the earlier levels. seed "10300" was picked because a Tree could be built up fast and would be able to be picked without slowing down significantly in mario. Seed 10200 was also a candidate.
Tree strat
This consists of building up on a platform, This makes the begining levels of 0 a lot faster and saves tens of seconds. It also means that row20 clears won't delete almost completed rows, but only removes rows with one or two minos in them.
Row20 clears
This is a glitch where clearing the 20th row moves the playfield down one row and awards 1 extra row over the amount you cleared. This allows for fast completions of the early levels where tetrises are only worth 1-4k points. This allows for more "juicy" tetrises later on when they're worth 30k+ points.
Doing 5-6 row20 clears will make tetriminos from the bottom of the playfield wrap all the way up to the top of the playfield in row 21. this row is invicible as it is above the playfield but nevertheless it prevents movement. this has to be accounted for and the route was constructed with this in mind. The third piece of the sequence (second s Piece) was placed vertically instead of horizontally to prevent row21 minos from messing with placements in level 5.
At the end of the row20 clears there is a mino in row 21 and column 1 that prevents movement. it is noticable when moving things left in level 5.
L+R tapping
Pressing R and on the subsequent frame pressing R+L will register as 2 right movements, this is used for 40hz-60hz movements to the right. This trick does not work with the left direction.
Natural dropdown abuse
each level will naturally drop a piece down one unit per a certain number of frames. On level 18 its every 3 frames, on level 19 its every 2 frames etc.. This naturaldropdown sometimes align with whenever you can manually pushdown the piece. in the case where this natural dropdown and a manual pushdown would happen on the same frame, the manual pushdown overrides the natural dropdown. However if you wait with the downpress one frame you can make the piece drop down with thenatural dropdown one frameand on the very next one it drops down one more frame thanks to the manual pushdown. this speeds up the time a piece drops down and touchesthe stack by 1 frame and sometimes can save a framerule. However it also gives the player 1 fewer pushdown points.
Framerule shenanigans
Tetris has framerules, after each lineclear there is a 4 frame framerule. This means that sometimes natural dropdown abuse can be avoided if it doesnt save time for the next framerule. this gives 2~ pushdown points more per segment between lineclears. and makes it possible to squeeze out every point from each segment
Pushdown abuse on Level 19+
On level 19+ it is actually faster to continously spam the down button in what i call the "5 frame Down null Cycle" (3 frames of down and 2 of no input repeating) to move the piece down faster. This makes each pieces touch the stack 2-3 frames faster compared to 0-1 frames on earlier levels, although this sacrifices many pushdown points as you never hold the down direction long enough to score substancial points by this mean.
So if 19 looks faster than you're used to.. that's because it is
in these levels , some pieces appear to not be tapped fast to the right of left, why is that?
Well normally you'd tap a piece to where you want it and only then do you press down. But on 19 while doing the 5 frame down null cycle, you can sneak one left or two Right inputs in during the null phase. This means that as much of the initial left or right tapping you can eliminate and instead do the 5 frame down null cycle, the faster the piece can touch the stack.
Some pushdown optimization
Due to the time limt of 6min 21s. more pushdown points can be squeezed out instead of doing the 5frame Down null cycle. This is done partially in the end of the run. but can possibly save up to a thousand points. This is very little compared to the overall score
Extra singles
Towards the end of the run extra singles are taken as there isnt another bar that can yeild a tetris anywhere in the sequence. In other words, there is a massive drought right by the end.
The TAS can likely go evern further to 15 million if new routes through the early levels are found row20 tetrises are incorperated. However these are much harder than on the normal Tetris ROM due to the lack of RNG manipulation.
This TAS was mainly constructed in FCEUX and played in Mesen for testing. For the submission it was tested and made to run in BizHawk
Therun uses standard competition DIP switches of 6min 21s
Darkman425: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: Input file replaced that truncates blank inputs after the last Tetris input.
Darkman425: Hello TegaMech, Gaster, and Zel, and welcome to TASVideos!
The routing for the competition cart is weird, as I've learned from experience. The score in SMB affecting the Tetris RNG seed alongside having no other way to influence Tetris piece RNG at the end creates a more complex optimization problem beyond the initially expected challenge of just TASing 3 games back to back. From watching the inputs played back and reading the notes, it's clear that this is well optimized and well routed to ensure as much score was earned as possible across multiple tested RNG seeds. Rad Racer is also there, and is well optimized to drive through and slow down as fast as possible to start Tetris sooner. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard under "maximum score".
despoa: Processing...