The first Turbo Grafx 16 submission!
Dragon Egg is a Japanese game about a little girl who has a Dragon egg (go figure). She uses this egg to bash skeletons in the head to collect power-ups to make the dragon grow. When it grow up, she can fly around on it. You know, the typical plot.

Tricks / Strats

One of the main aspects to the TAS is power-ups. It is critical to upgrade the dragon completely as soon as possible since it has flying abilities. So the first 2 screens, I manipulate as many orbs as possible. Luck manipulation depends on frames, which accounts for the delays in those screens.
The dragon has the ability to hover a bit, and increase height slighty, by rapidply tapping the I button. This is very quirky and unlikely to be useful in real time. For a TAS, I use this feature several times to create some nice shortcuts.
You may wonder why I shoot at nothing, often. When you fire, it causes the dragon to drop to the ground, much faster than its normal floating descent. I use this to land on platforms sooner. When ascending it is sometimes faster to do this and sometimes not. This is because once you fire, you can't jump until the dragon attack animation is over.
In the first screen I load up on power-ups at the shop. This upgrades my attack so that it takes fewer hits to defeat enemies (including bosses).

Catgories

  • Emulator used: Mednafen-rr
    • EDIT: this uses the old style .mcm format. For current mednafen/pcejin versions, use the mcm to mc2 converter.
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Manipulates luck
Enjoy

mmbossman: A decent first TAS for the TG16, nice and quick, with some decent action. Accepting.
ShinyDoofy: Processing...


TASVideoAgent
They/Them
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #2226: adelikat's PCE Dragon Egg! in 07:36.27
Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
Not the best game I've seen, but still entertaining enough to get my imaginary yes vote. :)
Emulator Coder
Joined: 1/12/2007
Posts: 95
It looked like what I've come to expect from a Speedrun on the site. Entertaining enough, though the emulator didn't want to play well on this comp. I'd say add it.
fruitbane
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Joined: 3/28/2005
Posts: 216
I had no idea that game was that short. heh. Short work was made of it, indeed. I'm glad I got to see the game this way because I'm not sure I could have played the whole way through it. Seems like it was a good title for TASing, though. I say put 'er through.
Editor, Expert player (2079)
Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 3282
Pretty good for a first watch. Seems a bit slow though. For those who want to watch movies on Mednafen: You must enter this on the command line, in the following order: > mednafen -mov (movie file) -play 1 (ROM name) The ROM name must always come last.
adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3575)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Actually, you don't _have_ to have -play 1 if you have the -mov option, you can press shift+P after mednafen loads, to start movie playback.
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Player (52)
Joined: 4/10/2009
Posts: 226
I was trying to play this movie just to test mednafen but I couldn't get it to work.
adelikat
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Joined: 11/3/2004
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FuzZerd wrote:
I was trying to play this movie just to test mednafen but I couldn't get it to work.
Can you be more specific? Did you get the emulator I linked in the submission text? Are you running windows or linux? Could you open games? Could you open the movie? Did it crash? etc.
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Player (52)
Joined: 4/10/2009
Posts: 226
I am using windows. using lets mednafen and the emulator in your link. I can get the games to play just fine, I even managed to record and play my own short movie (although I think it was in using the default movie file, btw one of the texts I read said use shift+r to record but its actually ctrl+shift+r). it didn't crash, all that pressing shift+p did was reset the lag frame counter.
Former player
Joined: 5/4/2005
Posts: 502
Location: Onett, Eagleland
Any encodes yet?
I think.....therefore I am not Barry Burton
Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
mednafen currently lacks avi dumping support.
Former player
Joined: 5/4/2005
Posts: 502
Location: Onett, Eagleland
Ah, I'll set it up later then.
I think.....therefore I am not Barry Burton
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
I'm interested in hosting this on youtube, mainly because it is a PC Engine game, but, well, you get the general point. Can't wait for any sort of encode. =P
Former player
Joined: 5/4/2005
Posts: 502
Location: Onett, Eagleland
Nothing comes up after I launch mednafen through command line.
mednafen.exe -mov dragonegg.mcm dragonegg.pce
Blank line afterwards then returns me to the directory....*shrug* Rom and movie are in the same path as the executable. *** EDIT *** Reboot fixed it...weird
I think.....therefore I am not Barry Burton
Player (52)
Joined: 4/10/2009
Posts: 226
I figured out why I couldn't get it to work, I didn't realize you needed to have the movie file in the same folder as the rom.
fruitbane
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Joined: 3/28/2005
Posts: 216
FuzZerd wrote:
I figured out why I couldn't get it to work, I didn't realize you needed to have the movie file in the same folder as the rom.
You don't if you include the paths in the CLI command. I have a separate movie folder and I just make sure to include paths all the way around.
adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3575)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
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Btw, getting AVI recording into mednafen-rr is a high priority, and work is being done in an attempt to make this happen. (There are other options for encoding for publication though, as PCSX also doesn't have avi capturing)
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Former player
Joined: 5/4/2005
Posts: 502
Location: Onett, Eagleland
I hope a GUI is planned for the future ;).
I think.....therefore I am not Barry Burton
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Joined: 8/12/2007
Posts: 102
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [1281] PCE Dragon Egg! by adelikat in 07:36.27
honorableJay
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Joined: 8/18/2008
Posts: 104
Location: Albany, NY
Interesting game, short and sweet. Btw, the encode has a horrible audio lag. It starts somewhere near the first boss and progressively gets farther and farther behind the action. By the end of the movie it's almost 2 seconds behind the screen.
Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
honorableJay, it seems you are quite correct. I will correct this matter with a proper re-encode with bframes and vorbis audio in an mkv container. Blame adelikat for requesting an avi (and/or mencoder for ruining it) :x Sorry for the wasted traffic!
Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
Turns out PCE tends to drop frames when the vertical resolution is changed, mednafen doesn't seem to care about keeping audio and video in sync. If anyone manages to get this to sync and drop me an encode, be my guest.
Player (100)
Joined: 3/20/2008
Posts: 466
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
First I notice this video only has 4 yes and overall votes, but that I can overlook due to the change in the voting system. But then reading the comments, there were only 3 yes posts (Shiny Doofy, ugetab and fruitbane), and none of those viewers were exactly overwhelmed by the submission’s quality. I also find it curious that the video gets published right after a youtube encode is made. First, that’s publishing the video before the majority of the people even get a chance to watch it, assuming most people don’t have PCE emulators handy. That also doesn’t give those select viewers the opportunity to express opinions contrary to those of the very small sample that was used as grounds for publication. In short, I find this publication almost as curious as NSMB, though at least in this case I would’ve voted a weak yes myself.
Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
Vykan12 wrote:
I also find it curious that the video gets published right after a youtube encode is made.
12 days of delay classify as "right after"? Interesting, to say the least.