This is my second run here.
I cannot write so many sentences, because I'm very weak in English.
Therefore, I often quoted Floogal's forum post and the commentary of previous submission, to explain the detail of a glitch. Thank you.
If you find something wrong (e.g. grammatical error, wrong explanation), let me know.

Movie Information

  • Emulator used: SNES9X v1.43+ v15.4
  • Use WIP1 Timing
  • Fake Mute desync workaround

Goals/Aims

  • Abuses programming errors
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Uses death as a shortcut
  • Uses Walk Through Walls Glitch
  • Manipulates luck

Luck Manipulation Tricks

B-Button RNG trick

Pressing B once (outside battle) brings the party status screen. On this screen, the Random Number Generator (RNG) is used once every frame. It is used everywhere, but reduces the use for the long time by this TAS as much as possible because step stops.
During a battle, moving in the menu once uses the RNG once, and that process takes 2 frames usually. Therefore, manipulating the RNG before a battle by certain ways is faster than moving the cursor in the battle.

Zigzag stepping

Because stepping on the border which determines whether the game generates an enemy uses the RNG, stepping over the border again and again is an effective way to manipulate the RNG quickly. While doing the manipulation, Ness & co. look like walking in zigzag. This is why I named this method "zigzag stepping".

General Tricks

NPC Manipulation

Manipulating the RNG also controls NPC's move direction, then it saves a couple of frames in various scenes.

Tail Positioning

When a person joins the party, s/he walks slower than normal speed. Therefore, the length of the event can be shortened, by letting the tail of the party member stand close to him.

Stutter-Stepping

You can ignore some of hotspots by releasing the arrow key periodically. In the early part of the run, Ness skips Starman Junior battle. This is one of major use of stutter-stepping. The pattern to perform the skip is to press arrow key in one frame, then release it in one frame, and repeat.
Also, Stutter-stepping can stop the move of enemies who pursue Ness. At Giant Step, Attack Slug tags along behind Ness. This is done by stutter-stepping. The pattern to perform the skip is to press arrow key in seven frames, then release it in one frame, and repeat.

Skip sandwich

Skip sandwich makes Ness's walking speed 1.5x faster for 10 seconds (and skip sandwich DX keeps the same effect for 20 seconds). Faster speed allows us to pass through a cliff which cannot be passed in normal speed (the cliff near the tunnel before Threed, for instance).

Photo Shoot Teleport trick

As you may know, photo shoot can be skipped by teleporting. But it cannot be skipped stutter-stepping. He is tough.
Although, Ness & co. never say "Fuzzy Pickles" in the run, because the run skips the most part of the game :P

Walk Through Walls Glitches

Teleporting Through Walls Glitch

The maximum speed of teleportation exceeds eight pixels per one frame. It allows us to go through a thin wall, in certain pixel positioning.

Walk Through Cliff Glitch

You can go through the gap of some cliff. Read gocha's note for details.

Walk Through Stairs Glitch

Everything in Earthbound is in one large map (see here). Whenever you walk through a door/cave-entrance/hole in the floor, the game warps you to where its destination is.
Now, when Ness & co. step onto a staircase (like those under Threed or in the pyramid), they automatically move forward a bit & "lock" onto the staircase, so that they can only walk up or down diagonally. If the game interrupts that locking procedure (by telling you someone's HP is getting critical due to poison/cold/etc. -- possibly other things like your Dad calling you could also work), then control gets messed up, and Ness & co. get "ghosted".
While ghosted, you can freely walk through anything, and directly walk around the map posted above with impunity. Most areas will appear pitch black due to having a different tileset than what is currently loaded, but you can reset the tileset by using the Town Map (if standing in an area that shows up on it) or the Sound Stone. You can hear the music of whatever area you're in, so that can help you orient yourself. In order to unghost yourself, you must go through a door or warp somehow (death, use an Exit Mouse, teleport). Doors only exist in areas with loaded tilesets.
Some rules -- don't go out of bounds. It will likely freeze. Also, you can never go below where you activated the glitch -- I guess the game tries to lock you onto the staircase, and gets confused when you're nowhere near it. This "can't go below" line stays in effect after unghosting yourself, and also when warping via doorways, teleport, etc. So don't enter the Threed hospital after starting the glitch in the Threed underground passageways. You can clear this "don't go below" line by heading back to where you started the glitch & walking onto the staircase normally -- everything goes back to normal completely when you do so.
Now, you can start the glitch, and then (provided the area isn't below you) immediately stroll right up to Giygas's lair. Use the Sound Stone to refresh the area (if you need to), walk in & out of the doorway to unghost yourself, and fight Giygas. ...except that the game will freeze on the first prayer cutscene. As you play, the game sets or unsets "flags" that it can check later to see if you've done certain things. The flag that is required for the prayer cutscenes to work is set when you travel back in time in the Phase Distorter. But we can't just glitch-warp to where Poo learns PSI Starstorm omega, as the only doorway to unghost yourself is on the wrong side of the chasm.
So we need to use the Phase Distorter in Saturn Valley. This requires (1) dropping down the hole into the Lost Underworld (this sets a flag that gets Apple Kid & Dr. Andronuts to appear in Saturn Valley), and (2) beating Ness's Nightmare in Magicant (this sets a flag that gets Dr. Andronuts to ask for the meteor piece). Thus, the game involves rushing through until we're able to glitch-warp, dropping down the hole to the Lost Underworld (and death-warping back to Threed), glitch-warping to Magicant & beating Ness's Nightmare, and then continuing the game like you normally would after finishing Magicant.

Special Thanks

gocha, Sato-chan, Floogal, Halamantariel, Nitrodon, ElectroSpecter, and starmen.net.
And thank you for reading our submission, enjoy the run!

gocha and Tropsy proofreaded this text; thank you!


adelikat: Accepting for publication as a "glitched any%" category.

adelikat: Changing the verdict to having it obsolete the published movie. This was brought on by discussion in the forum topic as well the discussion regarding Chrono Trigger. Obsoleting the published movie keeps are options open for a future movie. We have the option of deciding to have a no glitch any%, 100%, an "all aspects" type category, or none at all.

ShinyDoofy: As nobody else seems to be doing this, I'll give it a go.

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Is there a good reference for what's involved in the encoding process? I have a pretty powerful machine, and I wouldn't mind helping out every now and then when time allows.
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http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/MakingAVI/Snes9x/Windows.html (or http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/MakingAVI/Snes9x/Linux.html if you have Linux) Good luck, I can't make heads or tails of anything more complicated than single pass encoding.
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Agreed ComicalFlop - Encoding is difficult, and extremely difficult to do well. It has it's own language associated with it. I've failed miserably every time I try and encode. Gens produces horrible sounds (possibly due to onboard audio instead of an external card?) Snes9x, sounds desync quickly. I can't even get to compressing....
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Post subject: Movie published
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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. ---- [1297] SNES EarthBound by pirohiko in 1:10:00.95
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DarkKobold wrote:
Agreed ComicalFlop - Encoding is difficult, and extremely difficult to do well. It has it's own language associated with it.
Yeah. The language is made up of the words "video, MEncoder, shit, AVI, MKV, audio, damnit, x264, argh, quantizer, decimate, bitrate, shit, desync, fuck". At least in my experience, sometimes.
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This is why I wish Kega was open source. Easy way to dump AVI's. ^^ Though uh, of course, thats Mega Drive only. Anyway, glad to see that this movie is finally published.
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Video description needs to be updated - Death is not used as a shortcut, but death is used as a shortcut. Great video. The whole team at Ness' Nightmare made me lol pretty hard.
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Some nasty pops in the sound on this encode, for instance during Pokey's theme at 3:28 or so.
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So that's why they call it a "skip" sandwich.
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A few questions: 1. Why did you take a hamburger from the first cop? You never use it, and it wastes frames. 2. What exactly were you doing with the fourth cop? You never mentioned any sort of RNG manipulation of that sort. 3. Excellent job on Ness's Nightmare. How long did it take you to get it like that? What exactly is going on in that battle, it appears that the nightmare flashes itself, but I didn't know you could even attack yourself while feeling strange, just other party members. 4. Where the heck did that teddy bear come from?
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I think I'm qualified to answer those questions. 1) It was probably faster than manipulating it away. Hamburgers are a 1/8 drop from cops, so it's not surprising that one of the cops dropped one. 2) Selecting the weapon from the menu adds more text (and thus uses the RNG more) between selecting the cop's attack+target and checking for the SMAAAASH!. This presumably made it possible to reach a SMAAAASH! in a reasonable amount of time. 3) When you are confused, your target is randomly selected from all characters (enemy, ally, self, and NPC) in battle. 4) After Jeff crashes the Sky Runner, Ness and Paula (re)join the party. The teddy bear is in Paula's starting inventory, so it appears when Paula joins.
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Nitrodon wrote:
3) When you are confused, your target is randomly selected from all characters (enemy, ally, self, and NPC) in battle.
What kind of message is given for ness hitting himself with a bat then? I never saw that happen during my run of the game.
4) After Jeff crashes the Sky Runner, Ness and Paula (re)join the party. The teddy bear is in Paula's starting inventory, so it appears when Paula joins.
Well the first appearance of the bear is after Ness wakes up from magicant, so what you're saying doesn't make sense. Actually it's weirder than that. The bear is in Paula's inventory after the sky runner crashes. It appears when Jeff is doing his introduction, and then a few frames after it finishes saying "Jeff joined your party" the bear disappears (despite it being in Paula's inventory). It persists like that until Ness wakes up after Magicant, to find that this Poo fellow who he's never met before, and a Teddy Bear insist on following him around everywhere. He doesn't understand why, and in the end they don't actually get to do anything. One of my favorite things about broken RPG speedruns is making up new pretend stories for them. For instance in Earthbound Ness has a nightmare where he beats Paula into unconsciousness with a tee-ball bat. After defeating this evil part of himself that rests in the Sea of Eden, he becomes a real man who knows how to treat a lady, and gains 30 levels.
Post subject: What's up with the Earthbound movies?
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I was surfing the SNES TASes today, and I found the latest Earthbound run. It had obsoleted the previous one by damn near three hours by use of a glitch. If anything, this should be a "glitched" run and be in a seperate category than the obsoleted run. Adelikat even said he accepted it as a "glitched any%" run, yet there it stands. There is another mistake in adelikat's sentence. The publication text says:
EB's Pub Text wrote:
Thanks to some collision detection bugs, including one that shows that the Skip Sandwich is a fitting name for the item in ways the developers never intended, the author is able to move around the game's areas freely, completing the bare minimum number of tasks needed to keep the final battle from locking up.
This would be classified as a glitched low% run, am I correct? Also, in the submission:
adelikat wrote:
Changing the verdict to having it obsolete the published movie. This was brought on by discussion in the forum topic as well the discussion regarding Chrono Trigger. Obsoleting the published movie keeps are options open for a future movie. We have the option of deciding to have a no glitch any%, 100%, an "all aspects" type category, or none at all.
No glitch any% is pretty much impossible because you need to collect every key item in the game to beat it without glitches. Maybe a no glitch 99%? 100%. Unless someone wants to play through 3 hours that improve 2 damn frames, this is impossible. And someone really needs to define the "all aspects" run for me.
Games to TAS: 1. Rampart (NES) 2. Pokemon Yellow (GB) 3. Aladdin (SNES) 4. Shadowrun (SNES) ----- <sonicsonic3> and please tell me...WHAT IS THE BACK LONG JUMP CODE!? [on SM64's BLJ]
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There had been a lot of debate about this already when the run was published, and ultimately, the old run is still on this site, so why bother? /Also, earthbound has its own thread, this rather belongs there.
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The thread for the publication would be a more appropriate place for this discussion.
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As far as I could gather, there are two facts that led to the obsoletion of the non-glitched run: 1. We did not predict the existence of a glitch that skips the entire game (and thus were unable to explicitly mention that we weren't using it). 2. An unrelated Chrono Trigger run was horribly outdated.
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Merged posts discussing this publication into this thread.
Post subject: Re: What's up with the Earthbound movies?
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Just some things: -> The glitchless run can probably be improved by more than 5 minutes and not just 2 frames. -> Pirohiko is working on a new glitched run and uses new time-saving techniques (abusing RNG, subpixel optimization, etc.) so this new run will be of high quality. This means that a new glitchless run will be pretty hard to make if one wants to keep this level of quality and it isn't very worthwhile (there is already a run there, just some minutes slower than possible, so what?).
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YES
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Peachtotheinfinity wrote:
YES
You little necro, you.
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You little necro, you.
What is that supposed to mean. I'm only 14. I don't know that much vocabulary.
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A necro means someone who posts on an old and inactive topic for no good reason.
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.
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He means that you are posting in an old thread and your post doesn't even contain anything useful. Now move on.
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Oops, that was typed wrong.
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You know, after watching this run again, I see two things that could be improved upon. One, is the further abuse of Skip Sandwiches for walking speed. Two, would be the strategic use of abusing Teleport alpha to zip across the maps faster. Speaking of, could Teleport alpha be used during the parts where Ness is walking out-of-bounds?
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