Game objectives

  • Emulator used: BizHawk 1.11.4
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Plays at hardest difficulty
  • Contains speed/entertainment tradeoff

Plot

Mickey and Minnie are dancing happily as all of a sudden the evil witch Mizrabel, jealous of Minnie's beauty, plunges out of the sky and abducts Minnie. Mickey chases after Mizrabel all the way to the Castle of Illusion... He has to collect the 7 rainbow gems to turn into Super Mickey build a bridge to the final level, beat the witch and rescue Minnie.

General Comments

In the following, I will describe several tricks that are used.

New movement technique

Usually Mickey's running speed is capped at 1.5 pixels per frame (px/f) and sliding down a slope is capped at 3 px/f, that means if you were to hold the direction you're going after a slide you would fall back to max running speed but pressing left, right or down every 4 frames, allows you to keep your sliding speed, as long as you're on the ground. Moving objects can also be used for a speed boost, for objects moving in the same direction as Mickey, you have to jump at the last possible moment before running off of it, for objects moving in the opposite direction, you have to jump off right after landing on it. In both cases the object's speed gets added to Mickey's speed.

Ladderjumping

Partly used in earlier TASes but with precise y-positioning this can be done on every ladder. Basically, you let go and regrab the ladder just before a screen transition, this puts Mickey in his standing state for a split second, allowing you to jump.

Corner boosting

By partially clipping a ceiling, Mickey can jump up to 9 pixels higher, which allows you sometimes to skip a platform or ladder and even bypassing some part of the level. Additionally, Mickey's x-position gets shifted up to 4 pixels.

Walljumping

Mickey must meet the following conditions: downward momentum, x-velocity over 2 px/f, proper x-positioning to skip the wall's two outmost pixels.

Door glitch aka "Ray Manzarek"

Mickey can get wedged between an item and a door. You can then pick up the door, resulting in Mickey zipping around.

Detailed list

This run improves the currently published movie by 3716 frames (62.01sec). It breaks down as follows.
LevelFrames SavedTotal Frames Saved
Overworld 122
Overworld 268
Enchanted Forest 11321
Enchanted Forest 2425
Enchanted Forest 31338
Enchanted Forest 4118156
Enchanted Forest 53159
Overworld 36165
Toyland 112177
Toyland 26183
Toyland 389272
Toyland 456328
Toyland 578406
Toyland 62408
Toyland 79417
Overworld 46423
Dessert Factory 17430
Dessert Factory 234464
Dessert Factory 322486
Dessert Factory 456542
Dessert Factory 5-106436
Dessert Factory 611051541
Overworld 501541
Overworld 6401581
Library 101581
Library 22661847
Library 301847
Library 4401887
Library 5161903
Library 6401943
Library 7421985
Library 801985
Library 901985
Library 1001985
Library 11992084
Overworld 762090
Clock Tower 1652155
Clock Tower 28453000
Clock Tower 31243124
Clock Tower 403124
Clock Tower 5793203
Overworld 803203
Overworld 903203
Overworld 1063209
Castle 183217
Castle 2293246
Castle 3403286
Castle 403286
Castle 5503336
Castle 6993435
Castle 703435
Castle 803435
Castle 9313466
Castle 10303496
Castle 1103496
Castle 122303726
Castle 13-103716
I divided the levels into sections. Every time a screen transition or fade-out occurs, a new segment starts. The number of lag frames was reduced from 94 to 40.

Level Comments

Enchanted Forest

The first "leaf boost" is actually a special case of the aforementioned speed tech. Mickey interacts with the leaf in such a way that he gets the left- and rightward momentum, resulting in a speed of 3.5 px/f.

Toyland

Slightly faster boss strat, I got the boss to land twice on his box and jumped off of the box to grab the gem.

Dessert Factory

New strat, involving getting the barrel into the bossroom. Some time is lost getting it, but it's more than made up by utterly destroying the "Chocolate Devil". The way he disintegrates into pieces is RNG and can take between 12 and 26 frames per piece. By doing seemingly random movements, he can be manipulated into dropping a piece every 12 frames.

Library

The bounce you can get off of the book boss, is strong enough to get on top of the wall, this allows you to get the subsequent hits as fast as possible.

Clock Tower

Walljumping ftw! Getting to the gem early, skips a decent amount of backtracking. Damageboosting made it possible to get to the nut before it even moved and beating the boss in one less bob.

Castle

At the end of the rainbow cutscene, it's possible to jump (the jump sound effect can be heard), this is known as "rainbow jump" and is mainly for shits 'n' giggles, but it wastes 1 frame, so consider it a speed/entertainment tradeoff. The dragonfight seems a bit glitchy, especially the first hit. I think, as long as you traverse the hitbox with the barrel, it registers the hit as soon as you throw it. This oddity and the fact that the barrel falls straight down when Mickey's horizontal speed is 0, allowed for sneaking in an extra hit (2nd hit). For the next 3 hits, I manipulated the boss into shooting the lightning balls straight down in the fastest pattern and for the last hit, I was able to use a faster strategy, since I had one extra health and didn't have to regrab the barrel. Even before the final level transpired, I wanted to change the Mizrabel fight a bit (fastest to final hit instead of shortest input that still beats the game) and having no extra health left, narrowed it down to option 1 anyway. That's why the input is 10 frames longer in the final fight.

Concluding Comments

I'd like to thank Katzman 79 for the barrel strat against the "Chocolate Devil" and btrim for the door glitch.
I hope y'all enjoy this run :)

Masterjun: Judging.
Masterjun: Entertaining game and really nice improvements. (My tip: Try to do more different things in the autoscrollers to make it even more entertaining! Copying input is not bad in itself, but when you have the chance to increase the entertainment of your movie, you should take it!)
Accepting for Moons as an improvements to the previous movie.
Spikestuff: Publishing.


TASVideoAgent
They/Them
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Challenger
He/Him
Skilled player (1689)
Joined: 2/23/2016
Posts: 1061
My Bizhawk 1.11.9 desncys this TAS during the Boss 1 battle. Anybody up for encode?
My homepage --Currently not much motived for TASing as before...-- But I'm still working.
Alyosha
He/Him
Editor, Emulator Coder, Expert player (3821)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2829
Location: US
Challenger wrote:
My Bizhawk 1.11.9 desncys this TAS during the Boss 1 battle. Anybody up for encode?
Some changes have occured to SMS inbetween 1.11.4 and now. Quite a few timing fixes to the Z80 core happened. I also fixed SRAM and interrupt handling, which was pretty far off before and worked largely due to luck in how games used interrupts conservatively. I don't know which of these is effecting sync on this game, maybe I can look into it tomorrow.
Spikestuff
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Editor, Publisher, Expert player (2642)
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6438
Location: The land down under.
Synced/Dumped from A to B with what the author tells ya to use. (Also Syncs on 1.11.7) Encode coming in a bit. Someone buy me something so I can have better connection to the internet. I mean temp encode: Link to video
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
Editor, Expert player (2098)
Joined: 8/25/2013
Posts: 1200
That was lovely. Gets a yes from me.
effort on the first draft means less effort on any draft thereafter - some loser
Joined: 5/8/2010
Posts: 177
Location: Entropy
I used to play this game on the gamegear, man it was so corny compared to the megadrive/genesis one which I still love. Yes vote, love the glitch on the 3rd level saves lots of time!
Challenger
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Skilled player (1689)
Joined: 2/23/2016
Posts: 1061
Thanks for the encode, Spikestuff! Watching this TAS, once again really awesome work on this game, Tee-N-Tee! Notable new improvements and new glitches on every way! Awesome new zips, new boss 3 strategy and a big skip on Stage 5 (Clock Tower)! Great Yes vote!
My homepage --Currently not much motived for TASing as before...-- But I'm still working.
WST
She/Her
Active player (489)
Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1697
Location: RU · ID · AM
Easy Yes vote
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2 my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
Synahel
She/Her
Former player
Joined: 1/19/2011
Posts: 260
Location: France
Very nice, amazing improvements, the speed conservation is amazing and all the new strats look very good Kudos to you
Skilled player (1003)
Joined: 10/13/2014
Posts: 409
Location: nowhereatthemiddleofnoone
yeah it's the best run I viewed on sms in this year!!! Than said-I it's the bigger, the higher on sms for me. Entertaiment 10/10 Technics 10/10 One word...STARS YES vote!
GAW sms... Totally destroyed
XYZ
Former player
Joined: 12/9/2006
Posts: 168
Location: 2bastuz
Yes vote for another MegaMan Mickey Mouse game. Hey. Stop. Taking circle after boss defeat, tree boss throw leaves, chocolate boss disintegrated and gathered, tower enemy, MM initials. Is it really not MegaMan TAS?
Alyosha
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Editor, Emulator Coder, Expert player (3821)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2829
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I looked at some trace logs to see where differences came from that makes this run de-sync in most recent versions of bizhawk. AS far as I can tell, it comes from right here: 817D: ED LD A, R AF:0040 BC:1400 DE:50E3 HL:733C IX:C300 IY:DD03 SP:DFE4 Cy:204661845 cnp-h-Zs The R register is counter that increments on instruction calls, and and the timing fixes to the z80 means it has a different value at this point (2704 instead of 2C04 in the previous versions.) This seems to change the boss pattern. So the desync is unrelated to interrupts or SRAM, it appears purely cpu timing related. I don't know how/if this effects judging, the current cycle timings are indeed more accurate in the current version, I just thought I'd point this out so its documented.
Active player (437)
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
What a tremendous effort! You absolutely broke the game a lot further than before. You toyed with it :D Thoroughly enjoyed watching you smashing your way through the game. Thank you very much for the entertainment. Whoever encodes it, please provide a lossless encode. Would love to see you taking on Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, lots of new discoveries since the published run has been found.
Nitrogenesis wrote:
Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!
Arc wrote:
I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.
natt wrote:
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
Experienced player (690)
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he seems to collect chaos emeralds to become super as well
I want all good TAS inside TASvideos, it's my motto. TAS i'm interested: Megaman series, specially the RPGs! Where is the mmbn1 all chips TAS we deserve? Where is the Command Mission TAS? i'm slowly moving away from TASing fighting games for speed, maybe it's time to start finding some entertainment value in TASing.
Techokami
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HE GRAB THE DOOR O_O Yes vote! Wish I could have watched it directly instead of an encode, but what can you do to fix the desync?
Editor, Reviewer, Experienced player (979)
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Posts: 3109
Location: Sweden
You can then pick up the door
Well, I'm fairly certain this is the first time I've seen this in a video game. Yes vote!
Editor, Expert player (2098)
Joined: 8/25/2013
Posts: 1200
So, serious question. We still don't have a SMS star. ....Can this be Starred?
effort on the first draft means less effort on any draft thereafter - some loser
XYZ
Former player
Joined: 12/9/2006
Posts: 168
Location: 2bastuz
arandomgameTASer wrote:
....Can this be Starred?
Let's look at title. "Starring Mickey Mouse". No, we must give to this movie Star Ring) Yes for SMS star award.
Skilled player (1458)
Joined: 11/26/2011
Posts: 656
Location: RU
Excellent work Tee-N-Tee! I enjoyed it from beginning to the end. This nearly ethalon TAS for games of genre platformer.
arandomgameTASer wrote:
....Can this be Starred?
In my opinion it deserves.
I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Current projects: NES: Tetris "fastest 999999" (improvement, with r57shell) Genesis: Adventures of Batman & Robin (with Truncated); Pocahontas; Comix Zone (improvement); Mickey Mania (improvement); RoboCop versus The Terminator (improvement); Gargoyles (with feos)
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. ---- [3292] SMS Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse by Tee-N-Tee in 11:46.53
petaQ
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Joined: 3/8/2018
Posts: 22
Hiya, I wonder if any of you or the TASer can clarify what is meant with the version difference of 1.0 and 1.1 - speedruns of the game are currently affected by the clock tower bolt RNG. Does v1.1 have a totally fixed sequence there? Or did you mean to say that the bolt goes up only because of the TAS's optimal play? We were also wondering if you could explain the mechanics of the corner boost you use in the library to go over the top of the screen before jumping in the tea, as that would be among the final things the RTA run lacks that may be humanly viable. Thanks!