In reviewing this run, I was able to implement some movement improvements scattered through the run.
Stage 1 (16 Frames Saved): Started moving earlier and managed to get the 10th hit on the skeleton a bit earlier to move to stage two.
Stage 2 (0 Frames Saved): Different attack pattern to avoid the axe. Otherwise no frames difference.
Stage 3 (14 Frames Saved): Better movement (more diagonals) to exit the maze faster.
Stage 4 (45 Frames Saved): Better movement (more diagonals) to exit the maze faster.
Stage 5 (2 Frames Lost): Unfortunately I lost two frames here and can't figure out why. Even just copying the original requires adding two frames. The player character must move up to y-position=15 while touching the freed boy to end the game.
Total improvement = 73 Frames
Here is an updated .bk2.
And a temp encode.
https://youtu.be/kZIQXhatvHo
Once I have coauthorship/editing rights on the submission, I'll change the main encode to this one.
Here's a side-by-side GIF comparison of the run before and after improvements.
I also discovered a minor ROM issue. Checking the ROM used for this run using goodtools yields "Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox) [o1].a26" The
[o1] indicates that the ROM is an overdump ROM. For those who may not know, overdump ROMs have extra unused data beyond the actual game data in the ROM file itself. This extra data is meaningless and doesn't impact the game in any way.
Unfortunately, goodtools does not have a
[!] marked ROM for this game indicating a known proper dump of the game. There is a ROM in the goodtools database that's not labeled with any notations "Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox).a26" but this ROM only seems to contain the first stage of the game (it resets to the beginning once the spears are collected).
There is a PAL version that has the
[!] known good dump indicator; interestingly the inputs from this run sync perfectly on the PAL version but the overall play is slower due to the framerate differences.
Due to these issues with the ROM, I think the overdump version is likely the best to use for this game, as it allows a full game NTSC run.
