(Link to video)
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My first submission! Attempts to beat the Easy Championship as fast as possible. This is the most popular category for speedrunners. Shows off many of the tricks the community has discovered over the years as well as some TAS only tricks/lap skips I've found.
Emulator: BizHawk 2.8.0
The ROM checksums (SHA1) are:
SPCH1001.BIN = 10155d8d6e6e832d6ea66db9bc098321fb5e8ebf
Motor Toon Grand Prix.bin = 16925b62621871a66a7fd3dd858214f546d8092f
Online checksum SHA1: ( https://emn178.github.io/online-tools/sha1_checksum.html )

Important Mechanics and Information:

Car Selection

Raptor-Raptor is the car of choice and has a unique set of abilities and quirks.
  • Can drive off course without a speed penalty
  • Easily controllable while in the air
  • Drives noticeably faster in reverse

Key Items and Their Usage

  • Power Up!
    • Top speed of the car is slightly increased
    • Also improves acceleration
  • Turbo
    • Similar to Power Up! but only temporarily increases top speed and acceleration
  • Jump
    • Car is boosted into the air
    • Useful for skipping portions of the track
  • Dynamite
    • Fires out the back of the vehicle and causes an explosion
    • Since Raptor-Raptor is driven backwards this can be used like Jump to skip areas by running into the explosion
  • Bomb
    • 3 bombs/mines are placed statically at the location of the vehicle over a couple of seconds
    • When a car hits a bomb it is thrown into the air like Dynamite
    • If the car is stationary all bombs are laid on top of themselves
    • When hitting a stack of Bombs their force is cumulative and thus throws the car further

Acquiring Items and Manipulation

In order to get items the play must first pick up coins. These coins are used to "buy" a spin of the item wheel. Item wheels contain 8 items that are "randomly" selected. The wheel begins to spin and the player can then press a button to stop the wheel. A skilled player can accurately press a button to stop the wheel at the desired location.
In actuality, these item wheels are not random. At any given time, one of three predetermined item wheels will be selected depending on the frame the coin in spent. Additionally, which set of three item wheels is available is dependent on the players position in the race (e.g. 2nd vs 6th) and the amount of laps (measured in half increments) the player has completed. More information, including a complete set of item heatmaps is available on my github here: https://github.com/lazycurler/MotorToonGrandPrixResearch/tree/main/itemWheel

Lap Skip

Arguably the most important time saving trick of this run is Lap Skip. As the name implies, this is when a significant portion of the track is skipped such that when the player respawns the lap counter has incremented. The following is quick summary followed by a link to a more verbose explaination. The game tracks the players last physical location on the track which it uses when respawning the player. Separately, the game tracks the players progress along the track and, crucially, this will update even if the player isn't physically on the track (i.e. above it). Therefore, if the player can stay off the track for a significant portion (over 1/2) of a lap and cross over the track to update the players progress then a lap skip can occur. This happens when the players position updates over 1/2 of a lap in a single frame. A more in depth explanation with diagrams/examples can be found on my github here: https://github.com/lazycurler/MotorToonGrandPrixResearch/tree/main/respawn

Lap by Lap Information:

Toon Island II

Lap 1

  • Start by turning around and picking up 2 extra coins
  • Begin driving off-track to set up lap skip
  • Use coins to get Power Up!x3
  • With no Jump item, use the house to skip over the track (updating track progress)
  • Start the item wheel to get a wheel with Super Shield
  • Crash into out-of-bounds terrain to trigger respawn resulting in lap skip warp

Lap 2

  • Start driving off track again to setup the next lap skip
  • Use speed/moment to completely jump the track (updating track progress)
  • Crash into out-of-bounds terrain to trigger respawn resulting in lap skip warp again

Lap 3

  • Start driving off track again to setup the next lap skip
  • Use Super Shield to increase driving speed
  • Repeat lap skip setup and execution to finish the lap

Toon Village

Lap 1

  • Turn around and collect 4 coins to start
  • Use first 3 coins to get Power Up!
  • Use 4th coin to get Bomb
  • Place Bomb strategically off track for use on the next lap
  • 8th place car used to accelerate back to full speed
  • Jump to Deo-Express over a portion of the track
  • Cut through the main track to pick up another coin
  • Coin used to get another Jump to skip the corkscrew track

Lap 2

  • 4 more coins picked up
  • Ride off bridge to start setup lap skip
  • Continue riding off track until the Bomb from place on the previous lap is hit
  • Dynamite used to Deo-Express again, this time off track
  • Go behind the houses and carefully ride along the saw-horses to maintain lap skip
  • Run into out-of-bounds terrain to complete lap skip

Lap 3

  • Super Shield to increase speed
  • Jump to Deo-Express again
  • Use final coin on Dynamite to skip the corkscrew again and finish the race

Crazy Coaster

Lap 1

  • Hold off on turning around to make grabbing coins easier
  • Pick up first 4 coins
  • Turn around with a Y-turn
  • Pick up next 2 coins
  • Get a single Power Up! in before preforming a S-bend skip with a Jump
  • Get a second Jump in to skip over a big portion of the track
  • Use a coin before crossing the halfway point to get a second Power Up!

Lap 2

  • After the ramp begin riding off the track to setup lap skip
  • Use a series of Dynamites to switch between the rails of the track to maintain respawn location for lap skip
  • These switches are needed as it is not possible to drive on one side without hitting invisible walls or going out-of-bounds (and respawning)
  • Dynamite over the track to achieve enough lap progress to enable lap skip on respawn

Lap 3

  • Dynamite back onto the track rail to setup for another lap skip
  • Use Jump to switch between rails followed by another Dynamite
  • End with a Jump to complete the lap skip

Gulliver House II

Lap 1

  • Turn around and get three coins
  • Similar to past laps use coins to get Power Up!x3
  • Pick up 2 more coins
  • Super Shield with the first coin
  • Wait to cross the median an use the second Super Shield to help with acceleration
  • Pick up another coin
  • Get Jump to do jump over the pancake

Lap 2

  • Pick up 3 more coins
  • Super Shield them to improve top speed
  • Pick up two more coins
  • Save the final Super Shield for crossing the median again
  • Pick up another coin
  • Dynamite over the pancake this time
  • Save a single coin for the final lap

Lap 3

  • Pickup coins and Super Shield similar to previous lap
  • "Dynamite over pancake again
  • Turbo one final time before crossing the finish line

Haunted Castle

Lap 1

  • Turn around immediately
  • Pickup 2 coins
  • Use first coin to do a Spyro skip with Jump skipping a portion of the track
  • Use the other coin to get a Power Up!
  • Pickup coin and spin wheel before crossing halfway point to get a second Power Up!
  • Go the longer route down the spiral to get a coin to get the final Power Up!

Lap 2

  • Pick up two more coins
  • Use the first to Spyro skip again with another Jump
  • Pickup a coin and immediately use it before crossing into the second half of the lap to get a Super Shield for later
  • Ride up on the rail an jam the car into a corner to get it stuck while having one corner of the car be registered as in the next sector (below)
  • Getting stuck like this forces a respawn and since the car is registered as in the next sector it serves as a forward warp
  • Super Shield for acceleration and top speed
  • Turn around and finish lap

Lap 3

  • Continue Super Shield
  • Pick up 2 more coins
  • Use Jump to Spyro skip again
  • Continue using "Super Shield" saving the final one
  • Use the final "Super Shield" for acceleration and top speed
  • Force another forward warp by getting stuck
  • Don't turn around since this is the final lap and there's only a short distance to go
  • Finish the lap, race, and championship
ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.
ThunderAxe31: File replaced with a spiked version that removes 5523 blank frames at the end and implements the CycleCount value. Also, removing the branch label as it's unnecessary, as explained by Spikestuff. More details here.
Hello and welcome to TASVideos, lazycurler! For a first submission, this is a great effort. You took your time analyzing the game mechanics and figuring out the fastest route accordingly. From looking at your movie closely, I could see that there was a lot of care into making it. Accepting as fastest completion.
Spikestuff: Processing...

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Posted: 12/17/2022 9:02 PM
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TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7883: lazycurler's PSX Motor Toon Grand Prix in 13:37.61
Posted: 12/30/2022 2:30 PM
(Edited: 12/30/2022 3:30 PM)
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Spikestuff
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Editor, Publisher, Expert player (2633)
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6437
Location: The land down under.
Flash TASer of 2022 PSX TASer of 2016
Two things, and one of these is going to be solved by me.
  1. You use the Cross button to advance through menus. All face buttons (Circle, Cross, Square, Triangle) advances onwards. So those downtime moments can be improved by a few frames.
  2. The input ends late and is also missing a CycleCount (and ClockRate), I corrected that for the Judge which can be found here.
Lastly, placing a shotgun claim for publication. Edit: I don't see it properly outlined by the author so I'm just going to both explain the branch, but also suggest the nuking of it. The game defaults you on Easiest difficulty in the Options. There's a total of 5 difficulties: Easy, Normal, Hard, Professional and Expert. Professional and Expert do not allow items to be on track. Ideally for a TAS, Easy being the default difficulty wouldn't need a branch, this TAS would also have a fair challenge with one that's done on Hard. Expert, being the polar opposite would require a branch (and also need to be done) appropriately labelled "Expert". You can't call it "Expert, no items" as it's part of the difficulty description. Lastly "Championship Race" is all the races, this is again a default mode where you race through all 5 tracks. Comparatively more straight forward than say what we have for F-Zero, but I personally believe more inline with Chocobo Racing. So on a technicality this is "Championship Race" which is a default mode, which doesn't need a branch compared to a hardest difficulty run.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
Posted: 12/30/2022 4:51 PM
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lazycurler
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Joined: 12/5/2022
Posts: 1
You use the Cross button to advance through menus. All face buttons (Circle, Cross, Square, Triangle) advances onwards. So those downtime moments can be improved by a few frames.
Ahhhh, that makes sense. Assuming it can still be published as is I think I will leave this as future work.
The input ends late and is also missing a CycleCount (and ClockRate), I corrected that for the Judge which can be found here.
Thanks for adding/fixing this! As for the branch, I wasn't sure and figured I'd add one to be safe. 100% good with getting rid of it
Posted: 1/13/2023 10:48 AM
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CoolKirby
Editor, Experienced player (570)
Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4036
Exotic platforms TASer of 2014 NES TAS of 2013
Awesome job on this! I always enjoy racing game TASes, and this one was full of fun skips. Some of the play looked slightly unoptimized, but I don't see it as a big deal due to the complexity of the game. Voting Yes, and welcome to TASVideos!
Posted: 2/1/2023 12:01 PM
Post subject: Movie published
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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. ---- [5067] PSX Motor Toon Grand Prix by lazycurler in 13:37.61