This topic is for the purpose of discussing #9014: ninespaces's Arcade Wonder Boy in Monster Land in 12:26.15

Couple of things: 1. Has anyone found out why the "wiggling" changes the money value? (Unintended memory corruption, perhaps?) 2. You start the final boss with a little more than two hearts you don't need to use - have you tested if it's faster to take chip damage in most rounds to skip the PERFECT bonuses and reduce the overall health bar you're taking along (and need to waste frames refilling at the end of each round)? 3. There's some areas that are obviously very laggy - would killing some enemies in those areas as you pass through help in that regard?

#1 Short answer: I have no idea. Longer answer: There's a few things I've learned about the gold values (but not really the wiggle glitch). First, hidden gold drops are primarily a function of the value in 0xC82A. But I've never seen a number calculated this way. It splits the low & high bits out and... umm. Well, here's some examples: 0x00 = 0 gold; 0x0F = 15 gold; 0x10 = 10 gold; 0x1F = 25 gold. But then at 0x99, it wraps back to 0 rather than incrementing to 100+. Anyway, the point of all that is that 0xFF = 65 gold. Second, if Wonder Boy switches horizontal direction 2 frames prior to a hidden gold drop appearing, 0xC82A is set to 0xFF. Otherwise it's set to 0x01 for a coin, 0x10 for a bag. Why? No idea. It's definitely tied to these hidden gold drops appearing though, because 0xC82A is not changing when Wonder Boy is otherwise flipping directions, nor when gold from monster drops appear. Gold from monster drops seems to be calculated separately. Third, there's a gold coin 'decay' value at 0xC80D. It's set to 4 when a coin first appears, and slowly counts down to 0. Its value is added to the value in 0xC82A to get the total gold obtained. #2 Not exhaustively. By the time of the boot upgrade, Wonder Boy is so fast that taking damage from enemies is (usually) a fairly big time loss, even when they boost him in the same direction. So getting his health down super low would take a fair chunk of time. That said, those screens between rounds sure are time sinks, so it's worth investigating. #3 Again - not exhaustively. I did try in a couple of spots to kill enemies, but it ended up being faster to just keep moving. As with #2 though, it's probably worth looking into some more.

A classic tas with fast 2D platforming action. Looks great! The highlight is when the player is bouncing on the enemies to hit the flying boss. Stunning performance!

Ok... I vastly underestimated how much time the Round transition screens take. (My thanks to GJTASer2018 for the suggestion.) Went back and took deliberate damage to keep health as low as possible throughout most of the run, and the result is a substantial improvement: User movie #638491354432209448 In this updated version, I stop deliberately taking damage from Round 8 onward, because a lot of health is needed for the final Round, and because enemy damage is so high from that point on that even one hit generally kills Wonder Boy. It's still possible there's more time to save via health manipulation -- but Round 11's RNG is fairly volatile, so I'm not sure. I've updated the submission with the new encode embed link, and removed the no longer relevant round by round comments. (Is this appropriate? If not please let me know!)

Managed to squeeze in some additional improvements in rounds 8-10: User movie #638492249852511625 Updated the encode embed link.

So the wiggle tech with lots of gold is only applicable to hidden gold?

So the wiggle tech with lots of gold is only applicable to hidden gold?

As far as I can tell.

Great to see a TAS of the Arcade version of this game submitted here! This version is more difficult to beat than the SMS version, and you did a great job on this game. I especially liked the initial version of the "Blue Death" boss (bouncing on the flying enemies was neat). Thanks for explaining about the gold glitch, the damage route, and the lag (I didn't realize some areas are laggy when I played this game before). About the wall glitch on the Round 2: Great discovery! That wall is the only one the glitch works? I wonder if this glitch could work with some walls of the last round (for instance, around 9:53 and 10:07 of the encode video). About the damage route: On Round 8, I noticed you waited a bit to take damage on the room before the main boss room. Couldn't be faster taking damage from one of Death enemies on Round 9 instead? Or they do high damage enough to kill the player? Also, I noticed something at the end of the first room of Round 10 (around 7:48 of the video): Falling down directly is faster than doing a jump earlier to this point? Watched this run on the same day you've submitted it, but I didn't comment before because I decided to test this game when I had free time: actually the "start" button has one more function: it speeds up messages, even the unavoidable ones (the "quiz" boss from Round 6 and the ending message after you defeat the last boss). Meanwhile, yes vote... And fun fact: the ending message on the SMS version can advance without needing input at all. I don't remember if the behavior applies with the Arcade version too.

Thanks, Challenger - those are all great suggestions. I can't believe I didn't know about the start button functionality, that's a big time save. Interestingly, it also changes the point of final input, because the UFO's message just before the credits is fast-forwardable. I suppose that changes what's considered the final time for the TAS? I've incorporated the start button functionality and the RND10 jump into the updated version, and I've updated the encode embed link in the submission: User movie #638493990861075742 I haven't found anywhere else the wall glitch works, including the places you noted. The vertical section in RND3 seems like a good candidate for it too, but so far I've only managed to get it to work in that one RND2 location. Strange though... in principle it seems like if it works there, it should work elsewhere. I haven't managed to save time using the RND8/9 alternative damage suggestion. There's a similarly frustrating part in RND10: because of damage taken in the underwater section, an enemy needs to be killed to get some health later or Wonder Boy dies. In principle it should be faster to avoid the damage from the underwater enemy and then skip past the later enemy - but I haven't been able to get that to work without it messing up RND10/11's RNG, which currently works quite well (at least, as of right now!).

I think I'm going to wait a few more days before looking into this TAS. Seems that improvements could still be a possibility.

Checking back in to make sure that the improvements have all been explored and finalized. If so, I'll continue with judgement.

Checking back in to make sure that the improvements have all been explored and finalized. If so, I'll continue with judgement.

I made one more improvement. Changed the RND11 Minotaur fight to beat it closer to the elevator that spawns. Haven't been able to get the other suggestions to work - it always ends up with a death in RND11. Encode embed link is updated and here's the revised .bk2: User movie #638500824710515904

Checking back in to make sure that the improvements have all been explored and finalized. If so, I'll continue with judgement.

I made one more improvement. Changed the RND11 Minotaur fight to beat it closer to the elevator that spawns. Haven't been able to get the other suggestions to work - it always ends up with a death in RND11. Encode embed link is updated and here's the revised .bk2: User movie #638500824710515904

Thanks. I'll be starting my review tonight