Two things. First, an insignificant contribution to Raphael's melee attacks. While I haven't been monitoring any values, I can tell from experience that the damage dealt is not always the same, with the same enemy sometimes withstanding a number of attacks that would in other cases destroy him.
that's probably the random 5 vs. 3 damage on his 3rd combo strike we were talking about a few posts back.
Second, a faster way of beating Slash ^.^
holy crap. :)
Basically, keep headbutting him (or whatever the ramming move is called), and get the timing down right which isn't THAT hard to do when playing in less than realtime. Notice that some headbutts hit twice, too.
how do you accomplish the double ram? is it from a single press of Y? or if you have to hit Y twice, do you also have to start running again?
how do you accomplish the double ram? is it from a single press of Y? or if you have to hit Y twice, do you also have to start running again?
The double hit is from a single button press, it simply connects twice. After every hit, you need to press a directional button once to start running again, and then headbut him again quickly afterwards.
Also, finishing Slash with a flying kick (which ideally hits three times) should be little faster.
As for Raph's normal melee attacks, what about his second one. When practicing on the console, I have noticed that sometimes I take out the red jump-n-throw-knives foot soldiers with a headbut, followed by a kick and a normal attack, while at other times, I need to attack twice after kicking him for the kill. (note that after kicking, you start of with the 2nd melee attack, not with the first)
The double hit is from a single button press, it simply connects twice. After every hit, you need to press a directional button once to start running again, and then headbut him again quickly afterwards.
wow, another reason why Manual kicks Auto's sorry ass.
As for Raph's normal melee attacks, what about his second one. When practicing on the console, I have noticed that sometimes I take out the red jump-n-throw-knives foot soldiers with a headbut, followed by a kick and a normal attack, while at other times, I need to attack twice after kicking him for the kill. (note that after kicking, you start of with the 2nd melee attack, not with the first)
to my knowledge:
knife-throwing foot soldier HP = 28
Raph shoulder ram = 10
Raph standing sidekick after ram = 12
Raph second normal hit = 4
thus, you should always need another hit to finish him. can you give a specific example (i.e. location, etc) of a knife-thrower who fell within three hits? better yet, a savestate. :)
Here's a from-save-state movie of it: http://www.filespace.org/nitsuja/orange3.smv.zip
I think that some foot soldiers start out with lower HP than normal. The only really obvious case was in the elevator up to Shredder, where one of the groups of soldiers there would die from a single special attack that normally wouldn't be enough to kill them, but maybe there are other cases of it throughout the game.
After some playing around, it seems that it is indeed always the same Knife Soldier who dies a little faster than his counterparts, the one in Nitsuja's movie being one of them. Takes care of that :)
However, there seems to be no logic as to which ones are weaker..
Edit: ugh. The headbut-spamming on Slash doesn't work in hard mode because there's a longer delay between hits on Slash during the fight as opposed to normal mode. So much for that :[
Apologies for the double post, but seeing as the topic's dropped down a bit, an edit would most likely not be noticed, so here goes.
In the second battle with Krang, is there an easy way to make his vehicle appear near ground level, so it can be special attack'd? With easy meaning, something you can pull of consistently in a non-tool assisted speedrun.
ugh. The headbut-spamming on Slash doesn't work in hard mode because there's a longer delay between hits on Slash during the fight as opposed to normal mode. So much for that :[
That might explain the trouble I had getting it to work... But do you mean that even in a TAS it would be impossible, or just that the delay is too long to do it reliably in a non-assisted speedrun?
AllBogs wrote:
In the second battle with Krang, is there an easy way to make his vehicle appear near ground level, so it can be special attack'd? With easy meaning, something you can pull of consistently in a non-tool assisted speedrun.
No. At least, it appeared to be random, and I didn't notice any pattern to it. (It isn't random in the Super-Krang battle, however; that time-wasting bomb-launching move can be avoided with the right sequence of attacks even if they're not done as fast as possible.)
I'm working on a TMNT4 speedrun on hard mode and I made boss killing movies, including some of Slash. The first one is done without shoulder charging, and the second one is done with shoulder charging.
These aren't perfect by TAS standards since I played in real time, but they should give a pretty good idea of how the Slash battle works on Hard (I think these are faster than your current run).
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/766/slashbattle1.smvhttp://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/767/slashbattle2.smv
About the first Slash battle, I haven't tested using a special against Slash's roll attack (which will prevent him from traveling to the other side of the screen), then hitting him on the way down. Hitting Slash multiple times in one shoulder charge might be possible if you're overlapping him, I never tested.
All_Bogs: I have done some testing against the Krang battle and it is one of the few battles in the game that is random to my knowledge. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to what height he will appear at.
ugh. The headbut-spamming on Slash doesn't work in hard mode because there's a longer delay between hits on Slash during the fight as opposed to normal mode. So much for that :[
That might explain the trouble I had getting it to work... But do you mean that even in a TAS it would be impossible, or just that the delay is too long to do it reliably in a non-assisted speedrun?
I thought the delay would be too long to actually do the battle faster with shoulder dashing, but as demonstrated by Mikwuyma's video's, this doesn't seem to be the case; while you can't hit Slash multiple times with one dash on Hard (or so it seems), you still hit him continiously. While slower than on normal difficulty, it's still a bit faster than the method shown in your TAS.
Using a special attack to stop Slash' roll attack sounds like a good idea.
As for Krang, that's well evil, putting that sort of randomness at the end of a game :[
As for Super Krang, I know. He goes into something you could call "special attack mode" after every six hits, and if he has 2 blocks or less of health left, that special attack is his bomb drop attack. A quick, but messy method for normal mode involves dieing to regain health for more special attacks, but that wouldn't look good in a no-deaths TAS ^.^
How does the in-game timer work in this game? I'm curious because Nitsuja's much faster run has an in-game time of 15:33, but Mazzeneko's obsoleted run has an in-game time of 13:10. Can anyone explain why?
How does the in-game timer work in this game? I'm curious because Nitsuja's much faster run has an in-game time of 15:33, but Mazzeneko's obsoleted run has an in-game time of 13:10. Can anyone explain why?
Wow, I hadn't noticed that. My guess is that I put the in-game time below 10 minutes, but the display isn't capable of showing only 1 digit for the minutes so it shows a bogus time (since they assumed sub-10 minutes is impossible, which it is, but not in their crazy unit of time they call a minute). Or maybe something Mazzeneko did more than me (slamming enemies?) stops the in-game timer. Either way I wouldn't rely on the in-game timer for comparing performances - timing it in real-time would be a lot more accurate.
How does the in-game timer work in this game? I'm curious because Nitsuja's much faster run has an in-game time of 15:33, but Mazzeneko's obsoleted run has an in-game time of 13:10. Can anyone explain why?
I found the real reason why. The game keeps perfect track of the number of seconds that you have control during each level, and correctly splits it into hours:minutes.seconds, but then the number printout routine has a bug. It doesn't convert to base 10 correctly, so it accidentally decreases the number it prints by 6 for every multiple of 16 that the number is. This error affects both the minutes and the seconds. So at 59 it will show 41 (the highest number it can print), and any minute display below 15 is almost certainly 6 minutes too low.
The real in-game times, if the game could display them correctly, would have been 00:15.45 (for mine) and 00:19.16 (for mazzeneko's). If I had waited another 15 seconds, the in-game time would have displayed as "00:10.00".
EDIT: Oops, I don't know where I got 9 seconds to reach 10:00 from, but I meant 15, of course, since 45+9 wouldn't be enough to reach the next minute.
hah.. i remember from waay back that the game told me i finished in like 25 or 26 minutes, even though my actual time was closer to half an hour. i chalked this up to either an inaccurate timer, or maybe time being lost if i died/continued. but it stayed in the back of my head.
good to see this mystery solved.
have you considered making a bugfix? where's the routine at?
have you considered making a bugfix? where's the routine at?
I hadn't, no. I know the time in seconds is stored at 0x7E1BDE (as a 2-byte int) and that the mistake happens because it converts the individual digits of hex to decimal (so for instance 1C becomes 1*10+12=22 instead of 27) but I don't know where the code that does that is located.
dang, for not seeing the code, you sure have this spot-on. :) ex:
and correctly splits it into hours:minutes.seconds,
like you said, that's right, and it fails in preparing those values for display.
what *should* happen is that it takes a decimal time (e.g. 22d) and then turns into BCD (e.g. 22h). that way, each digit is in a nibble, which makes them easy to output. what the game currently does is:
SED (set decimal mode)
LDA #$0000
ADC time_unit
STA time_unit
CLD (clear decimal mode)
i'm honestly not sure how "decimal mode" works on the CPU. but i do know that while that snippet will succeed at converting 0Ch to 12h (as C isn't a valid 0-9 digit), it will fail at things like 28h (it stays 28h rather than becoming 40h, probably because both digits are already 0-9) and the example you gave.
here's a bugfix (for a USA, version 1.0, headered ROM):
http://assassin17.home.comcast.net/tmnt4_patches/Turtle-Time.zip
what it does is get (time_unit DIV 10) and (time_unit MOD 10) -- many thanks to a pre-existing division routine! -- then correctly sticks each digit in a nibble of the byte.
it seems to work right, but would you mind throwing some more $1BDE values at it and see how it holds up?
thanks
oy vey.. i scoured ROM sites, and see there's two USA version 1.0 ROMs, both having good checksums, but the files are definitely different. then there's filenames with (A) and a (E), different file contents, both version 1.0, yet their regions are the same according to the emulator.
does anybody know the story on the US ones? is Konami too dimwitted to update the version #, or is one of these a widely circulated hack?
EDIT: ok, according to GoodSNES, one (not the one i made my patch for) is "(Beta) [h1]", meaning a hacked beta. it's almost identical to a ROM with "(Beta)"; the majority of the difference is the cartridge info (game title, ROM makeup, etc) is changed to be normal.
grumble..
I just had a look at SDA and I found this:
http://speeddemosarchive.com/tmnt4.html
A new speedrun made and beat the game in 22:31 on Hard diffeculty. I think it's awesome, concidering it's played on console.
The normal qual is just fine if you don't wanna download high/insane. Check it out :)
took only 4 hits only troughout the game.
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
If you ask mike himself, he might give you his test runs he did on snes9x. They're arguably the exact same thing, but his space station level is a lot better/more entertaining.
A followup on the timer bugfix: on April 10, I uploaded a more official archive to my site, complete with patches for the Japanese version and the USA Beta (so now every release of the game is covered), anti-patches, and documentation and commented assembly code that most of you who've read this thread won't need. ;) Get it here:
http://www14.brinkster.com/assassin17/ OR
http://assassin17.home.comcast.net/
All questions and comments are welcome.
