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There's a problem with the Pidgey route, and I'm not sure exactly why. I end up stuck in something similar to the faint Trainer-Fly glitch, where I can't talk to most NPCs and I need to use a PC to save and restart. It doesn't stop the route from working but it's a serious time waste, and I need to find a way to make the Pokemon Center work. I have all the difficult luck-manipulation out of the way, so I'll finish up this version for a demonstration, but I'm frustrated that I can't find the reason for this glitch and couldn't catch it in testing.
Here is a link to that .bkm file, it becomes extremely sloppy after the Weedle fight because I just wanted to show the problem.
edit: If the problem persists with the Level 6 Pidgey route, I'll try catching a level 2 Rattata with 13 HP. This has the advantage over Level 6 Pidgey, level 4 Pidgey, or level 7 Charmander in that it can go into red bar from a critical Water Gun, which saves over 15 seconds. I'll have to test it, however, to ensure it doesn't have the same problem as this level 6 Pidgey run.
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Thomaz wrote:
A few things:
1) I would still get the Antidote in Viridian Forest, because it's literally in front of you, unless TAS can walk around it and buy something else instead in a faster time?
You're right, I forgot to mention the Antidote. It's faster to pick up the Antidote, but I'm not sure if I want 2 Potions and 3 Poke Balls or 1 and 4.
2) I'm pretty sure Pidgey can't reach the Fresh Water before dieing. He needs exactly 23 HP. Remember that the moment Pidgey gets Poisoned, it receives damage at the end of the turn. =(
Good point. However, Pidgey won't take that damage if I use a Poke Ball on Bellsprout and have it miss. According to my testing, it's faster to have that failed catch animation in order to avoid needing to use a potion in the field. I also know that a higher level Pidgey will speed up the Missingno fight by taking less damage off Water Gun.
3) When you faint after the Fresh Water, you can walk down towards the gate and MissingNo will appear before you enter the gate. There's no need for depositing the Fresh Water at all.
I've always been a little unclear on the workings of that glitch. So, I would want to toss all the items above my 255 Potions after doing that, and then toss the potions until the inventory menu broke? Or would it only be necessary to start tossing the potions from slot 6?
I assume you'll whif an attack on your first turn so that MissingNo can Water Gun you btw?
Yes, a failed Sand-Attack is the fastest way.
The Pidgey fast kill on Weedle sounds intruiging. However, a level 6 Charmander can 5HKO the Weedle with 2 normal attacks and 3crits. Sure, the rival fight is slow, but even Bulba isn't that much faster. What I'm trying to say is that I think the Charmander route is faster because although Charmander's DVs are bad, they are perfect for the death-warp and it doesn't involve depositing your starter either. And by skipping Poke Balls until Pewtwer City, you skip the Viridian Mart entirely.
That's also a possibility I'll try to test. The big problem is that I'm not as adept at manipulating RNG entropy as MrWint, and a search with only 2 degrees of freedom will have an average delay of 256 frames to get the correct DVs.
Should I write down my route (no big difference aside from those I mentioned) to see if there's anything I missed?
Please do. I apologize for constantly thinking of difficult-to-manipulate events that make the segmented run even more challenging.
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I am now unable to use the faint trainer-fly to make a wild Pokemon appear without fighting another trainer first. Shenanagans, do you know if there are specific circumstances necessary to make that happen?
edit: I figured it out. You need to be standing directly in front of the trainer when he spots you, if there's any space in between it won't work.
Testing has shown the existence of problems with my planned route. I think it might be faster to do a route like this:
- Buy 3 Poke Balls, Parlyz Heal, Burn Heal at Viridian City.
- Catch level 5 Pidgey before Viridian Forest.
- Swap out Bulbasaur in battle, use Pidgey to fight Weedle, leaving Pidgey with 17/22 HP. Pidgey can win with 3 attacks, Bulbasaur will reach level 7, Pidgey will reach level 6.
- Buy enough items to have 6 in Pewter, Potion last.
- Proceed to do Brock Through Walls to Saffron.
- Deposit Bulbasaur, heal, execute faint Trainer-Fly
- Get Pidgey poisoned by a level 19 Bellsprout with 31 or 32 Special.
- Buy Fresh Water
- Faint on Celadon roof, then deposit Fresh Water in PC.
- Fight Missingno., using two potions and then catching it.
- Deposit items, withdraw Fresh Water, trigger item underflow.
This route makes it possible to use two items in battle against Missingno. before visiting Celadon, and still ensures the fastest possible way to faint out of Celadon.
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Thomaz wrote:
Anyway, final time is now 13:43. As it is looking right now, I'd say I can get sub 14 by about 3 seconds lol...
I remember when people joked about how ridiculous it would be to create a sub-90 run. These developments are great, and please post as much as you want about the segmented run, it's very relevant to my TASing.
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Thomaz wrote:
Ok. So I just did a Blue run using Charmander and I noticed something really weird, but very annoying... I couldn't walk to the left during all this! Due to my route from Route 3 to Saffron, I couldn't enter the Pokécenter. I have to go left once after reaching Saffron. If I don't, the game freezes because I walk over something nonexistant. So, to get rid of BtW, I had to enter Mr.Psychic's house, then walk out and heal in the Pokécenter. =X
I was a bit lazy so I went for a critical Gust from Pidgey for the death-warp, but in reality, it should't be much more time. And I also didn't get a perfect Bellsprout encounter on the lower left patch of grass on Route 7 (when I walked up, I got the right DV, but when I went left, it was different lol).
No matter, the only effect this had, was that I had to use my second Potion I picked up. I will skip that Potion in a segmented run, although I will hate myself for it. Also, in this run, I should've saved more often due to mimicing a segmented run and I shouldn't have critted so much...
Regardless, final time is 00:13:56.
Assuming I can fix the going left issue, skip TM18 and buy another item instead, a segmented run might just sub 14. It's gonna be tough though.
Did you manipulate for 1024 DVs, or level up Charmander to the correct Special, or something else?
On the TAS, it makes me chuckle that I saved 2 frames before leaving the first room. It's no longer necessary to change the battle style to Set, since this run will never win a fight against a trainer with multiple Pokemon.
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MrWint wrote:
I don't think you should worry about this kind of optimization quite yet, as long as the route isn't ironed out. Chances are the setup won't work out/be suboptimal in the end, or you need additional steps (like a specific Trainer ID), which will be especially true when using Cooltrainer in the end.
When using the DVs to create the necessary coordinates, the PP of the first two moves is used to determine the data that is read. The PPs I used in the proof-of-concept are not ideal, since they cause the Trainer-Fly effect and require fighting a trainer or saving and resetting to get rid of it. There are probably better ways to set this up, which may or may not use the DVs, so spending time on optimizing getting these DVs may be futile in the end.
I see. In that case, I'll work on a run using something similar to the Abraless RTA route so we can have a TAS of the new route. I understand that your method gets more precise results but can take much longer to make the videos.
edit to add: If you use Potion after duplicating to 255 and visiting the PC box, does that disrupt the glitch? I'm thinking about the best way to walk to Celadon and poison-warp back after catching Missingno. The route will have caught Missingno at that point, so won't it be correct to deposit Pidgey and use the newly caught Missingno/Rhydon to get poisoned?
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MrWint wrote:
That happens when it cannot find the coordinates, it keeps looking for them forever, softlocking the game. Most trainer IDs are not in the right location to trigger this, you need to have it on an address ending in {2,6,A,E}, the Trainer ID addresses are at $d359 (master), $d177 (party), $d8b0 (opponent), $cfa4 (selected), none of which is working. Only the boxed Pokémon's Trainer ID at $daa2 (and some subsequent) will work, so you need to box (any) Pokémon to make it work. Also, the Trainer ID is followed by the experience data, which needs to have the right values for it to overwrite the memory in the right way. The first usable (if not ideal) value is 0x0004, which requires at least 1024 exp.
Also, a bit more clarification on the goals of the memory corruption (i.e. the choice of the address to read the path data from): The goal is to overwrite $cd3b to mask any button that can be used for or held down while moving (B and Select work, or the directional buttons directly), while not disabling these buttons by masking them at $cd6b. The third important address is $cd60, which contains a bunch of flags that control overworld interaction: Bit 0 makes the game think you are being engaged by a trainer, which causes the same effect as Trainer-Flys do and should be avoided. Bit 1 causes the dust cloud animation, which costs some frames, but clears $cd6b and thus may allow you to move when you otherwise couldn't. The other overwritten bytes are not that interesting as far as I can see, it's mostly a buffer storing screen tiles (the same used for the Cooltrainer encounter glitch).
Speaking of Cooltrainer, using the transform glitch to finish the game is likely still faster than using item underflow, but it's even harder to set up than in the current TAS, since it's even earlier in the run and you need to spend some of your manipulation potential already to make walking through walls work. I presume there will be a good amount of trickery required to execute this. I will experiment with this and see this will work out.
I see, thank you. Using the 1024 DVs costs about 5 seconds compared to better DVs if something else were to work, so it's not worthwhile catching and boxing a Pokemon. I'll get to work on a faster opening that finds a Charmander with those DVs, but it'll take a lot of work unless I get a working script to brute-force test for me.
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I'd like to test setting the trainer ID to 0x1024, does anyone know what memory address stores trainer ID? Edit: I did a manual RAM search, trainer ID appears to be a 2-byte big-endian number stored at address 1359. I did a quick test poking the ID to 1024, or decimal 04132, and the game stopped and wouldn't accept input when I talked to the Brock skip trainer from the right.
I looked at the table of values, and it looks like it won't be possible for the player name to have 0x1024 in it - the alphabet starts at 0x80.
Thomaz wrote:
Yeah, I just tested it and 1/0/2/4 does work like you said.
It would be really great to be able to use a Charmander with higher Atk...I'm not gonna like the segmented run if a specific ID is gonna be needed, but there's nothing I can really do about it (although hard, I have the means to get both a good Charmander a workable ID).
Is there a special luck-manipulation method, or would you be sitting down and grinding it out? It would take almost 50,000 resets for a 50% chance of getting the correct trainer ID, and the odds are equally bad if there's only 1 set of DVs that works.
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Shenanagans wrote:
Actually 1024 is genius because that would correspond to our coordinates!
That would explain why he chose those DVs, then. Is there any way to use different DVs, perhaps through trainer ID manipulation? An attack DV that's too low costs an extra attack at the Weedle fight, and an HP DV above 2 costs an extra 66 frames in Celadon.
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True wrote:
Chamale wrote:
The NES seems less reliable with TASbot than other consoles, particularly because the hardware is more variable than later Nintendo systems
I'm sorry; what? If you know something about my bots (that everyone calls TASbot now) that I don't I'd like to know?.
I think it's an issue with the console and not the bots. NES consoles are older and have more variation between individual units, and TASbot had more synchronization problems at AGDQ with the NES than with the other consoles. I've also heard there are more issues with runs that sync on one NES failing to sync on models that should be identical, but as the others pointed out EMI may be the cause of the problems at AGDQ.
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Shenanagans wrote:
Thomaz wrote:
So 4 saves sounds ok I guess. Hard but doable. And not so insane that it will take months to get it... <_<
Also, I just finished a testrun on Pokemon Red (so I had to faint in the Dojo...) and got 15 minutes. 14 is probably possible. 13 though? I'm not sure.
4 saves sounds pretty reasonable. 2 would be the full on yolo while 4 will be a fairly safe run.
My TAS estimate was 12 minutes so 14 would be a reasonable segmented run (TAS saves a minute or two because the charmander route.
Are you talking about an in-game time of 0:12 or an out-of-game time of 12:xx.xx? Either way, that's a huge improvement, and I'll take your estimate as probably correct.
I'm going to start manually testing different DVs for Charmander to see if they can achieve Brock Through Walls. The DVs in MrWint's test run, 1024, are essentially a worst-case scenario - the attack is far too low but HP is going to be a point too high.
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Thomaz wrote:
Edit: nevermind, the Old Man Potion is faster by roughly a second.
What do you mean by Old Man Potion? There's a kid on route 1 who gives the player a potion, but I can't imagine the hidden potion near the Old Man is any faster than the hidden potion in Viridian forest, especially since it might be possible to jingle cancel the one in Viridian after fighting the trainer.
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Shenanagans is right, the faint Trainer-Fly causes a wild Pokemon appearance without needing a trainer battle. A level 19 Bellsprout knows Poisonpowder, and it will have a Special value of 31 or 32 if its special DV ranges from 0 to 3. Now I just need to figure out those DVs for Charmander.
So, there are two encounters where some DVs must be manipulated to specific values: Charmander's E#??, and level 19 Bellsprout's ???[0-3]. A level 6 Charmander with 48 Attack EV and 14 Attack DV will just barely have 13 attack, which is a relevant difference. I did the math on the EVs, and Charmander's HP DV must be between 0 and 2. So one of Speed or Special could be odd, but not both.
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I just counted, going from route 7 to the vending machines in Celadon causes 21 poison damage. A level 7 Charmander would have enough health to survive this. Depending on what DVs work with the glitch, we would of course want an HP DV of 0 to 3 in order to have 22 HP and faint as soon as possible. That means getting even-numbered DVs in Attack and Defense would be ideal. The Speed DV will be irrelevant to all battles, since it won't affect any of the five fights in the TAS. Charmander's ideal DVs would look something like E#??, where # is an even number.
Shenanagans wrote:
Surprisingly with a death trainer fly (where you get the encounter in front of a trainer and die to setup the trainer fly) you don't need to fight an additional trainer to get the wild pokemon to appear.
This tactic was used in the old NSC route to get Nidoking before Brock.
Are you sure? I'll test that, very surprising and good news.
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Shenanagans wrote:
I'm pretty sure wild bellsprout can have 31/32 special at level 19-21 so if that's the case we could skip the dojo fight entirely.
Might mess with this tonight lol.
Who would we fight instead? Remember, you need to fight a trainer to trigger the next stage of the Trainer-Fly glitch.
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Shenanagans wrote:
I'm speaking more from a TAS perspective.
Getting poisoned and dying while in the mart would save the entire walk back to Safferon (and we would need a way to re enter Safferon due to us not having teleport to get back)
We could also just die to a wild pokemon in the grass like meowth again, but getting poisoned would save a 45 second walk.
We also found a new way to setup the Brock through walls glitch that may make the starter not matter as much. You need a pokemon with 16 special in slot 1 of your party, and a pidgey with 8, 10, 13, 15, 16, or 17 HP remaining in slot 2.
We could possibly catch a wild level 5 pikachu (I'm almost sure they hit 16 special) and catch a pidgey on route 2.
This might be faster then the PC method ( we would Deposit bulba and pidgey in Safferon center when we heal there)
Level 7 bulbasaur can hit 16 special though so I would need to time pikachu vs bulbasaur...
That sounds like it's probably an improvement, since catching a Pidgey is much faster than wasting 10 or more Tackle misses against Weedle. A level 4 Pidgey could have 17 HP, and possibly last from the grass east of Celadon to the Fresh Water vending machines. According to this calculator, Bulbasaur can have 16 Special at level 7 while Charmander, Squirtle, and Pikachu would all need to reach level 9. Although, as you said, a Charmander with the right DVs could get past that trainer, and that would likely be faster than trying to make Bulbasaur work.
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Shenanagans wrote:
Hey everyone, decided to make an account to join all this discussion.
You are correct in saying that we can skip abra with a death warp, it would save around a minute off of the route I posted.
One other large time save is that you really want to red-bar the Missingno catch (it saves 19 seconds due to missingno's cry length)
so my thought would be to setup the death warp on route 6, get poisoned by a wild bellsprout on route 7.
Walk to the Celedon Mart and buy a greatball, a fresh water, an x speed, and an X defend.
This gets us to 6 items and we have x defends in slot 6.
We can then faint to the poison to get back into safferon. which from there we can simply encounter the missingno, use 2 x defends, get hit to redbar by sky attack, and catch it.
Then we can get underflow and warp to the end.
The only issue with this is that we would need to use a different starter because bulba's immunity to poison...
Thanks for setting up an account, and that route you posted. It seems to me that skipping the long cry would require a large time sacrifice. By the current route, Bulbasaur can simply repeatedly miss with Tackle when fighting the Weedle in Bug Forest, and I can luck-manipulate it to repeatedly fail with String Shot. That will bring Bulbasaur to level 7, with the right amount of PP for each of its moves, although a wild encounter will be necessary to use select on the moves afterwards.
If the route starts with Squirtle, getting 16 PP for one move slot and 36 for the other wouldn't be possible, because Squirtle has no moves with 40 PP until level 28. If the run starts with Charmander, it would take 2 max-level Metapod or Kakuna encounters before increasing its level.
I think Bulbasaur is so much faster than the others that we'll just skip the red bar trick. Normally we don't allow it anyway because the low health warning is so annoying, but since Missingno.'s cry is also annoying I suppose it would be accepted to avoid that.
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Zowayix wrote:
Chamale wrote:
Also, I'm not sure this route would be faster than using the Cooltrainer glitch. However, since I can't figure out how to use the Cooltrainer glitch effectively, I'll work on this TAS instead.
This is only the realtime route where Cooltrainer is very impractical; wasn't there something posted a while back about using the Brock Through Walls glitch to get into Cerulean Cave and catch a Transform user (Ditto, instead of Mew) faster than otherwise possible?
Yes, and I estimate that would be faster than this route. However, I'm not very good with assembly code, so I can't plan out a route for that.
For this route, I think Blue version is faster because wild Meowth can knock out Bulbasaur with one Bite, and Meowth only appears on Route 6 in Blue.
Thomaz wrote:
I would really want to buy in Viridian, but there aren't enough items to get to 6th...so I guess:
Pick up Antidote and Potion, then buy 2 Poke Balls, Awakening, Burn Heal and Parlyz Heal.
Why Viridian? The Mart in Pewter City is less of a detour.
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Oh well. Potion is the best item in that case, because no detour is needed to pick it up. Just need Missingno. to use Water Gun so we can use the Potion after being hit.
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Thomaz wrote:
Oh, you're right. That would work! Potion wouldn't be too useful because the heal at Saffron is required so Bulbausaur would be at full health. But yes, yes, the Ball would work!
Excellent! We need that Poke Ball in the 6th item slot, so that means getting 5 other items. I think it would be best to pick up the Antidote and Potion in Viridian Forest, and buy 3 unnecessary items in the Pewter City mart before the Poke Ball.
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The NES seems less reliable with TASbot than other consoles, particularly because the hardware is more variable than later Nintendo systems. If you'd like to show off a long run, I think it would be much better to choose a game on the SNES or N64 to have a better chance of synchronization.
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Thomaz wrote:
Yeah, I had been thinking of that as well. I doubt getting a MissingNo from grass really is faster.
Wait...It's a long shot, but you could death-warp from Route 6, faint from the Dojo guy, get the sixth item x255, then walk to Celadon and get the Fresh Water.
The only issue would be getting an item that can be used in battle to get 255. Bulbasaur would be healed after Saffron and after fainting... Are there any items one can use?
Well, there's the X-Special in the tunnel between Vermillion and Cerulean.
What about a Potion? That can be used in battle, and there are several that can be easily picked up along the way. Or, if we intend to catch Missingno, we could buy a Poke Ball, duplicate it up to 129, miss once, and then catch it to end up with 255 Poke Balls. Would that work?
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p4wn3r wrote:
Interesting. Unless I'm missing something, the TAS shouldn't need to buy an Abra at Celadon, since we can T-fly a Missingno. by dying from a random encounter.
I think the Abra is necessary so we can warp back to Saffron without giving water to the guard. I don't think there are any places to use the Escape Rope in Celadon, so Abra is faster.
Also, I'm not sure this route would be faster than using the Cooltrainer glitch. However, since I can't figure out how to use the Cooltrainer glitch effectively, I'll work on this TAS instead.
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Thomaz wrote:
Yeah, so forget about the catching another Pokemon thing. It's not required. I just beat the game in 18 minutes. On Pokemon Red though, so I needed more coins for Abra (and was dumb in getting it). I reckon it might go to 17 in a segmented unassisted run. Maybe even 16, but I doubt it. Good stuff though, regardless.
Do you have a video? Or, could you post the exact route please? I'm interested in trying this out myself but I'm not sure I understand what is required to make the glitch work.
