The item drop routine is called by the death routine. The death routine is called by the hit detection routine.
Metroids have a special hit detection for projectiles, which calls a special death routine, which calls the multiple item drop routine. Or it calls the item drop routine multiple times, I'd have to check.
Metroids have the normal/common hit detection for power bombs, which calls the normal/common death routine, which calls the item drop routine *once*. So yeah. You *must* kill them all at once. There's no way to get around the problem.
Oh, and you MUST avoid excessive damage, or else you'll trigger energy only drops.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
Grapple beam doesn't actually damage enemies. Enemies just die instantly to it if they're vulnerable to it. Draygon being the exception.
It's worth mentioning that the speed echoes are treated as an uncharged plasma/wave shot. Which is why they're unfortunately useless for killing anything interesting.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
Might as well put my own two cents in, I guess...
I think that at least a 9% run (which kills the four bosses guarding Tourian) would be a good run to watch. The Mother Brain fight is unavoidably slow and tiresome with low percent, and that's basically all the 9% run skips. Ridley is the second longest fight, and there you still have a number of missiles, supers, and powerbombs to use to speed the fight up, as well as lots of jumping around and dodging Ridley's attacks. The only real drawback to a 9% run is getting the Gravity Suit, which takes a lot of horizontal bomb jumping.
Though, I had an idea related to that that I've never been able to pull off... It was never useful anywhere else, but it might speed that room up for a 9% run.
I don't think watching a 10% NBMB run would be very interesting. 1/2 of the run would just be watching Samus travel up through the 15 screens to get to Tourian. It might be interesting to learn it's possible, but it's just not entertaining to watch.
anyways, an idea I've had: If you've bombjumped a lot, you might've noticed that you can bomb jump 'walk' along a roof, where you spam bombs as fast as you can lay them, and move a few pixels every bomb. The only time I've been able to start this is when I can start bomb jumping within a few blocks of the roof though - I've never managed to bomb jump up from below, and then start walking along the roof.
If it's possible, it would be faster and probably a bit more interesting way to get the Gravity Suit in a 9% run.
and wow. I have a run named after me. o_O
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
evilchen: Sorry, I seem to have a knack for ruining runs. :P
I haven't tested it, but I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work. It sets the important bit of ram correctly, and that's all it needs to do.
Tub wrote:
Wait - isn't that auto-save overwritten when you save in tourian, thus not copyable? Or do you intend to reset after ceres, then copy the file, play one of them up to ceres etc?
The latter. Play a game through Ceres, reset during the Ceres explosion cutscene, copy the save, play as normal to Tourian. Using that as a save doesn't cost any in-game time.
Using the auto-save at Samus's ship immediately after Ceres, though, does cost some in-game time.
moozooh: I just noticed I still have my disassembly of the random drop routine. I'll upload that real quick...
http://drewseph.zophar.net/Kejardon/ItemDrop.txt
It's not plain enough to be understandable without assembly knowledge, but given how much of a mathematical pain the routine is, the disassembly can be an immense help still. And you might want the ram map open alongside it.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
The drops are determined the moment they appear, no sooner.
You could calculate them in advance, but I don't see the point. It's faster to just test emperically. I guess you could reverse-engineer what numbers you need for the RNG to get the drops you want though, and watch the RNG.
The RNG's code is located at 80:8111 in the rom. The routine for determining the drops should be listed in my random routines document too, and you can get the drop chances from SMILE. If you put all those together you can calculate what you need. I don't have the time to be working on this though, sorry.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
It's definitely going to depend on what frame the power bomb kills the metroids, but I don't think it matters where that happens at. And after the Metroid is killed, I don't think there's anything Samus or Rinkas can do to change the drops, though pausing the game should be able to.
The RNG is a word (two bytes) located at 7E05E5 - 7E05E6. The rng is updated *every* frame, even during the title screen. The bytes are also swapped every frame if the game is unpaused. I think. I never pinned down precisely what caused that extra step.
(Almost) Every time the RNG is used, it's also updated again.
Trying to mathematically manipulate the RNG is a nightmare. I played around with it a few times, the RNG had a period of around $800, and that was *without* the extra byte-swap and extra steps when the RNG is used.
So no, knowing the workings of the RNG is not likely to do you any help.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
you know, it's not like I don't read this board... ;) I take it you're doing a no-boss run and x-raying to Tourian.
For getting the x-ray scope, you really need to abuse the wavers and fireflys. They give good invincibility time and can drop lots of energy.
As moozooh said, you might want to consider taking the Ice beam anyways. It may literally take hours to luck manipulate the Metroids into dropping as many power bombs as you'd need. If you're really out for lowest percent though, you can kill the bosses and only need 9% (though you'd still have to choose between ice beam and speed boots). If you're determined to make a 10% No-Boss run though, it would probably be faster to use the pause screen to help with luck manipulation: Frames spent on the pause screen *do* affect the RNG, and they do so differently than normal time passing, I think. None of Samus's movements affect the RNG at all IIRC, and I don't think Rinkas or Metroids do either (except through item drops), so the pause screen would be the easiest way to manipulate the RNG.
For skipping Mother Brain, the first death can be anywhere. Or you can simply reset as soon as you save.
Though if you're going for fastest in-game time, you'd actually want to skip the first save entirely and only save in Tourian, reset, and play a new game up to that room in Brinstar. The only purpose of that first save is so you don't have to spend real-time later getting to the Brinstar spike room.
Actually, come to think of it, you could reset and use the auto-save during the Ceres explosion cutscene to cut off a nice chunk of real-time without having to sacrifice any in-game time.
Wow. Super Metroid brings up a whole plethora of questions about entertainment value of movies now. :P
::edit:: Bahahahah! I just now noticed that that room is loaded DURING THE DEMO SCENES. I haven't tested, but you shouldn't even need two games at all because of that. Just get a save in Tourian, reset / die / whatever to get to the title screen, let the demo play until it gets to that room, and then press start and load your game. You can check offset... 7FA0F3. As soon as that turns to 01, load your Tourian save and you should be able to skip MB.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
Obscure glitches nobody else will probably know the answers too... guess I better answer them. :P
The middle question is the simplest. I'll answer that first.
Samus's hitbox is not checked for block collisions while Samus isn't moving, *except* for the blocks she's standing *on*. You can literally be inside a wall of spikes and not be affected at all by them, as long as the block below Samus's feet is a normal solid block.
Samus's hitbox is also only checked for block collisions in the direction Samus is moving. Jumping straight up only checks around Samus's head for collisions. Turning right moves Samus to the right, and checks the right half of Samus for collisions.
The grapple beam does some odd stuff with Samus's hit box. It seems to reset something when it's released (I don't know precisely what). That *might* be why you pick up the item... What I'm not sure about is if that happens first or if your third question happens first. It might be that Samus is put into the air, the collision detection finds the item, and pops up the message box before the graphic data is updated. The message box halts ALL code processing (except for code called by interrupt).
I'm drawing a blank here, but this should be common knowledge to the TASers here... say you pick up an item by turning around in mid-air, effectively walljumping off of the item to 'touch' it. You get the item before Samus is shown walljumping, right?
either way, the grapple beam causes the game to check the blocks Samus is in and checks the item block and Samus picks it up. I'm just not completely sure on the order of events.
Now, for the third question: This is an obscure little glitch with the grapple beam... or it might be intentional, but it works more often when it's not supposed to. It moves Samus up a bit if she's inside of certain block types... It seems to be happen on any block type 8-F, and the blocks above are *not* 8-F. This includes most notably ordinary solid blocks, two-high blocks, scroll PLMs, and items.
Items are probably the least interesting to glitch around with, because they disappear as soon as you collect them. And solid blocks tend to be a bit difficult to get inside of. If you know where the scroll PLMs or two-high blocks are, though, you can sort of hover on them by rapidly firing the grapple beam. SMILE will show them with a bit of effort.
A few easy places to test this: First room directly left of Samus's ship, just behind the breakable wall to the sloped energy tank room. There's a scroll plm and two-high blocks there, jump up and spam the fire button.
Or you can jump in the pit just before the breakable wall, then jump back out and slowly inch to the right until the screen starts scrolling. Jump up and spam fire at the ceiling. That one's harder to hit right imo, though, but you can find the right spot a bit easier.
The place I first found this glitch was in Maridia, the vertical mochtroid shaft 3 rooms before Draygon. Just jump from the ground, hug the right grapple wall, and spam the grapple beam (firing left so you don't hit any grapple blocks).
I never found any uses for it for my glitch-hunting. :/
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
It's easier as in, you're less likely to critically fail and end up falling.
The difficulty is essentially the same as far as avoiding motion upwards goes. And you need to cross *long* horizontal distances without significant upwards motion.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
Yeah, it's the same beam you found
It doesn't deal damage (well, I've never gotten it to deal damage), but it's rapid fire and can break blocks and open doors.
If anyone managed to get it to deal damage, it'd do... 150 damage, super missile type beam. No, it doesn't open red doors or green doors, I've tried.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
In other words, what you're saying is if you're driving on a regular highway, then switch to driving on ice, it's the drivers fault not being able to control the vehicle, rather than the ice's? Am I interpreting your analogy correctly?
No, because SMR's physics allow for perfectly precise controls, while a vehicle designed for driving on highway doesn't have the capabilities of driving on ice (and thus doesn't allow for perfectly precise controls). -1 for you!
No, a vehicle designed for driving on highway still has the capability of driving on ice. It's just much different and harder. But you can adapt.
<JXQ> my initial reason this time was to point out that the controls are indeed faithful to metroid prime, even from my perspective, and even though 2-d and 3-d are quite different, I still get the same feel...
Agreed.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
First off, a bit of clarification about some things that are confused way too often.
The space/time beam and the murder beam are essentially *completely unrelated*. The source of them is the same glitch (select spazer + plasma simultaneously), and they are both beams, but those are basically the *only* connection they have.
The space/time beam is considered bomb damage-type beam that can freeze and go through enemies. The murder beam is considered charged power-bomb damage-type beam that can freeze, go through enemies, and go through walls. It's usually up to the enemy to try and figure out how to react to a charged power-bomb damage-type beam. Phantoon doesn't handle that too well. XD But that has nothing at all to do with the space/time beam mucking up the game.
moozooh wrote:
By the way, Kejardon, can you shed some more light on the nature of space/time beam and the reasons it fucks up the game that much? How can such a simple thing do that much various effects, all of which mess up everything so badly?
Honestly, not much. I know that the beams use a simple index to find just about *all* their relevant data, and so when you overflow the index (which happens with any combination of plasma + spazer), the game starts pulling data and *code* from essentially random locations. What it does from there is anyone's guess. No, let me rephrase that - what it does from there, nobody can guess. >_> The only way to know would be to read the game's programming.
Beyond that, I don't much know nor care. The space/time beam was interesting to me at first, but after a while I honestly sort of got sick of it - as far as I'm concerned, using it is similar to using PAR codes. Neat for novelties, not really valid for anything else. I am still interested in the murder beam and chainsaw beam, as those are far more stable, but I've never gotten around to looking into their workings.
Chainsaw beam is all the beams except wave ice. Good for destroying beam-destroyable blocks, doesn't really do much else... so far as anyone knows right now.
Datamanipulation can be done by hex-editing... but there is no directly accessible hex-editor inside of Super Metroid you can get to without external tools. Let alone a comprehensive hex-editor.
There is an enemy debugger hidden in Super Metroid, but it's not all that great of a debugger.
There might be another room you could use to skip Mother Brain. It wouldn't be unlikely - there's a pretty good sized window of possible door transitions. But the one in Brinstar is the first I found, and convenient for the path I used, so I stopped looking. Nothing chronologically before that works - I checked from a fresh run at Ceres.
And to try and help clear up what hex-editing ram means... Your energy is a piece of ram. If you want to hex-edit that legitimately, you get hurt by an enemy or pick up an energy refill or something.
Your position is a few pieces of ram, X and Y. You edit those by moving around.
The room data is a huge chunk of ram. You edit that by entering a room transition, or shooting breakable blocks, or other small things. Usually.
Going to the title screen is also an effective way of editing the room data. That's because the room data takes up *so much* ram, that some of it is used for other things instead when no room data is currently needed. It's only with rare glitches that you're ever concerned with unconventional methods of editing ram.
Finally: No, I don't know a cheat code to silence the annoying beep noise. Yet.
90EA7F60 seems to work. Just make sure the noise is off to begin with when you put the code in.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
evilchen: It's not luck manipulation, it's data manipulation. You *have* to die in that Brinstar room and reload a Tourian save to skip past Mother Brain.
Hero: I remembered yesterday that some rooms copy old rooms' BTS data to the background data, and the background data is what needs to change to allow you to skip the slope block without crystal flashing. I don't know exactly why or when it happens, or the limits of it working yet, though.
It would take a while to look through everything, and I'm too busy trying to juggle classes for college to look at it. Anyways: There's still a slim chance you *can* skip the crystal flash. It's not particularly likely though - there's a very slim area of workable data for that path. On the plus side, I already know that Dachora's room gives a bunch of good BTSes for it.
::edit::
Also, some objections to the space/time beam and various other things adding up to 0.02$...
The space/time beam glitches up the *hardware*, not just the software. Seeing as emulators are usually iffy at emulating hardware glitches, I wouldn't rely on anything except the console to verify if something actually works or not, and so far there's no known way of causing Zebes to explode on console with the space/time beam (at least, none that I've heard of).
Breaking into Tourian and skipping Mother Brain are just various software glitches.
That's not to say that I think 9% should replace 14%; the 9% run cannot work without magical secret world stuff that doesn't make any sense whatsoever to a normal player, and skips the final 'scene' of the game. But the space/time beam is, imo, far worse than the 9% run, and shouldn't itself make the 9% run not legit.
And honestly, I've always thought of NBMB as more a novelty than a serious run.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
whoops. I forgot to mention the last step I used for NTSC, sorry.
If you do what I said in the topic, you'll end up in front of the door, not inside of it. You have to hold down in the next room to change Samus's hitbox and manage to fit in the door.
Doors facing left close 2 frames faster (I haven't pinned down *why* that happens though), so it's significantly harder to manage to land in them correctly. >_< You have to aim down and land on the bottom block of the door while it's closing in order to be standing - I don't think you can get *in* the bottom block before it becomes solid.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
Space-time can get the bombs required, I used codes because I'm lazy.
There's a plethora of impossibilities in most of my save-states. I know basically all the ram offsets so I just cheat my way to whatever I want for testing.
Very few people know that the metroid can be killed with power bombs, since normally you don't have any power bombs, and earlier the giant metroid *couldn't* be killed by power bombs.
And a run by me honestly wouldn't be that interesting. Most of the unique things I know are Bad Ideas(tm), and the useful tricks are already well-known.
Now I need to come up with more things for movies though... hrm. Mother Brain was easy since she's so incredibly buggy.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
I present to you: Super Metroid Inanity
Part 1: Mother Brain
Mother brain is an aim-bot-through-wall cheater! (not that I'm much better... XD)
Mother brain holds the key to invincibility! And it doesn't like it when you kill Rinkas. x_X
Mother brain has a comfy chin, but a *really* nasty bite. Ouch.
Samus has the ability to rebound off of walls. Now add in a super jump and Mother Brain and you get a world of pain.
Samus has obviously never read the script for the final battle.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
Mother Brain's attack will interrupt the crystal flash. You must have a minimum of 301 energy all at once in order to survive MB's attack.
I've tried a lot of crazy stuff against MB's attack, *nothing* does any good.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
A few clarifications...
There are two versions of the rom, NTSC and PAL. NTSC is also the Japanese/US version. PAL is the European version. There are no other versions (excluding hacks)
The patch is for headered roms. Make sure your rom is 3146240 bytes before patching or loading it. If it's 3145728 bytes, you have a headerless rom.
You don't actually have to patch the rom though, if the filename of the ips matches the filename of the rom, the emulator will patch the game in ram when it loads. I prefer doing this, less work for me and easier to update the ips.
snes9x1.43 broke for me in Ceres. snes9x1.43wip worked perfectly up to just before Draygon, when my power went out. >_<
Highness: Make sure you have the most recent version of Legacy. I actually had the same problem; Samus jumps into one of the grappleable enemies. I downloaded the newest Legacy patch (from May, 2005) and the enemies were in different positions, allowind Samus to pass just in between them.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
Morph Ball + Bombs:
To get anywhere past the start of the game, used tons of times. Not a chance it will ever be skipped.
Charge Beam:
Kill bosses. Pretty sure this'll never be replaced.
Missiles and Super Missiles (4 total)
Beat Mother Brain's first form. The Zebetites don't matter, you can skip those.
Power Bombs:
Reach the later bosses. Another I doubt will be replaced.
Gravity Suit:
Escape Draygon's lair without resorting to Crystal Flashes. It actually isn't required to win, but it's the most percent-efficient method.
3 Energy Tanks + Varia Suit:
Survive Mother Brain's final attack. I recently tried a glitch I thought could disable her attack, but it didn't work... something about the background in Mother Brain's room messes with the glitch, even though you can do it in every OTHER room in Tourian. >_<
Ice Beam *or* Speed Boots:
Get to Botwoon, and skip the Zebetites. Quite odd that they both fulfill the same exact functions, but they do.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
Correct damage values, in the order the game keeps track of them:
0. Normal beam : 10
1. Wave beam : 25
2. Ice beam : 15
3. Ice/Wave beam : 30
4. Spazer beam : 20
5. Wave/Spazer beam : 35
6. Ice/Spazer beam : 30
7. Wave/Ice/Spazer beam : 50
8. Plasma beam : 75
9. Wave/Plasma beam / Speed Echoes : 125 / 2,048
10. Ice/Plasma beam : 100
11. Wave/Ice/Plasma beam : 150
12. Missiles : 50
13. Super Missiles : 150
14. Bombs / Space/Time Beam : 30 / 45 per 1/3 of second
15. Power Bombs : 100, can hit twice
16. Speed Running : 250 a frame
17. Super Jump : 75 a frame
18. Screw Attack : 1,000 a frame
19. ALL Charge beams / Hyper Beam / Special Beams : 3x beam combo / 500 / 150 (45 for ice)
20. Psuedo Screw Attack : 100
Most enemies take 2x the listed damage. Spore Spawn takes 3x from charged beams, I think, and only 1x from super missiles (odd, since you can't normally bring super missiles into the fight). Ridley takes 4x from super missiles.
And a quick note: Space/Time beam is considered a bomb (14) because it contains Plasma (+8), Spazer (+4), and Ice (+2). I haven't gotten around to measuring the murder beam and it's type, though... it wasn't discovered when I made this list. >_>
::EDIT:: The murder beam's type is charge beam, simply because you're required to charge before you shoot it. Slipped my mind when I posted.
kwinse wrote:
Kejardon wrote:
Kriole wrote:
Samus is damaged by a Rinka in the opening.
That's a script action; no damage.
... it just dawned on me I know way too much about SM.
