I'm not sure if this counts, but there was that instant win SMB3 show case during one of the TASBot events. I can't seem to find the video right now, however. Anyone with info on it?
That's 'NES DPCM glitch' and already listed on the page, though it could use more information and video links if you have any!
EDIT: I thought of a good video for the 'cart swapping' section. A proof of concept, where you get ACE in one game to instantly finish a second game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xayxmTLljr8
How about runs that involve physical interaction with the setup (kicking the console, plugging/unplugging something, opening the disk tray/swapping disks for any reason except a game-required disk swap, crooked cartridge)? Not sure how many of these are used in runs, but the advantages of opening the disk tray are obvious (can skip or delay cutscenes in some games)
There could also be 'tricks' caused by variations in console and console environment - components that have failed or aged, a disk drive or hard drive loading slower/faster than normal, etc. Emulators don't (and shouldn't be expected to) allow for physical parameters of the underlying hardware to be specified arbitrarily.
There's also always, of course, cosmic rays flipping a bit at just the right moment to make your run faster. Wonder if anyone's ever tried to pull that off in real time.
Why do they steal things with cameras filming the place?
Reminds me of the numerous examples of people cheating in Magic the Gathering pro tournaments (which have relatively large cash prizes), on camera. They know perfectly well they are on camera, yet they still decide to cheat and hope they aren't caught.
If you’re good at cheating, cheating in an MtG tournament is positive expected value, because the penalties for being caught are so low (there isn’t even a way to be permanently banned by cheating! The highest penalty is IIRC a 2 year ban). Ironically, it’s even good to be notorious for cheating, since now your opponents have to spend precious attention keeping track of ways you might cheat in instead of thinking about the game.
One way to make speedruns that are verified to not be cheated would be to make them in games that record input files at the same time you do your run. If that input file plays back identically on other people's systems, then the run itself is legitimate (at least in terms of not being run on a modified version of the game logic - they could still be pretending to play back a TAS, but that is hopefully easier to detect, especially if, say, the run was streamed with handcam). Such games include Doom and Portal.
Skipping World 6 by having a specific powerup at the end of World 5 is not "Warpless" to me. Not voting.
I don't think it's a warp? Look at the 'world map' in the encode. World 3/world 4 are on separate branches, as are world 6 and world 7. Doing just one of each set of branches is sufficient to reach the end without warping.
I wrote a little Lua script to automate optimizing these jumps, but it caused a deadlock in JPC-RR due to an apparent race condition. (I didn't investigate it thoroughly.) I was able to work around it by commenting out a line in JPC-RR that restores the display after loading a savestate, but that becomes annoying when working interactively, and it was too cumbersome to switch back and forth between the two versions. So I just optimized all the jumps manually. Maybe in a future revision.
Hi Sand,
Could you point me to the line you commented out? I would love to get this solved, as it is very annoying whenever a script I'm running stops everything, ruining what I'm trying to do.
If the game is written in HTML and java script, the field that shows the partially filled out text is probably a text field that can be read.
You can write JavaScript of your own and run it on any site you like. So you could write JavaScript that reads this text field and writes its guesses somewhere. Look up a script called Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey to learn more about ‘user scripts’.
Specifically I think the reason why a GBA was sending input to the GC (rather than a normal TASBot setup) is because there's Gamecube/GBA synchronization signals that make accuracy easier (which helps a lot since GC is inconsistently timed due to disc loads).
Oh hey, that's pretty cool! Thanks for posting that -- I wonder what the underlying mechanic is? -- and for introducing me to that Twitch streamer (I track projects like those, i.e. ones trying to beat every game in a system's library).
As far as I know no one's done any followup research on it, so I'd be curious too. I don't think anyone even knows if it's an emulator bug or not for example.
What percentage of this is cutscenes? 60%?
Amazing work by the authors, but I think the game/category choice makes this a worse candidate for stars than a TAS of this quality would normally be
The great part about watching this on youtube is you can just skip past cutscenes!
