I tried a few other things today while experimenting. Here's what I found out.
1. If you skip to FuSoYa w/ a full 5 member party (IOW skipping the Falcon sequence), the game will claim he joins, but he does not. Sorry guys, no 6 member party corruption.
2. You do NOT need to warp back to Dwarf Castle after getting FuSoYa in order to work on corrupting his spells. You can simply exit out of the Lunar Palace via the south door. Still need to rearrange his spells though
3. You can begin the first sequence right after the Cal & Brena/Golbez fights. The room count, assuming you go straight into the throne room initially, warp back to the crystal room, then back to the throne room is 3 at the throne room (post crystal).
As for the question "why Cid" I don't know. Cid's values are close to FuSoYa's in SRAM (like character name is Cid's name, Edge's name, then FuSoYa's name), but I'm not sure if that's why. If it wouldn't pull up Cid, it would probably pull up another character is my guess.
Ok, I've played though watching RAM and studying the code. I've determined now that it's NOT possible to do this glitch in the way needed before entering the underworld.
First off, the values pulled that determine Map ID and X/Y coordinates are actually pulled in a set fashion from SRAM. The values start at 7E172B (map ID), 7E172C (X) and 7E172D (Y) and set back 3 values at every map transition.
Map ID determines which map is pulled up, which appears to be different maps depending on whether you're in the overworld or the underworld. Map ID #0 for the overworld must be the Town of Baron while the one for the underworld I think is the smithing shop in the SE corner. Since there are certain 0 values (as some SRAM spots are never used), that's the likely reason it's not possible to do it in the overworld.
So thus my conclusion is that it's pointless to try it until after Golbez is beaten in Dwarf Castle. It would have been cool to try to do it earlier, but it's just not possible without hacking SRAM values.
Here's a list of the various locations where the 64 room layers bug works, translating and testing from the list I linked earlier. I'll separate tested and untested.
Tested (unless a name is specified, I've tested it personally):
Town of Baron. Values increment when going though the door leading to Serpent Road. Other locations decrease.
Kaipo. Values increase going in/out of the house where Rosa is, lower going out of any other building. Confirmed by banshiryuu.
Underground Water Way. This is the secret room that is under the waterfall in the first room of the dungeon. Use the stairs to B2 and back to get the count to 63, then go under the waterfall. Confirmed by dunnius.
Antlion's Lair. Values increase everywhere except for exiting the save room in the back of the dungeon. Best place to go is the stairs in the back of the dungeon then when at 63 go into the door into the save room then back out.
Fabul. Values increment everywhere except going down the left tower.
Mysidia. Values increment going though the door to the building with Serpent's Road. Values decrease everywhere else.
Toria Castle: Says it decreases when leaving Edward's room. Confirmed by dunnius.
Dwarf Castle: Values increment everywhere except going out of the Cafe. If you play the Japanese version, they decrease going out of the Developer's area too, which comes into play for warping there.
Tomera Village (the town in the SW corner of the underworld). Increases going into/out of the weapon/armor shop. Decreases everywhere else. Confirmed by dunnius.
Untested:
Baron Castle. Notes state the return value is leaving the prison area.
Old Waterway. Says it decreases when leaving the save room. I'm guessing the count does NOT reset when moving from Town of Baron to this area. (Or from this area to Baron.)
Tower of Babil, Lower Section: Says it decreases when "coming out of a small room", so likely a save room.
Elban Cave: Says it decreases when coming out of a store?
In early spots I get stuck at what should be -2, while I believe it was post Fabul it appeared to be -3.
I'm basing this assumption on # of screen transitions.
But without the hovercraft, you can't go over to Mt. Hobs
Can you use multiple tents to shift the collision detection multiple tiles?
Nope, it seems you can only do one square of shift, and I'd need 3. Plus the game remembers your position. The only good that the shift tiles glitch does is allow you to step on trigger squares w/o triggering the trigger. That's why you can skip Village of Mist.
Normally you'd enter the town by stepping from a non-town square to a town square. However, by shifting the tiles, you trick the game into thinking you're on the tile for the life tile of town. When you reload, you're standing on the tile, but since you didn't MOVE onto the tile post-reload, the command to enter town doesn't happen. And the game allows you to move from a town tile square to another town tile square w/o re-entering the town. This is why you can skip Village of Mist, though it proves to be completely worthless, since the sequence in Village of Mist triggers Tellah to appear at the waterway.
The only use for the glitch I've found so far is for skipping the bombing of Damcyan. As a funny side note, if you have the hovercraft on the map when the bombing occurs (you can restep on that tile later and trigger the sequence), the palette for the hovercraft gets messed up until you enter/exit an area.
In other news, I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out an earlier spot to break the game, but so far have had no luck. I seem to get stuck on Floor -3 in the upper left corner of Baron. Why I'm getting stuck here I don't know, since according to the info on this page the Map ID and X/Y coordinates should be based upon the Big Whale (as far as I can tell from the translation). Since this info should not change based until I go to the Tower of Wishes to call it, this should not be stopping me at any early point in the game. So I'm not sure what's causing things to go wrong. I know a few X/Y coordinates on later maps will change because values are different between the US and Japanese version, but this shouldn't be one of them.
I'm not going to be able to do more on a console. At this point to better research and understand the glitch, SRAM watching is going to HAVE to be used. I'll try to figure things out based upon a Engrish translated version of the SRAM Values List(Original Japanese version)
SRAM watching is something new to me. I'm familiar with the concept...I just need to learn how to do it myself.
I've been trying to better understand the 64 room layer glitch, but right now I've been getting hung up on what should be map -3, which I'm winding up stuck in the upper left corner of Town of Baron. I think I'm gonna have to figure out how to look at the SRAM of the game in an emulator to better figure out what needs to be manipulated to figure out how we can do the glitch earlier.
I've tried it as late as post-Kainazzo with no luck so far.
I tried playing around with that stuff earlier. I tried Baron Town, but all it did was put me in the NW corner of Baron Town with no way of escape. I didn't try it at any later location though.
I'm guessing by "small room" they're referring to in the Antlion's lair is the room with the charm harp.
I'm trying to figure out how to skip the bombing scene, but I haven't been able to yet. I also assume that you do NOT need to visit Kaipo, since Tellah isn't where he would be. I assume his placement there is added during/after the scene at Mist Village.
Another possibility is that his presence is governed by the number of people in the party. Since you had 3 (Cecil/Kain/Rydia) the game assumed you already had Tellah.
After further testing, it is not party count based, but position based. Cecil/Kain only party will still trigger it. Which the crash will still occur then at Damcyan, much like a Cecil/Kain/Rydia party.
So unless Tellah is put into the party or a way to get past that trigger point is found, well...
Also, Kain is pretty worthless for the Octomamm fight. He does like 1/2 the damage Cecil does while jumping and about 1/4 the damage while fighting. He also takes a boatload more damage.
Edit 1: Entering and immediately exiting Kaipo will not prevent a removal of Kain from the party if you reenter Mist for the Package trigger.
Edit 2: Kain is removed from the party but Rydia is not if you go though the Inn sequence at Kaipo then head back to Mist. Visiting Rosa doesn't change the matter either. So unless there's someway to skip the bombing sequence, skipping Mist will be pointless. :(
Edit 3: The author I linked above says on the mist page "If you’ve never done this before, you can use this same trick to skip some other stuff, like the bombing of Damcyan. You can also have weird party arrangements this way."
So it should be possible to skip the bombing...just need to figure out how.
Edit 4: I figured out how to skip the bombing sequence. However, Damcyan castle is still destroyed and the spoony bard sequence (and subsequent game crash) still happens). In order to skip the bombing sequence though, you need to move 1 space below the trigger square, press Up then menu, save, and reset the game. You'll start anew on the trigger square but as long as you don't move onto it, the trigger won't happen.
Still leaves the issue of skipping over to Mt. Hobs though. The water gap is 2 wide at the narrowest spot and right now I can only slide over 1 space.
Edit 5: I put on a "save anywhere" code just to see what happens if you skip over the tile that triggers the Tellah/Edward battle. Edward is nowhere to be seen. The game also crashes if you "talk" to Anna (but everybody else is ok, but most everybody has nothing to say).
So I think as amusing as the glitch seems to be, it's not going to be helpful for a TAS or speedrun, unlike the 64 floor stack glitch. I had high hopes, only to be crushed. :(
Edit 6: The 64 Room Layers Bug works on the US version, though map directions for negative rooms is a bit different, plus you can't warp back to the developers room.
But it works!
While fooling around with the sliding glitch, here's what I've been able to do so far.
1. Obviously, skip Mist Village stuff. This keeps Kain in the party.
2. The scenes at Kaipo still happen and Rydia will automatically be put into the party. This does NOT remove Kain.
3. Tellah didn't appear at his blockade spot at the cavern. The campfire scene still occurs (he isn't put into the party, nor is Kain removed). Tellah's lines at the spots of the cave still occur.
I'm trying to figure out how to skip the bombing scene, but I haven't been able to yet. I also assume that you do NOT need to visit Kaipo, since Tellah isn't where he would be. I assume his placement there is added during/after the scene at Mist Village.
I'm gonna continue anyways to see how much can be skipped. Ultimately the goal would be to get to the underground castle ASAP so you can skip to the end of the game. If you can't proceed w/o saving Rosa, then there may be an issue with too many members in the party once you get to Yang, since normally at that point you'd have 4 (and Yang is the 5th).
It'll be very interesting to see how this all plays out.
Edit 1: If Tellah is not in the party when you get to the scene where Edward would appear at Damcyan Castle, the game crashes when the battle would start.
Unfortunately, this causes an issue, since you can't proceed w/o the hovercraft. The gaps in the water/mountains seem to be too wide, plus the glitch isn't working for me now suddenly. But without the hovercraft, you can't go over to Mt. Hobs, so this is a real issue, since as mentioned earlier, no Tellah = crash. So this may be a problem and not as good of a glitch as I was hoping it would be.
Edit 2: Even if you enter the scene from the wrong side, Kain will vanish from the party if some later sequence isn't triggered. I know Kaipo works, but I'm not sure on other things. It will be fun to try out.
Edit 3: Tellah, as expected, does not appear even if you skip Kaipo. The campfire sequence happens the same, with Tellah and Rydia magically appearing on scene. No party changes after the scene occur.
Okay, so here's my best guess as to what's going on there:
* The spell Warp has to remember the sequence of rooms you passed through so it can take you to the previous one. Therefore there's an array of 64 "room histories". Normally not a problem since most regions are heirarchical (i.e. you couldn't overflow the array unless there was a chain of rooms of length 64), but the Dwarf Castle rooms all loop, so instead of backing you out a room when you backtrack, the old room is appended onto the end of the array.
* Overflowing the array index causes it to go negative and read from your message speed and window color settings, which in turn allows you to teleport to various points in the game.
* Somehow it also lets you muck up FuSoYa's spell list, so he ends up with Explode as a spell. This lets you instantly end the Zeromus fight.
* Cid is terrible at casting Meteo.
Well with PS3 the cords are depending on what length of USB cable you have, since they're wireless, but use USB cables to charge. I'm not aware of any "official" PS3 controllers that are wired (but wouldn't be surprised if there were).
I could try to find most of the others, since I have a ton of different systems. Just can't right now.
I always thought seeing through Samus' visor/helmet was a choice made to further iterate that you are Samus and seeing the world of Talon IV though her eyes.
I would say use it right away, since if you time it correctly you should reach Rosa just before 6AM (almost 12 hours of in-game time). I think you should be able to reach that spot in time.
Honestly, I don't think any of us should look into that post for more then what it is. We are never going to have all the answers of why zidanax did what he did. There's the possibilities of a suicide note, or of him telling other people that he's "going to do it", or other similar actions. Typically people who commit suicide will make actions like that not because they want to commit suicide, but because they don't.
Now why he didn't mention anything to us is hard to say. Maybe because he didn't consider us his friends? Maybe because the internet isn't serious business? Or maybe because he felt we couldn't help? It's impossible to say and we will never know.
At this point we just need to accept that he has left us, moved on to a better place, and help others in ways that make their life better.
...or something like that. I'm always bad at these speeches.
You guys will give a hundred yes votes so enthusiastically to any given Castlevania game but immediately dismiss this as boring? Has anyone here that voted no actually watched a classic Castlevania run on here? If anything, this run is more interesting because it actually uses more then one weapon.
Yes. I'd rather watch CV2 then this, honestly. And CV2 is a bad game.
Bad audio, bad graphics, and the gameplay in this is very awkward. Yes, I've played this game. It was not fun.
It's too bad that you can't switch from Alucard to Yoko w/o going though chump Julius. Oh well.
All my questions that I was going to ask were answered in the submission comments. Voting yes.
I thought there was one more boss at the Nest...that guy with the talisman on his face. Am I remembering incorrectly or does it not show up on the first time though?
