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Nice work Randil, as we all expect ^_^
No screen shot will ever do the speed of this game justice (wait, sonic is blue, these are the blues brothers... hmm) An almost 15 second improvement seems insane to me (but don't call me surprised)
Gratuitous yes vote.
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SGreenwell wrote:
Wow, great video! I think this is one of those games you have to play to appreciate how good this movie is. ... Do you have any plans on tackling the sequel?
Aw shucks, thanks :) Yeah it's definitely one that will be appreciated more if you've ever tried the game... I have doubts that I could beat it w/o savestates.
As to your question, I'm assuming you're speaking of "Fantastic Dizzy" /"Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy"... I have looked into it, but it's a little overwhelming (long) and there's no straighforward walkthrough that I know of. But maybe someday ;)
scubed wrote:
To answer your question:
Yes, this is not the only talking NES game. Specifically, the game
Special Cybernetic Attack Team
Thanks, I'll check that one out ^_^ I've actually heard of a couple others since I wrote that as well (but can't think of them off the top o' my head). Strange that no "mainstream" games did though? (to my limited knowledge, that is)
PS I'm very happy this got published so fast after being accepted!
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No sequence breaks... that we know of ;)
OK probably not. But dosbox is still "pending" (and kind of janky... not nearly as advanced as fceu yet obviously)
Plus can you control the later sierra games w/o a mouse? I guess you could use the keyboard to control the cursor but I don't recall being able to.
Maybe i'll try KQI on sms ;)
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adelikat wrote:
Good enough. Setting to "accepted", congrats :)
Cool, thank you! Dizzy finally has a home on TASvideos ;)
I'm thinking about doing Fantastic Dizzy at some point -- it's a bit longer but has action scenes interspersed, and if I can skip a couple items like this one I don't think it'll be that bad.
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I've always wanted to see a tas of a sierra game... then I realized that KQV was released for the NES!
OK, so it's not the greatest game in the world to tas. Here's a walkthrough done at 100% speed, with big help from a faq since I never played this one--though the faq was frustratingly lacking in some areas :(
Walthrough movie
Improvements would come from potential sequence breaking and much better control of menus and movement (particularly taking advantage of diagonals).
Now I can dream of a Space Quest movie...
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MetalChurch wrote:
It's a weak yes vote because I don't see any challenge in this game, no ennemie, nothing else to do beside catching key objects and gave them back to their belonger...
But it entertain me.
Thanks for voting! Sorry not to reply for 2 weeks... yes, I guess it's a case of if-you've-never-played-it-then-it-doesn't-look-challenging. Actually, the first time I played it I managed to die in the first room :P
Most of the challenge comes from the horrible play control and non-obvious puzzles, both of which are obviously not apparent in a TAS
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Raiscan wrote:
That gets a simple thumbs up in my opinion.
Warp wrote:
Yes, this is definitely in the right direction.
Thirded. In fact I'm going to bookmark that page in the meantime to use instead of the other lists, which take way too long even on a decent connection.
If the page could also be sorted by system (and maybe some other things like length) that would be all the better.
In fact, thumbs should be optional imo (for lazy bastards like me that still have 56K's)
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Well, it could be a couple of things. First of all, be sure you are using the function mem(x4C2) and not just 4C2 which it will interpret as just a constant value (or actually jibberish, since unless you precede a number with x it will be interpretted as decimal not hex). Or it could be somthing else... what are you setting A B etc. to do?
also check out qFox's better instructions here if you haven't already.
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gratuitous yes vote here ... i'm still always amused by the absurd damage boosting and general undead smackdown. a couple good chuckles added in there too.
thanks for giving me an excuse to watch a movie of this game again! ;)
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Globe wrote:
In case someone is still working on obsoleting Genisto's Peach only run ??
*shrugs*
I would still like to see an fceu version... I got a little discouraged/distracted though.
Watched your WIP and it looks nice! I'll go over it carefully to see what the improvements were (1/6 of a second is hard to catch on a casual watch ;)
IMO this movie should definitely focus on style/superplay; speed is not as much of an issue, since if you really want to go fast you shouldn't be using peach anyways :P Not to say that it's not important at all but I think that sacrificing a few frames to see something "cooler" is definitely worth it.
Oh, and I guess we should start a separate topic at some point ;)
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Not that I know of. Unfortunately it's not so snappy -- link doesn't move any faster. If you are in the middle of two gridlines it still takes a couple of frames before he gets there, unlike in Kickle Cubicle where a similar trick can make you go significantly faster.
One thing that is used in the current movie to move faster is taking advantage of yet another movement pattern that only takes 5 frames to cross 8 units of space. It seems to happen the first block moving up or right, so if you alternate between the two you can go pretty quick.
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Catastrophe wrote:
7. If you touch Zelda anywhere, you win. It doesn't matter what level you're in.
I noticed the same thing using memory poke. It looks funny since zelda's sprites are loaded from the current dungeons "palette" so she does not look like herself :) Example movie
What I really wanted to post about was the wrapping glitch. Obviously a lot of you are familiar with and understand how to make it work, but I think if we can understand why it works a bit better then maybe we can find a similar glitch (or not...)
(all numbers below are in hex btw)
So it looks like it works because when you steer in a perpendicular direction to your walking for one frame at the right time it changes link's movement pattern in such a way that he "misses" the position that triggers an exit (or a wall).
For example, walking off to the right, he will go E8, E9, EB, EC, EE, EF then F0. So that's a movement pattern of 1 2 1 2 1 1. Pushing right when he is at F0 scrolls the screen. But, if you hold up or down when he's at EB, he gets pushed back to E9, then when you hold right again it goes EB, EC, EE, EF then F1. That pattern is essentially 1 2 1 2 1 2 (if you ignore the back and forth part between EB and E9). It skips the boundary at F0, and his x position will keep increasing until FF when it wraps back to 0 which is the left side of the screen.
Why does link's x position change if you press up or down? While it appears that he can walk pretty much anywhere he wants, link can only walk on what is essentially a "grid", kind of like evenly spaced streets. They are 8 positions apart from each other; valid x values to walk up and down on start with 0, then 8, then 10, etc. and valid y values to walk left and right on start with 5, D, 15 and so forth. If you are not on one of these "streets", the game first pushes you to the closest one before letting you go on. So if your x position is 81, pressing up for one frame first takes you to 80 by moving left before link actually starts moving up.
So, you can glitch over all four sides of the overworld screens (if you can reach them), blocks etc. You can even skip over the boundary of a cave door in the overworld so that link walks up past it without entering and has his head stuck over the doorframe.
The problem in dungeons is that the walls are not only thick, but dense with boundaries. You can actually glitch 1 position further into the wall than usual, but that is also a boundary so can go no further than that. Theoretically you could do it in doorways, but the game does not let you turn when you are close enough to perform the trick. This also goes for the stairs leading out of underground item rooms (though you can glitch 8 positions into the walls down there).
The real part I wanted to bring up is an interesting ram address, 394. When you walk down or left, it is a value from 0 to 7 that is equal to the distance between link's current position and the last "street" he passed. For example, if link walks right from 80 to 83, it's value will be 3, because link can move up/down on 80.
Going up or left, it holds the "negative" of those values, F9 to 0. For example, if he walks up from 85 to 82, the value would be FD (because 85 + FD = 182, which is equivalent in this case to 82 (values greater than FF wrap back to 0)).
So we would expect, when the glitch is performed going to the right, for the values to be 0, 1, 3, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 1. BUT, what happens when you push up at the right time it actually reverses to the negative values... the values are 0, 1, 3, F9, FB, FC, FE, FF and then finally 1. Whereas if you push up anywhere else it stays within the same set of values, in this case 0 to 7.
One theory I have is that this value somehow helps determine which way link is pushed when you hold a perpendicular direction. In further support of the this theory, you can actually perform the glitch in a slightly different way (though never in circumstances where it couldn't be performed before). Going right, you can push up/down on the proper frame, hold right again for 1 frame, and go back to holding up or down, and instead of link going backwards (left) he continues going right until he reaches 1.
Hope that makes sense and that this wasn't overly obvious!
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I messed around with the tie fighter sequence and started improving it.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/5666/laughing_gas%2Balden-starwars.fcm
It's only the first 10, improved by about 2 seconds. Improvement starts around frame 24000 (everything up to there is laughing_gas's current movie)
There is a memory address, 6A07, that counts down how many need to be destroyed to move on; 40 in the first one and 70 in the second. New ones spawn when the current set is destroyed. So to go fast the best strategy is to kill them as quickly as possible.
When you push B it always shoots 5 pairs of shots in quick succession, and then you have to wait a bit until you can shoot again. It's unlikely that you can hit both while aiming at one spot, so I move the crosshairs along a line that goes over their initial trajectory, but the opposite direction. The trick iis then to find the earliest frame to fire when both will die (which I got lazy with and used a bot)
Anyways, it's very tedious and I may finish it out someday but thought I'd share in case someone else would be inspired ;)
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Now we need a lego robot that can use a normal NES controller ... and one faster than ROB
We could call it TASROB... it would also have to turn the power on. Then maybe we could see if the TASes would really work on a real NES?
Actually a robot probably wouldn't push the buttons with enough precision. Maybe some sort of USB controlled device that would mimic controller output directly and precisely. And that had precise control of the power and reset buttons.
Yeah, i'll get right to work on that... next tuesday...mumble mumble or something. ;)
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Finally figured out the damage addresses. The one I had originally measures the "damage" meter that can be refilled after the race. For the boat to be destroyed though you have to lower all their stats to 0:
40D Damage
413 Hull
415 Steering
411 Acceleration
40F Engine
Each of these values lower to 0, in that order. In your movie, AnS, the opponent automatically gets everything but damage reset to 2 when they are destroyed, but they have to pay to upgrade again. Maybe for higher opponents get reset to something higher which would make it harder.
So it looks like it would degrade into a jump-fest. The last opponent was harder to damage with jumping though. More testing I suppose...
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Wow, awesome!
I originally thought that destroying their boat would be faster but wasn't persistent enough and thought it wasn't possible. The ram value I found for their "damage" decreased by 1 until it got to 0, and stayed there after I damaged them a couple of times so I stopped trying to hurt them... grr. Looking back the value probably had to do more with the status icon on the screen showing the damage.
This is clearly the best strategy (plus it looks cooler!), unless like you say they get super tough later on.
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I wrote:
If it's only 9 this will be a really quick movie which would be another plus...
Nope, it's 15 levels, and they get incredibly long.
Here's a boatthrough that's over half an hour, and while not optimal, it's pretty fast and I don't know how much it could really come down. Plus tracks are reused ad nauseum so there would have to be a lot of entertainment to make up for it.
It does look really cool at top speed though :)
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More WIP action...
I realized there were different difficulty settings! (Yeah, I'm solw...)
And it looks like if you start from the Easy levels it wraps to the normal and then presumably to the expert levels, so you could upgrade your boat a little (very little actually) before hitting the harder levels. Though I guess starting at expert would make it shorter.
The movie above plays the three Easy levels pretty quickly, less than 3 minutes.
I didn't do it this time, but in general I think a good strategy is to damage your opponent's boat as much as possible quickly at the beginning of the first race. Their boat can take 5 hits (and then becomes invulnerable:( ). The more damage, the slower they go, the more money you end up making because they give you more if you beat them by a larger margin. They won't make much money so it will be hard to repair their boat, and damage not repaired carries over to the next race (not to mention that they can't upgrade either...). You can either push them into obstacles, or more amusingly use a turbo boost or a jump to land straight on top of them which hurts them but not you... I'll post an example later tonight.
Does anyone know how many levels there are? If it's only 9 this will be a really quick movie which would be another plus...
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Swedishmartin wrote:
BTW, is "interface" possible to use as a verb?
Also, the small text size gives me the capability to say dirty words that other forum-goers won't see unless they quote me! Tits!
Sorry, you were asking for that ;)
dictionary.com wrote:
in·ter·face v. to bring together; connect or mesh
... so verb away!
Also, tits ain't that bad:
dictionary.com wrote:
tit n.
1. a titmouse.
2. any of various other small birds.
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Dwedit wrote:
Dizzy the adventurer has one of the worst music engines of any NES game. It introduces a nasty 60Hz noise because the channels are updated every frame regardless of whether they need it or not, and every time you update the channel, you restart the waveform.
Haha, I thought it sounded particularly bad, but figured it was more likely an emulator problem. That the problem is with the ROM itself makes more sense in retrospect :)
Thanks for the info!
(oh, and thanks for the vote adelikat!)
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Submission text wrote:
This is a new record of Super Mario Bros, made in VirtuaNES but converted to FCEU's FCM format
...with nesmock presumably. So yeah that rerecord count probably isn't right :)
Looking at one of the older smb submissions, the 18000 frame run was made in about 6200 rerecords (if that's accurate of course). But I guess we have higher standards now ;)
