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TheAxeMan wrote:
Come on, any Persian tale has to end on a fight with Jaffar. Did you skip the last level with some trick or is it just not in this game?
That guy standing by the door is actually Jaffar. For some reason he just stands there and looks at me until I blast him with a fireball. (If I run into him I instantly die, but he never moves even then.) I've never gotten this far in the SNES version before, so I was very surprised when I suddenly won the game then. I don't think this version has the final level, and it seems like there's no way to turn into a shadow using left-right-left-right. But it looked like Jaffar was supposed to run away instead of just standing there - maybe it's because of the glitch, but it's a little odd if so because none of the other enemies had any trouble reacting to me when the glitch was active (in fact they gain the glitch's powers too).
I'd still like to see a run of PoP1 for SNES though -- apparently that version actually has much more than the PC (or any other) version of it, such as extra minibosses, bosses, and levels.
In case anyone's wondering about the glitch, here are some more details about it and its effects that may not be obvious from watching the movie:
- It can be activated either by taking a hit (and surviving) while crawling, or by hanging from a ledge while a crusher wall slides by overhead. Snakes are lethal.
- I cannot go through closed gates even when the glitch is active.
- Enemies can still attack and hit me, and they can walk on air and through walls (but are unable to fall / jump down).
- Wall spikes still impale me (unless I time it just right).
- I'm invincible to those slicer things from the horizontal slits in the wall. (Note that they can just barely be jumped through even without the glitched being active, but only when moving rightward.)
- I can climb down from thin air, but cannot catch onto it when jumping or falling, and can still easily die from falling too far.
- Leaving a room in a direction not programmed as possible (i.e. going out of the level) instantly kills me, except in a few cases where it leads to either a pitch-black or a totally glitched-out room (which don't seem to be useful at all).
- The effect of the glitch is permanent until restart or soft-reset (which is done by pausing the game with start, then pressing select to go to the title screen).
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The mix tip helped a lot. Now I'm done with Metaknight, 4.7 minutes faster than the 1P run so far, still with the Great Gave Offensive and Milky Way Wishes left to go.
I'm almost exclusively using wheelie rider whenever it's available because it's amazingly fast and strong compared to anything else. Whatever planet gives the wheel ability is my first stop (unless any other abilities are really fast to get or required, that may be the only ability I get in MWW). I don't know when/if wheel is available in the Great Cave Offensive, though (maybe there's a mix opportunity somewhere there?).
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I agree that keeping these things secret is pretty pointless.
I have a question: Are you aiming for real-time fastest, or in-game-time fastest? (Just wondering. I think Terimakasih was aiming to minimize in-game time.)
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samurai goroh wrote:
Cool, I'm anxious to see those times & the video in general, keep up the effort!
Well, the times I got are: 20:69 on 1, 31:07 on 2, and 40:70 on 3.
samurai goroh wrote:
BTW, I think this is worth to mention, when you play The Revenge of Metaknight, you can get the mix ability at the very beginning, so you can get any ability you need from the start...
Thanks, I didn't know that. Time to start that part over... I'll probably go for a wheelie to make into player 2. The wheelie rider is both the fastest and the strongest ability so it feels a little cheap to use it so often, though.
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I've started working on the 2P run of this again. So far I'm partway through Dyna Blade. Zurreco, I'm mostly using your movie for reference, so let me know if you've realized any major mistakes in it that would be good to avoid.
I made sure to beat all the gourmet race times that samurai_goroh posted by a decent margin, and overall the movie is 78 seconds faster so far. I'm using some pretty unusual tactics (who would've thought that Parasol is a great ability for zooming through levels?), well until I could get wheelie at least (TAC stars (edit: maybe I'm remembering their name wrong?) are awesome, although they seem to be only about 1/3 as strong as the burning hammer move).
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Highness, you know it's spelled reckon, right? Anyway, I'd love to see a run of this, but I won't be much help since I've always been terrible at it - those 2 werewolves always tear me apart, and the tiger boss later on, heck I usually die 3 or 4 times even at that very 1st boss in the intro.
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I don't have a gamepad so I just map player 1 and 2 to separate areas of the keyboard, use frame advance all the time (which I do anyways) and just play like normal but with twice as many controls to worry about. I haven't actually finished any 2P runs though, they take a lot of patience no matter how you do them (and the only runs I've finished so far were done in 1 sitting or 2 at most).
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Well that's weird, is there something unusual about how your computer handles sound or your sound card, or maybe you have a different fmod.dll on your path? Does it crash when you choose FMOD or is there just no sound? Have you tried restarting snes9x or taking into account that it might just be playing a lot quieter? FMOD is a pretty standard library for playing sound on Windows, I've never seen it not work before... (Well, the only sound driver option that doesn't work for me is FMOD A3D, but the other 3 work fine.) I can't make snes9x directsound play when the window is inactive because DirectSound seems to be hard-coded to only play sound when the application window is in focus, but FMOD doesn't have this restriction.
(edit: It doesn't work for you in the official versions either right? You might want to ask on the Snes9x forums about it then since I'm pretty sure it's supposed to work and maybe they know something about why it might not work.)
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Zurreco wrote:
This does not work for my PC. In fact, only the snes9x direct sound setting works.
It won't work if you don't have the correct fmod.dll file in the same directory as the snes9x.exe that you're running. I forgot to include fmod.dll with some earlier versions, but it's part of the v5 download.
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OK, I made "Pause When Inactive" an option you can turn off if you want Snes9x to keep playing games/movies when it isn't the active window. (You can still give games input while inactive, btw.) If you also want sound to play while it's inactive, you can set Sound Driver to "FMOD DirectSound" in the Sound Settings menu, but keep in mind that unfortunately this locks the "Sync samples with sound CPU" option off which a few movies need to play back right.
I was going to implement the other requests too, but I don't have time right now to do more and so many people requested this one feature that I thought I might as well post it as another update.
(Oh, and as usual, see the first page of this thread for the file. This post is talking about v5.)
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Posting occasionial progress as you go along is a good idea. Especially if you're trying to make this run perfect, it helps to have other people checking your work before it's all done. (Don't assume you'll be able to catch all of whatever mistakes you make yourself. And hex editing to patch up mistakes simply won't work in this game, it's too random for that.)
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About it not showing up in the taskbar, maybe Snes9x is starting itself up or unhiding its window in a nonstandard way that doesn't inform your shell it goes in the taskbar.
Playing while not in focus should actually be pretty easy to implement, it should just require turning off some "pause when the window gets disabled" code when a setting is on. Always-on-top is something I don't know how to do though, at least not without requiring a restart of the emulator for its setting to take effect. (For me, I can already just right click on Snes9x in the taskbar and choose "Always on top" but that's functionality that came with my video card.)
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BoltR wrote:
Would it be possible to add support for the taskbar? I hate having to minimize all my open windows to find the program when it's been lost underneith.
Also, how did you end up adding the CRC and current rom name?
I'm not sure what you mean about the taskbar, Snes9x already goes in the taskbar like other applications. (Maybe you mean when it has a dialog box open?)
I was intending to add the CRC32 and rom name between the save data and the controller data, but I think I was mistaken about the order of the offsets (one of them seemed to be relative to the other) so I ended up adding it between the metadata and the save data. So it's essentially part of the metadata, i.e. the comment text, just it won't display in the comment box because it starts with a null character. (Maybe that's a terrible way of doing it but it's not caused any problems so far.)
(I'll make the screenshot button customizable when I get around to it.)
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I liked this, it is a little hard to follow but I guess that's a good thing that it's so fast. Actually the boss fights were what confused me the most. I don't think you took all that much damage like you said (or at least, I sure take a lot more damage than you did when I play).
Some of the graphics in this game (giant explosion, splashes, squid monsters) are among the most horribly pixelated graphics I've ever seen. (And what a sad ending... the rest of the game's story didn't do a very good job of setting it up though.) Anyway, yes from me.
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I watched it, at a pretty high of a speed (sorry), but I think I did notice some nice uses of the hookshot in a few places I hadn't expected... maybe getting the hookshot earlier can save more time than I'd thought.
I don't mind this being a no-damage run, although I'd still rather see it with damage as there aren't very many places where taking damage is faster anyway.
But, yeah, this can be greatly improved. Better overall route would make the biggest difference. And consistently better precision at a smaller level: Whenever there's more than one way to get through a room or beat an enemy, try out all of them, even crazy ones, and go with whatever took the least number of frames (using the frame counter makes this easy). Never mind that the re-record count skyrockets when you try all possible combinations, as long as it's faster afterward. Obviously the faster ways will start becoming more obvious without trying everything, but... as it is now, almost every single room you go to I can see ways to get through it faster, even when watching at 2x or 4x speed. I understand not wanting to kill yourself perfecting every part of such a long game, especially on your first run, though, and that this is more intended as a test run.
About strategies like bombs+hammer or bow+sword... interesting, but I don't think using bombs and the hammer would be faster because the game doesn't let you equip multiple items and the menu screen takes so long to come up. (I wonder, what about using bombs+sword on the sandworms? Placing a bomb right where a sandworm will come out right as it explodes and you start attacking another sandworm with the sword simultaneously. Then again, maybe just manipulating them to come out where they can all be hit at the same time by a spin slash would be fastest... I guess there are lots of strategies to try.)
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The turning-around animation sometimes causes attacks to miss me, so that was intentional. There were several places that pauses were necessary to manipulate them, also. It might seem like just taking it a hit would be faster, but that knocks me away from the edges, causes me to draw the sword if I have one, and often instant-kills me (by hitting 3 times in rapid succession).
EDIT: agopo, I think I misunderstood your question and was thinking about something else. I turned around in order to walk closer to the edge so I could keep climbing up, because a bug in the game causes you to pull up too far to the left there to keep climbing straight up. The only way I found to avoid that was to climb back down a level and then back up, which was slower.
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OK, I'll try to put in the alternate savestate system. About MinGW, I've never even heard of it, but I'll see if I can apply that patch, hopefully it'll work...
On an unrelated topic, I discovered something wrong with the last update, it's not really a bug, but... what happened is that because a ROM name is 23 bytes, I was offsetting the movie data by an odd number of bytes which makes the movie hard to hex edit because it isn't word-aligned. I've uploaded a fix to save movies with an extra byte of padding for alignment, so... people who've already downloaded v4 should really consider re-downloading it.
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I've also seen it claimed that it must be fake because he starts a level out invincible but never gets a star item anywhere, although if you pay attention he gets it from the miniboss in one of the ship levels. And questions about why Mario starts glowing orange...
I had a question though: Are there significant differences between the US and Japanese versions of the game?
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But keep in mind that (as far as I can tell, as a rough estimate) it takes about 700 frames each time you gamble.
About the last update: A few of the pegasus dashes were over really short distances or over mostly stairs - did you test each one to make sure they were actually faster than just walking?
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spezzafer: I just uploaded an update for snes9x that should let you continue past the previous limit.
Avin:
1. This has apparenly been fixed by making sure to use a certain combination of sound settings, which my modified version of snes9x makes easier to keep straight, among other things.
2. Snes9x has a "cheat finder" that lets you view values in the game's memory and do searches for what values are different or the same between save states, and it lets you lock a value to a constant to test what the effect is. I don't think it's been used much so far though.
3. I think someone said they tried it and couldn't get it to work, but I'm not sure... it sounds fake to me though.
5. It's definitely not possible. Omni tested it extensively and I tried it out a while ago too, and it seems like the game developers thought it through and specifically made it impossible to take that shortcut.
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Hey guys... I just updated this to version 4. New changes include the ROM's CRC32 getting saved with the movie files, and the movie length limit fix being applied. See the first post for the file and more info.
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By the way, you can still sort-of use Turbo mode -- set the turbo frame skip to 1 and that makes it go at about 200% speed, which is not fast enough to cause it to desync. (It's better than nothing.)
I'm not sure why this game behaves differently when it's emulated too quickly. I think it's sound-related (yet again), especially because if I set the playback rate to 0 (No Sound) the game pauses indefinitely before the title screen until I turn the sound back on.
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Oh, hehe, guess I'd better upload a version with the fix then, was hoping to fix some other things first before anyone using it reached the limit. It'll be another... 8 hours or so before I can though.
