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Uh, well actually I forgot that it should be as simple as making sure the checksum matches in FCEU. If you don't see a mismatching checksum in red when you go to play the movie, then you have the right ROM. GoodNES said it was "Who Framed Roger Rabbit (U).nes" for me.
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Baxter wrote:
Basically I'm trying a "as fast as possible"-run now, with no ristrictions like sword only, or anything like that.
So I'll stop posting here, I'll use this instead: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=57
Had there been any progress on this?
I had a thought about this game - it seems to me that the tornado is far superior to the wheel in terms of getting around quickly. It has very fast horizontal speed (possibly better than the wheel), decent vertical speed (much better than the wheel), very good vertical control (much better than the wheel), and decent horizontal control (much better than the wheel). The only bad thing is the lack of cancellation, but that only matters at the very end of areas. And it seems to make Kirby pretty invincible while spinning, right up until you regain control to start a new spin.... Anyone know which bosses will pose a threat / other potential problems for a tornado-abusing run aiming to be as fast as possible?
edit: WIP run
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adelikat wrote:
dont matter how you look at it, the user will have to know the relevant ram addresses.
Keep in mind that it's not just RAM addresses (which can often be found without too much trouble via a cheat finder), it's also the value of the program counter - sometimes (maybe even quite often) the only reliable way to tell when something happens is to know what "line" of code gets executed to make it happen, which in general probably requires disassembling and understanding the game's code. Well, for some things it might be possible to look at what gets executed when something good happens and (a few times) subtract what gets executed when it doesn't. RAM values alone can go pretty far in some cases, but Bisqbot certainly wouldn't have worked as well (or maybe at all) without any monitoring of executing CPU instructions.
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I know it's possible to give Doom one continuous beating, but I don't think it makes up for the time it takes to push him into the corner first. It does seem like the car handling could have a bit more precision to it, and since all the item positions are randomized it's possible there's a better arrangement of items somewhere, but I don't really have any major problems with this now.
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HSZZZ wrote:
Desynched @ the first shredder battle
This probably means you have to turn off Volume Envelope Height Reading in the sound options and try again, or use the version of the emulator I link to in the submission text.
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BlueBlue wrote:
However, if you release on a frame on which your speed would normally decrease, then you will only move upwards for 2 more frames.
I've noticed that this exact same quirk also applies to Little Samson. Well I can't remember if it's 2 frames but you jump noticeably higher if you release the button at the right frame, probably for similar reasons. edit: Oops, I misread what you said there, didn't see the word "only".
BlueBlue wrote:
As for horizontal movement when jumping, I can't find any difference between running and jumping.
But if you jump while running, does the pattern of 2,1,2,1,1,2,1,1 reset to some point when you jump or continue where it left off?
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DJ FozzBozz wrote:
Because we only have 3 whistles. While he "officially" used 2, when you blast the wall to go to ToonTown, you use one by default, since B is used for the dynamite/detonator combo AND the whistle.
No, you have 5 whistles, only 4 of which have been used. Try it, there's still 1 whistle blow left after blasting the wall.
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I asked this at the last submission, but maybe someone here knows the answer: why not use the whistle one more time to skip a long segment of winding roads near the end? It looks like this was already considered in this topic, but there's no explanation as to why it was dismissed.
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In this case I would treat Escape Unit like a warp that skips levels, in which case you can choose to do a warpless run over a warpful run. (Skipping large parts of the game seems to be a sort of tradition in time attacks, though...)
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hopper wrote:
Although... does it technically count as being played at the hardest difficulty when you set one of the options to make you that much faster? :P
Actually this is more like a harder difficulty for all of the things changed. Raphael takes enormous damage from attacks compared to the other turtles (some enemies can kill him in two hits), so you have to be really good at avoiding attacks to survive with him. Donatello is more the turtle for beginners to use (as he has good defense, good attack, and good range, it's hard to go wrong with him). The double-tap run takes more skill to use than the hold-to-run, and the detection is actually a little messed up and unresponsive such that sometimes a triple-tap is necessary. And having back attack on would usually make it easier by fixing mistakes and hitting guys behind you when playing normally. It just so happens that all of these things that would make the game harder also give more control to make it more fast-paced when doing a time attack. (It is true that it wasn't necessary to change the control scheme, but that made the run so much faster to make on my keyboard setup that I think it was worth spending 1 whole frame before the game on it.)
Anyway, thanks for all the compliments.
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Maximus wrote:
Nitsuja, do you have an fcm of that fight; I'm a little curious as well :)
Oh, sorry for being too lazy to post this before: nightshade_fight.fcm. Everything up to the fight is the same as Randil's. The main tactic change is to interrupt a strong punch with a kick, then as soon as that does damage in a few frames interrupt it with a strong punch, then after 1 frame interrupt that with a strong kick, etc. (I found this out by mashing random attack buttons at full speed and noticing that sometimes the delay between attacks is much smaller than usual.) On watching it again, I think I wasn't as fast as possible with the final blow, it looks like there's a long delay before the final punch, so I expect you can get this somewhat faster. Also, resist the temptation to uppercut the final opponent sky-high because that makes the game wait longer before ending the battle; the sooner the enemy comes to a complete dead stop the better.
For menu manipulation, the general method is to pause the game right before the menu comes up, save it, and use frame advance and reloads until you find the earliest frame that you can press the direction button for 1 frame that still causes the cursor to move. In this case the menus seem to always follow a pattern of press, wait, wait, wait, press, wait, wait, wait, press, ... for left/right, and also require that same wait period of 3 frames before activating the next selected option. But you still have to use frame advance to test when the very first press happens, or you'll have too many waits before the first press in the menu, unless you want to count the number of frames between activating the menu and being able to move in it.
And one more thing: don't waste time using slow motion and/or frame advance for things where they don't help. Specifically, if you're just pressing in one direction for an entire room to walk across to the other side, obviously you don't need to enter every frame individually; you can just hold the direction and unpause (and/or turn the speed up), then pause again when you reach the next room. Or if you need to jump the maximum distance in battle, that involves holding jump and a direction for many frames so you might as well do that at normal speed and pause just before you land.
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Randil wrote:
Hopefully it will help you some, get it here. The battle is somewhat sloppy in this movie, I know =/
It sure is - I just gave it a try and finished that battle 374 frames faster than that. The battle lasted less than 3 seconds from gaining control to the final blow, meaning it was 3 times faster (and 4 times faster than in Maximus' movie).
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FractalFusion wrote:
However, I can't seem to grab the heart tank in Sting Chameleon's stage without defeating Launch Octopus. If it is possible to grab the heart tank with just the Boomerang Cutter, please let me know.
It would be very possible if not for the fact that the game is programmed to delete sprites like your boomarang when they're a little off the screen. Because of that, it seems to be impossible, although only just barely.
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Why didn't you use the whistle to shortcut across some of the long winding roads? Like around frame 11285 it looks like it's much faster to walk across and use the whistle than it is to drive all the way around. Similarly around 11845 it looks like you can use it there to save even more time, like 20 seconds. I think there are some other places later, too, although you only have 1 more use of the whistle left so you'd have to choose the best one.
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While much better, I'll point out that the menu manipulation is still not perfect. For instance, when you go to use the key on the statue in the beginning, it takes you 3 frames longer than necessary to choose "use". It seems minor but that sort of thing can add up, especially if more testing with frame advance would also speed up the battles (which is very likely).
Actually, you can make the fights a lot faster by mixing in other attacks like kick and maybe high punch (up+b and up+a), and never knock them on the ground because then you have to waste time waiting for them to stand up. Kicking the huge guys especially does lots of damage compared to the tiny punch you do to them each time, which would save a lot of time. So, I think you can get this faster by at least another minute.
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FODA wrote:
A more general way of setting the "goal" that the emulator has to find is to set it as being "earliest frame that has sprite #(insert address here) loaded on the graphics palette". That would be one way of knowing that the level has ended, for example, or that the enemy died, or that you got the power up, etc.
Don't you mean, a more specific way? Not everything you might be interested in doing results in a sprite being loaded, and maybe that's not how things work at all on non-NES systems.
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I was actually thinking about this recently... the biggest difficulty is in the game-specific information, mainly in finding the PC values and memory addresses of interest. Without a good way of finding that information or a large database of it, such a system wouldn't be very usable in general no matter how general-purpose the code is.
But, besides that part of it... One thing that should be included in the scripting for continuing at each frame and for generating input is the ability to refer to some variables and do some simple calculations with them, since allowing the robot keep internal state (and modify it) opens up a lot of possibilities, perhaps allowing it to work for longer sequences given good enough rules that change depending on what happened so far.
Also, something that allows the input to start out very random (a chance to push normally useless buttons or change buttons more frequently) and get less crazy (more toward what buttons you know typically need to be pressed) after more retries might yield more interesting results. Perhaps it could even decide which buttons to press less often depending on the results so far, but that might be going beyond what's easier to do simply by running multiple trials and seeing what worked best.
It seems that a robot tool like this would help very much with combat in RPG runs, when there is a lot of randomness that is tedious to manipulate manually, rules for reasonable input that are very clear, and results that are often displayed directly as numbers and usually easy to track to memory values.
Also, maybe this could be used to find the fastest way to beat a boss in action games. The address of the health of the boss would be easy to find, and a condition for restarting is if the boss health fails to decrease within a certain number of frames. Maybe we think we already know the fastest way to beat the boss, but it's possible the robot would discover something interesting like a glitch that kills it instantly or a way to make a weapon do more damage than it should, if there are enough options considered in the possible input and the time interval / max frames isn't too low. (And even if it just finds the fast "regular" way to beat it, there's a chance it would put on a good show anyway in the process. I found those short luck manipulation sequences fun to watch, at least.)
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Bisqwit wrote:
How can we improve the usability and usefulness of this website?
Many movies refer to other movies in their description without providing a link or even the exact name of the other movie. For instance, the full Zelda: A Link to the Past run refers to the "short version" of the run, and I can imagine some people reading that description wondering what the short version is and not knowing where to find it. Maybe it would helpful for all the references to movies to get links, except when it's talking about the movie that it directly obsoleted.
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Maza wrote:
nitsuja, I didn't quite mean that, so lets try once time...
Then that doesn't make much sense. I know you want combos, but even if you could assign a key twice that wouldn't give you what you want, because none of the hotkeys push regular buttons only once. So I thought you were asking about what I had just said earlier, because your question didn't seem to be logically related to your request for combos.
Anyway, it would require a small modification to VBA to make that work, or a larger modification to make it work for other buttons besides only R+B. Or, you might be able to set up an external key remapping or macro thing... I've never used them, so I barely know anything about them, but they could probably let you make one key press 2 other keys.
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Maza wrote:
And what come to the autohold/-fire hotkeys, You can assign only one button to those configurations. (For example if I put E to any autofire, I can't use E in any autohold. So you can't use same key twice in "Customize..." menu.)
OK, here's an example of how I have it set it up:
A button: V key
B button: C key
etc.
auto-fire A: Alt-V
auto-hold A: Alt-Shift-V
auto-fire B: Alt-C
auto-hold B: Alt-Shift-C
etc.
so to auto-fire a button, I can press the same button while holding down Alt, and to auto-hold it, I press the same button while holding Shift-Alt. Since they're just toggles that you don't have to hold down or press a lot, it's not that inconvenient that they use modifier keys.
