If you save all the hostages in all the levels, I think you may get a weapon upgrade (laser) against the final boss, Mr. Mimi. Or, at least, that's what happened when I just did a (victorious!) playthrough on real hardware: I unexpectedly got a laser against Mr. Mimi, and that's the only reasonable explanation I can think of for why.
(There's a claim here that you get the upgrade if you beat Minosaur without dying, and that you get fireballs if you used lasers and vice versa. But that's obviously not true based on the TAS -- and on my winning playthrough of the game, I lost a life or two against Minosaur and had to finish him off with my regular weapon, but still got a laser vs. Mr. Mimi.)
If my theory is correct, it probably wouldn't save enough time to improve the TAS, but is it worth looking into? There are only a handful of skippable hostages early in the game -- the rest are already required, I believe.
An addendum to this: I had been speedrunning the game this year, read SMSpower and during an attempt, did as instructed there, but did not get the powerup. I looked into this and my understanding is that you must collect 25-29 ? powerups, and, the last one you grab must be when the timer ones digit reads 1 or 0, and does not fall on an invincibility time. This gives you the FB weapon saving 47 hits at Mimi. Most ?s are right on the route: a new TAS would trivially breeze past the fun RTA collision and tight spaces. It'd save a hunk of time with RTA route too. To verify this, you can poke $0096 with the desired ? quantity, and $0097 with a 1/0 or non-qualifying number, before the final boss. Here's the run that I think proves this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iAeWC_aUUo
Steel Moons went from a NESDev entry to being blown apart by RTA runners this year, and the route has been maximally optimised now. I think a TAS would be fantastic. Here's the human best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jquDZaHMA6o
Hiya, I wonder if any of you or the TASer can clarify what is meant with the version difference of 1.0 and 1.1 - speedruns of the game are currently affected by the clock tower bolt RNG.
Does v1.1 have a totally fixed sequence there? Or did you mean to say that the bolt goes up only because of the TAS's optimal play?
We were also wondering if you could explain the mechanics of the corner boost you use in the library to go over the top of the screen before jumping in the tea, as that would be among the final things the RTA run lacks that may be humanly viable. Thanks!
It would ultimately depend on how the game is coded and how the answers are stored in that code. Some games do have the answers directly coded in with hex values being equivalent to a specifical letter in the alphabet. But to my knowledge there's no generalization of this practice for similar games.
That's a relief, thankyou for letting me know! I found some stuff in the hex but it was divorced of its context and only partial lists.
I'm curious: is there a general or game-specific way to yank answers out of a game? I've been speedrunning SNES Wheel of Fortune Deluxe, and have hand-wrote 4000 answers but I can't be sure where the list ends, and if there's a way to grab the set in one go, I'd be able to import it into a calculator I've made for the games. I kinda hope there isn't a way or I've wasted a bunch of time :D I have no ability for TASing in general so you may need to ELI5 if you can answer, thanks.
Outrun SMS seems to be very very weird for IGT, top runners have noticed huge illogical discrepancies between RTA and IGT regardless of crashes, and I think PAL is even running faster in both, which may be a lag issue. The whole thing is well above my ability, any light that can be shed would be very welcome.
www.speedrun.com/outrunsms/thread/kgp1i
Great to see an update! I'm curious: when we use the normal control scheme RTA you can buffer momentum for the start of the next stage for a while after crossing goal lines, is that also used for the relevant levels here?
Un Indien Dans La Ville - the camera can be manipped to despawn platforms and save cycles but we haven't quite the ability to do it in RTA and I haven't quite the ability to TAS, but there's also potential lag and item bonus management as well as damage boosts so it would make a great TAS.
I have just found a faster way to finish the final boss, which saves about 7 frames (edited due to miscalc): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgqAsAmUSE0
Don't ask me quite *how* it's faster, but I do know you can buffer A+B together pre-fight to get a grenade hit as well as an M hit at the same time giving 10 more damage. As to whether the last 2 M uses are helpful, I couldn't say, for a human they are when chained together.
(I checked the health stats for hardest difficulty and they are the same as normal, so afaik this tech still applies.)
EDIT: in run practice I also managed this stage 4 which seems to save nearly half a second. That was on normal so I'm aware there would be RNG considerations for setting it up, but perhaps someone smarter than me can look at whether this is better speedboat RNG or what exactly happened. Definitely a one in a million level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-1IFO4kwDc
Marble Madness GBC. A couple of us have been speedrunning it and found a bunch of stuff making it viable for RTA (it was previously thought to be unfinishable due to slow platforms at Ultimate). The potentially final thing would be help in Ultimate to make a faster platform cycle taking SOB from 2:43 to 2:40/2:39 which would be a hilarious parallel of the NES version. If anyone is interested feel free to head to the MM discord or PM me for info on what we know.
I think this submission should be updated now. I have no skill for TAS making but Sacrieon and I have been working on the speedrun of the game and managed to incorporate a lot of the advanced grapples in our runs, as well as do perfect Penguin fights. I would particularly be interested to see just how low the TAS can go as our human sum of best is now in the 1:25.xx range.
Here's the latest effort which has a human-perfect penguin but loses a bit of time in the levels, exactly one second total: https://youtu.be/pIriiZi2x3g
Marble Madness, but only for Game Gear. I will TAS Marble Madness on all platforms, from Arcade, NES, Genesis, Game Gear, Game Boy, DOS, and Windows.
I have been speedrunning the SMS version and I second a wish for a TAS of this. I discovered a couple of new tricks this morning and would be glad to share all my info, there's also an outside chance of duplicating the flagpole skip in Ultimate. Nobody speedruns the GG version though and it's the same as SMS it seems but just with a smaller game window which would make it useless on our side because of the physics being prohibitive with screen-limit bounces.
Just to mention that after skimming what you wrote I have no real clue whether you want/intend to TAS any lemmings games, but if you do, I speedran the first half of the levels on SMS and it has quite a lot of glitches that could be exploited better that way.
There is already a Mercs Arcade mode TAS at http://tasvideos.org/881M.html , but as a Mercs speedrunner for Original Mode I would love to see someone break that to pieces. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqu-mMVztKU is an attempt by someone on the hardest mode but lacking any notes on how he pathed, a lot of his movement seems suboptimal. If anyone ever wants to do a Mercs Original TAS I would be quite happy to share all the knowledge and pathing but I lack the technical ability to do the tool-assisted stuff properly. :)
Wanna use lua with Bizhawk to create a monitor for animation slowdown in SMS Lemmings. Is there a way to get a count of only the sprites currently on the screen? Looked in the help/functions list, can't find one that would do this.
...not to mention all that loading time on a TAS would be fugly.
While tapes and disks do lead to long loading times and inflated TAS times, it's understood and isn't likely to impact the judgement of any submission. See this run for an accepted example with a long loading time.
Thanks for the etiquette point! ^^ J helpfully directed me to a clean single game cart copy of the file which also works fine, Aloysha I hope that doesn't mean I inadvertently caused you to labour emptily.
C64 4 in 1 game cart doesn't work currently, unpaused Bizhawk auto-starts the first game, failing that you can use Joystick port 2 on frame 4 to select the second.
Member J posted
"Can confirm this behaviour with up to date developer version of BizHawk. Works fine on Vice and CCS64.
Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun + International Soccer + Flimbo's Quest + Klax (Europe) (C 64 Games System).crt
SHA1: 0b35ea869239ed1edbc4b31e6d5da185bf88ea19
With TAStudio, there's one frame (#4) where you can press down on Joy2 to select the second game. But things don't seem to work further than that. Moving around in TAStudio (after adding the Down on frame 4) also breaks things further, need to reboot core every time for it to run expectedly. "
I'm hoping to Tas Flimbo's Quest having recently worked out how the rng functions. I'll try tape images meantime, I can't find a different compatible cart file.
Hiya, am new but felt this was the best place to post about this.
Got a new modern laptop and want to start Tasing Flimbo's Quest. While I am searching for a standalone .prg cart image, I played the game since childhood via the 4-in-1 cart release that includes Klax, Fiendish Freddy and International Soccer. There are tape images but these would be very pointless to use, as when I RTA speedrun the game, I have to use a cart image as we use real world timing, not to mention all that loading time on a TAS would be fugly.
I directed Bizhawk to the correct C64 kernel and other files.
For reasons unknown to me though when I load this ROM I am unable to select a game manually - the emulator selects a pre-highlighted other game [to select normally requires pressing fire].
Does anyone know what might be causing this or how I can rectify it?