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Donkey Kong for Commodore 64

The debut of Mario.
Game premise: Donkey Kong has captured Mario's girlfriend and has taken her to a constructions site....thankfully Mario has not yet transitioned occupations from carpenter to plumber. As usual Mario must save the girl.
The C64 port has levels made up of combinations of 4 varying sub-stages:
  • Broken Girders
  • Elevators
  • Riveted Girders
  • Conveyors

TAS Notes:

  • Aims for fastest time to show and finish all four sub-stages. This requires selecting the 2nd difficulty setting and doing the Broken Girder stage twice.
  • For a VERY minor time trade-off (usually 1-2 frames), I typically make Mario jump backwards...just because I think it's amusing.
That's really all I have to say.

drd2k9: Cancelling due to concerns of completion and PAL settings.


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #5596: DrD2k9's C64 Donkey Kong (Atarisoft) in 02:55.74
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Can you maybe do encodes? I can't encode all your submissions just to let people post, since, you know, they aren't watching in emulators these days.
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I agree feos, because honestly, it's a problem, I must boot on win10 or 8 to watch, then than I work on fedora & than BIZHAWK don't run on this boot! I think it's easy to encode C64 video and add this with your submissions, indeed it's short and don't very heavy file. I don't request you to make the best video encode, but just do it for can easy watching, please.
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I've never looked into encoding. I'll read up on it and see what i can do.
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Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
DrD2k9
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Temp Encode Link to video I also edited the submission post to have the temp encode instead of a screenshot.
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I don't know how I feel about speed/entertainment trade-offs in general, specially when they are applied in a game which isn't very entertaining anyway. I personally would prefer this to be as fast as possible. As this game is kinda slow, voting meh.
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Isn't it possible to avoid waiting for the last barrel through RNG manipulation here? Also, voting No because the average-looking performance does not compensate for this bad port.
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Incomplete. Look for the game loop, don't just prematurely end it at the end of the conveyor level.
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I agree Spikestuff. You start a new game loop, then you stop prematurely, because next levels are an copie of the first levels! But you haven't finish the game in this case. And I think it's not optimized at the maximum, I'm sure than you have possibility to manipulate "RNG" for don't wait to climb, & in the level where DK fall, isn't it possible to won time with this solution? Vote no, for the first reason that you don't finish this run.
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I was gonna say it was probably vault material, until I realized the run wasn't even complete. Voting no.
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zoboner wrote:
in the level where DK fall, isn't it possible to won time with this solution?
I think this route is slower, because it was slower in the atari port, and this version of the games doesn't change the distances between the stairs in a way to justify it being faster here.
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BrunoVisnadi wrote:
I think this route is slower, because it was slower in the atari port, and this version of the games doesn't change the distances between the stairs in a way to justify it being faster here.
ok, Thank for this answer, because, I watched "DK NES" and i had to be ask, because i had a doubt!
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Why is this played at PAL speed? It's really slow and more boring this way, plus NTSC is the speed it was designed for.
DrD2k9
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Due to the concerns of this run being incomplete due to not finishing the level loop, I'm going to cancel this submission. I will likely revisit this game in the future (even if it isn't the most entertaining watch). Unfortunately many C64 games aren't very exciting to watch, but I feel that the system still deserves some TAS runs even if they are only vault worthy. The C64 is part of video gaming history and deserves it's space on this site if only for history's sake. As far as the PAL vs. NTSC situation. I didn't realize my BizHawk settings were for PAL instead of NTSC. That being the case, I'm going to have to revisit all of my Commodore 64 submissions as they've all been done with default settings...which means that they are all likely in PAL and may be faster if converted to NTSC. Ugh. Now I have a ton of unexpected work to do.
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om, nom, nom... blech!
DrD2k9
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SmashManiac wrote:
Isn't it possible to avoid waiting for the last barrel through RNG manipulation here?
I cannot deduce the RNG well enough to manipulate it. I can't figure out anything regarding the barrels or conveyors. I believe the spawn point and movement of fireball enemies is impacted to some degree by your position on the screen, but subtle movements don't seem to have much impact. I can't get breakpoints to work in the debugger. So attempting to reverse engineer the RNG is currently not an option. This leaves trial & error as the only option (at least for me--someone else may have other ideas/skills that I'm not aware of).