(Link to video)
Ghost Manor for the Atari 2600 was developed by Xonox, a company famous for making double sided cartridges in an effort to sell two games for the price of one. In this game, we must brave many deadly creatures and traps to save the boy captured by Dracula which only takes around 22 seconds.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Uses hardest difficulty
  • I ain't afraid of no sleep. I ain't afraid of no bed.

Comments

Ghost Manor has 5 stages and the ultimate goal is to trap Dracula and free the boy. The "game select" doesn't do anything in this game, but flipping both difficulty switches makes everything faster and has other limitations like only getting 10 spears in level one instead of 25, and rendering the maze section invisible, only to be illuminated by periodic lightning strikes. More details below.

Stage by stage comments

Stage 1

A skeleton runs around the graveyard and we must touch him while he is in front of a gravestone (these hitboxes are pretty questionable) to earn a spear. Once a spear is earned there is a 16 frame lockout period before you can earn another one. Once we get 10 spears it's on to stage 2 to use them.

Stage 2

There are numerous baddies moving back and forth at various heights as well as a mummy trying to chop you. If you interact with his hurtbox at all while the sword is "down" it's game over. You don't have to actually be chopped. There is a 24 frame delay between when you can shoot the next spear, and they are movable mid flight. Naturally we dance with the mummy and shoot everything as fast as possible, which lets us kill the mummy (he is invincible until everything else is killed) and move on to stages 3 and 4

Stage 3 and 4

Stages 3 and 4 are small mazes enveloped in darkness with coffins strewn about. Random coffins contain a cross, which we need to repel Dracula in stage 5. However, the game gives us one cross for free upon getting there, so we can navigate the darkness as quickly as possible. Bumping a wall slows you down for a coule frames, and touching the moving bar from the opposite of the direction it's moving kills you. We make a beeline for the exit.

Stage 5

The final "battle" with Dracula sees us using the cross (by holding the action button) to repel him back upward. The goal is to get him trapped into one of the cells to free the boy, so we do some stutter stepping to make sure he's constantly moving toward the goal and that we can control his X/Y more optimally. Once he triggers the cell, the boy is released and we must meet up with him at the stairs to win the game.
Edit: YouTube encode updated to show shortened run.

slamo: Judging!
slamo: DrD2k9 made this pretty easy for me, optimization has been looked over pretty thoroughly and the ROM usage is fine since there aren't more viable NTSC options. Accepting!

EZGames69: Processing...

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7472: ShesChardcore & DrD2k9's A2600 Ghost Manor in 00:21.08
MESHUGGAH
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I don't know what I watched as a first time viewer of the gameplay but voted yes cause it's damn short and very fast, also looked funny. Gameplay: A little girl starts from the cemetery to a castle, shoots some arrows, gets in a invisible maze up and down and goes to the stairs with a skeleton.
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Lord_Tom
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Yes vote for silly Atari game crushed. Laughing that the game has like a 5 second title screen, after which the 5 separate stages documented in the comments are passed in the subsequent ~17 seconds, including stage 1 which requires obtaining 10 separate items (or 1 item 10 times, but you get the idea...) Since it looks like you only used 7 spears in stage 2, I'm assuming you need to get 10 before you can exit stage 1?
ShesChardcore
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Lord Tom wrote:
Yes vote for silly Atari game crushed. Laughing that the game has like a 5 second title screen, after which the 5 separate stages documented in the comments are passed in the subsequent ~17 seconds, including stage 1 which requires obtaining 10 separate items (or 1 item 10 times, but you get the idea...) Since it looks like you only used 7 spears in stage 2, I'm assuming you need to get 10 before you can exit stage 1?
Yup, stage ends when you get the 10th one. There's a slight time gap between grabbing 2 and 3 but I don't think it's possible to close that gap and keep the "every 16 frame" cadence going based on how fast the skeleton moves in that section.
DrD2k9
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In reviewing this run, I was able to implement some movement improvements scattered through the run. Stage 1 (16 Frames Saved): Started moving earlier and managed to get the 10th hit on the skeleton a bit earlier to move to stage two. Stage 2 (0 Frames Saved): Different attack pattern to avoid the axe. Otherwise no frames difference. Stage 3 (14 Frames Saved): Better movement (more diagonals) to exit the maze faster. Stage 4 (45 Frames Saved): Better movement (more diagonals) to exit the maze faster. Stage 5 (2 Frames Lost): Unfortunately I lost two frames here and can't figure out why. Even just copying the original requires adding two frames. The player character must move up to y-position=15 while touching the freed boy to end the game. Total improvement = 73 Frames Here is an updated .bk2. And a temp encode. https://youtu.be/kZIQXhatvHo Once I have coauthorship/editing rights on the submission, I'll change the main encode to this one. Here's a side-by-side GIF comparison of the run before and after improvements. I also discovered a minor ROM issue. Checking the ROM used for this run using goodtools yields "Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox) [o1].a26" The [o1] indicates that the ROM is an overdump ROM. For those who may not know, overdump ROMs have extra unused data beyond the actual game data in the ROM file itself. This extra data is meaningless and doesn't impact the game in any way. Unfortunately, goodtools does not have a [!] marked ROM for this game indicating a known proper dump of the game. There is a ROM in the goodtools database that's not labeled with any notations "Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox).a26" but this ROM only seems to contain the first stage of the game (it resets to the beginning once the spears are collected). There is a PAL version that has the [!] known good dump indicator; interestingly the inputs from this run sync perfectly on the PAL version but the overall play is slower due to the framerate differences. Due to these issues with the ROM, I think the overdump version is likely the best to use for this game, as it allows a full game NTSC run.
MESHUGGAH
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BizHawk 2.8 + DrD2k9's usermovie test Syncs on: 2bee7f226d506c217163bad4ab1768c0 *Ghost Manor (1983)(Xonox)(NTSC)[o].bin 40d8ed6a5106245aa79f05642a961485 *Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox) (PAL) [!].a26 3b10106836565e5db28c7823c0898fbb *Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox) (PAL) [a1][!].a26 Doesn't syncs on: 0eecb5f58f55de9db4eedb3a0f6b74a8 *Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox).a26 Also I had no idea that an A2600 TAS can sync on both NTSC and PAL ROM.
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DrD2k9
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
Also I had no idea that an A2600 TAS can sync on both NTSC and PAL ROM.
This may not be the case for all games, but it does work with this one. The frames are just longer in PAL mode. I've run into something similar before; I think it was with a C64 game (EDIT: If I remember correctly, it was Monty on the Run for C64. Movement synced, but RNG didn't.). It would be interesting to try this on other games as well.
MESHUGGAH
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I saw a few interesting notes about this on various not allowed to link sites, so here's one quoted:
VSC scanlines wrote:
Often these games may be stable enough to run on both NTSC and PAL systems. These are the ideal specs that Atari adhered to: 100% standard compatible NTSC games display 262 lines per frame at 60Hz 100% standard compatible PAL games display 312 lines at 50Hz Games in both versions will be off about the same (NTSC will be ~10% faster and PAL ~7% slower). Most companies developed games in NTSC and later converted them to PAL. Since programmers were mainly concerned with having a stable image and acceptable colors, no time was spent on adjusting gameplay so that it ran identical to the NTSC version. What this means for players is, in most cases, playing a PAL version of a game compared to an NTSC version gives the PAL player an advantage, both in time and difficulty (due to PAL games running slower). In addition, the PAL version will offer a larger playfield.
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LOL, wth did I just watch? Yes vote :)
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4691] A2600 Ghost Manor by ShesChardcore & DrD2k9 in 00:21.08