#2785: adelikat's NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 16:26.89 - Topic 9890 - TASVideos

Vote: Should this movie be published? (Vote after watching!)

Submission Text Full Submission Page Publication Page

Note: many of the tricks demonstrated in this movie can be found at the TMNT Game Resources page.

As always, I have provided a release package on my my sourceforge project. It includes the movie file, submission text, and level savestates.

This is a long overdue improvement to my currently published movie of 299 frames. I started this project in the summer of 2008 because I was unhappy with some very small mistakes in the run (mostly on the scale of 2-4 frames). For whatever reason I decided to redo completely and see how much I could improve. I ran into a snag with some bad enemy randomness in level 4 which contributed to the project stalling for most of that 2 years. I picked it up again this summer and was able to break through that snag and of course hit tons of others. But finally, it is done.

Improvements

A lot of the improvement was lag reduction. I started this project after implementing the lag counter feature into FCEUX. I figured with that tool I could do a much better job reducing lag and that was my motivated to start the improvement. Along the way I found a new trick that contributed to a lot of frames of improvement. It involves conveyor belts. If running on conveyor belt in the same direction it is moving you get speed boost. However, if you jump off and immediately let go of the directional pad, the turtle will retain that high speed throughout the jump.

Making this TAS

I don't think I can fully express how painful it is to TAS this game in a highly optimized manner. It is full of random lag, random enemies, lag, random enemy sets, random item drops, and of course, lag. One can find a 10 frame improvement only to quickly get busted with 20 unexpected lag frames as a result, or a different enemy set in the next screen costing several seconds of time. I hit so many roadblocks where I was forced to redo in order to deal with randomness of enemies. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm done and this is my final version of this TAS, so enjoy!

Flygon: Replaced Dailymotion module with HD YouTube module, with adelikats permission.

Truncated: Setting this to accepted. Nice improvements.

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Posted: 8/4/2010 4:31 AM

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TASVideoAgent

They/Them

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Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14873
Location: 127.0.0.1

This topic is for the purpose of discussing #2785: adelikat's NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 16:26.89

Posted: 8/4/2010 4:31 AM
(Edited: 8/4/2010 4:35 AM)

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Mr._Kelly_R._Flewin

Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 757

Doesn't color a Dinosaur. Automatic No Vote! Even if this may be evolution.. I want a damn Dino! ;) Mr. Kelly R. Flewin

Mr. Kelly R. Flewin Just another random gamer ---- <OmnipotentEntity> How do you people get bored in the span of 10 seconds? Worst ADD ever.

Posted: 8/4/2010 4:34 AM

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Sonikkustar

Skilled player (1307)

Joined: 9/7/2007
Posts: 1354
Location: U.S.

Yes Vote. Ive seen how hard you have worked on this, so you deserve it. Plus, This run is pretty entertaining.

Posted: 8/4/2010 4:43 AM

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Kyman

Editor, Active player (428)

Joined: 9/29/2008
Posts: 706
Location: Canada

Claiming for encoding! Nice to see this finally done after all the crap you have been through with this game adelikat :P

Posted: 8/4/2010 9:00 AM

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Tompa

Any

Editor, Expert player (2142)

Joined: 8/15/2005
Posts: 1934
Location: Mullsjö, Sweden

Great improvement. You have my support for publication.

Posted: 8/4/2010 9:04 AM
(Edited: 8/5/2010 11:06 AM)

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Flygon

Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria

It's was slow and somewhat boring... but it's an incrediblyoptimized TAS. Very much a very strong Meh vote.

Posted: 8/4/2010 2:56 PM

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funnyhair

Player (116)

Joined: 5/13/2009
Posts: 700
Location: suffern, ny

Liked it, Always a Turtles fan. YES vote.

[19:16] <scrimpy> silly portuguese [19:16] <scrimpy> it's like spanish, only less cool

Posted: 8/4/2010 4:27 PM

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ObadiahtheSlim

Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 150

Nice improvment!

Posted: 8/4/2010 4:29 PM

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andrewg

Experienced player (699)

Joined: 2/19/2006
Posts: 742
Location: Quincy, MA

At 0:48 in the above video, would it have saved a frame or two to start walking the moment the screen would progress instead of walking until the screen progressed? ^ that's the only thing I'm curious of. Anyway, yes vote. I enjoyed that quite a bit.

Super Mario Bros. console speedrunner - Andrew Gardikis

Posted: 8/4/2010 5:03 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3585)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee

andrewg wrote:

At 0:48 in the above video, would it have saved a frame or two to start walking the moment the screen would progress instead of walking until the screen progressed?

No it would not have saved time.

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 8/4/2010 5:06 PM

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Sonikkustar

Skilled player (1307)

Joined: 9/7/2007
Posts: 1354
Location: U.S.

What about this trick?

Posted: 8/4/2010 5:20 PM

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AngerFist

Active player (432)

Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Good job old man :) Yes vote.

Nitrogenesis wrote:

Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!

Arc wrote:

I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.

natt wrote:

I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it

Cooljay wrote:

Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P

Posted: 8/4/2010 5:21 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3585)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee

What about this trick?

Already documented on the tricks page and discussed in the tmnt thread on the forums. It doesn't save actual time only input time. On the contrary it costs a lot of time. It only works with Mike who I killed in level 3. To not kill him would require killing Leo instead (resulting in extra turtle switches) or forgo the Raph glitch to get the ropes in level 4. In addition I would need more turtles switches at some point to snag a shuriken drop for Mike. All in all, about 4 seconds of real completion time would be lost for the sake of ending input early.

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 8/5/2010 4:48 AM

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Kyman

Editor, Active player (428)

Joined: 9/29/2008
Posts: 706
Location: Canada

After a long battle with archive.org here is a publishable encode: http://www.archive.org/download/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtlesTasIn1626.89ByAdelikat/tmnt-tasv4-adelikat.mkv Also optimized screenie:

I plan to use these after this run gets judged (presumably accepted).

Posted: 8/5/2010 11:05 AM

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Scepheo

Player (142)

Joined: 7/16/2009
Posts: 686

Although the game is somewhat slow, it's a very good TAS and an improvement to an already published one. So it's a yes vote from me.

Posted: 8/5/2010 3:40 PM

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C0DE_RED

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 5/22/2010
Posts: 80
Location: WAR TOWN, Georgia (USA)

Glitches in a half-shell, Konami-power! [Y]

Do I look like someone who really cares what God thinks?! "GI Joe: The Atlantis Factor" - May be improved in the future.

Posted: 8/5/2010 7:02 PM

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Dwedit

He/Him

Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 692
Location: Chicago

Why is the ROM checksum all zeroes? btw: this desyncs on level 3 if you use the NEW PPU.

Posted: 8/5/2010 8:32 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3585)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee

You shouldn't be using New PPU! Old PPU should be used for TASes only.

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 8/5/2010 8:34 PM

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NitroGenesis

He/Him

Editor, Experienced player (551)

Joined: 12/24/2009
Posts: 1873

what is up with new ppu? Just wondering.

YoungJ1997lol wrote:

Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.

Posted: 8/5/2010 8:44 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3585)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee

New PPU is for ROM hackers and others who need more pedantic things than we need. Don't use new PPU for tasing, its more accurate but more buggy. And the increased accuracy is fringe stuff that will rarely if ever matter in the world of TASing. In summary, don't use it. I regret ever making a menu item for the windows build. It used to only be a .cfg editing option only so nobody noticed and didn't care.

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 8/5/2010 9:26 PM

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Derakon

Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960

How can something be more accurate but more buggy? Isn't accuracy in emulation largely a matter of not introducing (extra) bugs into the gameplay?

Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.

Posted: 8/5/2010 9:40 PM

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moozooh

Senior Moderator

Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5770
Location: Away

I think it's different. Imprecision is when you're rounding calculations to make them faster. A bug means you're calculating wrong, not just imprecise.

Warp wrote:

Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.

Posted: 8/5/2010 9:41 PM

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adelikat

He/Him

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3585)

Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee

moozooh wrote:

I think it's different. Imprecision is when you're rounding calculations to make them faster. A bug means you're calculating wrong, not just imprecise.

What he said.

It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects

Posted: 8/6/2010 2:08 AM

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mklip2001

He/Him

Editor

Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2224
Location: Georgia, USA

It's great to see this game trounced again. The lag reduction is particularly evident in Stage 4. Nice job!

Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:

Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.

Posted: 8/6/2010 8:45 PM

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moozooh

Senior Moderator

Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5770
Location: Away

Excellent TAS, btw. Very enjoyable and probably as optimal as we could ever expect from this game.

Warp wrote:

Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.

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