User Files from TaoTao

Encode

This game is Famicom version of Chubby Cherub.

You can zip through floors and go to hell with precisely-timed pauses. (probably, it is nesessary to unpause on 8*n frames)

EDIT: You can also zip through ceilings, but it is essentially the same as zipping through floors. (You can go to hell by overflowing y-coordinate, but it seems that you can't go to heaven with this glitch.)

Encode

You can also perform the cursor glitch in battle scenes. And, you can manipulate the skill attack powers $06CC-$06D0 with this glitch. In this movie, I changed the attack power of the normal punch ($06CC) from 4 to 24, and instakilled Marin.

To execute there events, your gross score must be 40 or below when you reach the 16th hole. (This condition is somewhat difficult for normal human players...)

Poahr found a glitch to create an invisible conveyor in 8-2, and I reproduced it on FCEUX.

I haven't analyzed this yet. It might be related to the terrain buffer ($0400-$05FF) ?

EDIT: This movie uses a wallzip boost along the way, but it will be unrelated to this glitch. (I was able to reproduced this glitch without wallzip boost)

encode

Just a wip. Not so tightly optimized.

If you start the game with Up+Start input, the game seems to perform an undefined behavior (reset on FCEUX).

This is not a in-game code. The game fails to switch bank appropriately, and executes $00-. This game doesn't initialize this memory area on boot, so the actual behavior will depend on initial RAM state.

Probably, the cause of the wrong bank switching is that the game executes the "step forward" process before entering the guild. In this situation, the party member count is zero, so the loop at $C80A is executed 256 times, and it does many wrong memory accesses via wrong hero pointers. This wrong memory accesses seems to corrupt the write counter of MMC1.

encode

I refered this RTA video.

This run will be improvable with better RNG manipulation, etc.

Accidentally I found a crash glitch, but I haven't investigated the details yet.

It seems that you have to equip no weapon. (And, you might have to go down with an enemy?)

EDIT (2025/03/20): In this glitch, the game seems to fail to switch banks correctly. This game assumes that the main thread is always loading PRG 14 when a NMI is triggered, but in this movie, the main thread is loading PRG 5 when a NMI is triggered. So, after returning from the NMI, the main thread resumes from PRG 14 instead of PRG 5, and crashes.

See Ikari Warriors thread.

See Ikari Warriors thread.

see ktwo's forum post.

You can do swap operations during rapid pausing. In this movie, I enable redraw flags for all rooms, and the game fails to update some VRAM in time.

But this glitch only affects drawings, so I think it is not so useful.

EDIT: Probably you can corrupt the PPU transfer queue ($0400-$04FF, typical ring buffer) with this technique. For example, if you write a length=253 entry to the queue, the NMI thread will loop infinitely. But anyway, I think it will be extremely difficult to take advantage of this for TAS.

This game often backups hero structs. And, if a hero struct has wrong checksum/CRC, the game restores it from the backup. I crafted a fake backup struct on SRAM (with z3 solver), and created an amulet by changing name.

On Famicom version, the game displays a logo every time you reset, so this movie is not so fast. If this save glitch can be executed on NES version, it will be quite fast. But, it might be more difficult to execute this on NES version, because you can use fewer character kinds for a hero name.

This improves narimasa's TAS on nicovideo (part1, part2, part3) by about 16 minutes.

Objectively, this game will be quite bad. But it was interesting for me to optimize this run.

EDIT: if you newly tas this game, probably you should use NesHawk/SubNesHawk. Because, this game doesn't use NMI and uses PPU_STATUS ($2002) to wait VBLANK. FCEUX doesn't emulate the race-condition of PPU_STATUS, so an effective FPS differs between FCEUX/NesHawk. (FCEUX: 60.10, NesHawk: ~58. for details, see NesDev Wiki)

On SubNesHawk, You might be able to avoid the drop-frames by using the sub-frame pauses, but it will need the dev-build of BizHawk, because BizHawk 2.9.1 doesn't support FDS disk operations on SubNesHawk.

old encode

I made this in 2009, and now resynced this for FCEUX 2.6.6 (just removed some frames).

I couldn't resync this for NesHawk. (desynced at stage 2, and FDS load times quite differ)

Put your king to 27, and put your rook to 28. And, try to move your king to the opponent king.

Probably highest, but I haven't completely understood about the RNG.

solver: https://github.com/taotao54321/SameGameSFCSmall

Probably highest, but...

digest encode

You can zip through some obstacles with U+D / L+R inputs.

When Kazemaru joins, his level will be (the main hero's level) - 1. So, if the main hero's internal level is 0, Kazemaru's internal level will be 255.

But anyway, you have to win the 1on1 battle against the last boss, and it will take a long time to earn levels. I hope there are some more glitches to solve this problem.

Slower than the DPCM exploit.

encode

On the default RAM setting, there are no sound in the ending...

encode

Just a testrun. Probably improvable with better RNG manipulation, etc.

When a ball bounces by bumpers etc., you can sometimes manipulate the direction of the ball with input. (Probably the address $5A affects.)

This movie syncs on NesHawk as is, but I confirmed that another .fm2 movie only partially syncs on NesHawk.

Memory map:

Not theoretically optimal solution. I bruteforced only for endgame. Until the end of midgame, I used beam search to enumerate good positions.

I might submit this.

I might submit this.