User Files from Walgrey

Encode: https://youtu.be/f0r2R6roGo0

Quick Bowser's Tower TAS I whipped up just now. Would absolutely love to finish this, but I don't really understand how the RNG works. This TAS goes up to Floor 5.

Some things to note:

Stopping at Goomba Tower for now. Want to see if there's a way to get a nut to spawn closer to you. Also if there's a way to get the CPUs out faster in Great Bars of Fire, that would be great.

I think it would be really awesome if a TAS for this existed! I tried a run back then and got 54:XX, and I'm really curious to see just how fast this can be done. I could probably finish this myself, but given my skill level with TASing, it probably would be rejected for optimization. If anyone does want to help, please message me!

Encode: https://youtu.be/N1lnvxQ57fY

Encode (flashing lights!!): https://youtu.be/BYTQkU5iqGg

Well, this is it.
We searched for the shortest possible mazes using every starting seed with a program. This is what came out. It's unlikely that there's any maze better than this.

Encode (flashing lights!!): https://youtu.be/DUIvIfKRQxA

12 minutes of waiting for the shortest maze.
A completely straight line.

I didn't even know a maze like this existed.

Bored so I started making this.
I don't know how to optimize the camera minigame.

Went back and managed to save all 11 frames in Courtyard 1, plus some additional timesaves in Food Safe 1! All I had to do to avoid pushing the orange was to just hold up for a little bit more. I then had to alternate a bit from up and left to get past the next orange. It looks a little janky, but hey, it works!

Full breakdown:

I don't know how but I think the timesave in Courtyard 1 actually prevented the Double-Double Jump Glitch from happening in Food Safe 1? I was able to save frames for a lot of jumps because of it.

Edit: Just tried to do the second cooking game now. Unlike the first, you can't just breeze past it and have to actually try to optimize for the lowest score as fast as possible. I don't know how to do this so I think this TAS is now unfortunately on a hiatus. If anyone is willing to help, please contact me.

(BizHawk 2.8)

Encode: https://youtu.be/1rgBBDAlWNw

Finally working on this again!

All I really did today was copy+paste and resync the inputs from my last TAS. Unfortunately, I had to lose some frames in order to get it to sync.

Full breakdown:

I redid the sub-area in Courtyard 1. In my old TAS, there was an orange that I didn't have to push, but for some reason, when TASing this, I had to push the orange. This is where I suspect I lost the most time. Debating if I should redo these three levels.

Also, resyncing Food Safe 1 gave me a lot of trouble because of the double-double jump glitch: https://youtu.be/oNN2H9GD6-w

Not sure why resyncing the inputs where even an issue though. Lag? Sub-pixels? Anyway, currently at the next cooking minigame. Hopefully the game lets me do this without any waiting, otherwise this segment's going to be a roadblock for a while.

To-do:

(BizHawk 2.8)

Can't believe I didn't notice this haha

Encode (flashing lights!!): https://youtu.be/vqTat1CEHMI

Just a quick TAS I made with the new Stella core in BizHawk 2.10.

So there's a couple of things I'm worried about. For starters, the loading is definitely more accurate to the actual console, so in that sense, it seems more logical to use Stella over Atari2600Hawk. However, now it takes longer to generate a maze. On top of that, I can't generate the same mazes as my other Maze Craze TASes, since you can't reset while the game is loading a new maze. And then there's the issue about the TAS being slower than RTA.

I kinda wanna hear what people have to say about it.

(Also is it just me, or is the sound different?)

Edit: So it turns out that the shortest possible maze loses 10 frames from moving vertically. In this TAS, I generate the maze on frame 211 and lose (if my math is right) 62 frames moving vertically. That's a 52 frame difference. This means that if you generate the smallest maze before frame 263, you can beat this TAS. It all comes down to whether or not that's possible.

Edit edit: Also it turns out that you can increase your speed by selecting a game (so that the top-left number equals 2), however this takes 253 frames to do so, upon which you have to also reset and generate a new maze.

Encode (flashing lights!): https://youtu.be/1yuDKiMTLDQ

Found a shorter maze by resetting on frames 3, 6, 9, & 14. Still looking for an even shorter one.

(BizHawk 2.8)

Encode: https://youtu.be/7fe1Iaon-R8?feature=shared

Whipped this up today. Learned a couple things about this game that I want to share.

This is Pictionary for the DS. Hopefully, I don't have to explain the main premise. In this TAS, I beat "Pictionary Solo" on the hardest difficulty with 12 dice rolls. There are certain spaces on the board where you have to stop, making the lowest possible dice roll count 8. So why don't I do that?

The answer? All of the RNG in this game, including the number you get from dice rolls and the pictures you have to guess are determined by system time upon initialization. You can't affect RNG by pausing/unpausing, adding random inputs, nothing. If you start the game with the same system time I did, you will get the same dice rolls and the same pictures.

In order to get an 8-roll game, you need the following:

The odds of this happening are (3/36)^2 x (1/6)^4 = 1/186 624 or 0.0005%. Wow.

Can this game even be TAS'd? I wish, but I'm a little skeptical. It should be worth noting that you can press X or Y to get a different roll than using the touchscreen but it's also pre-determined and takes longer. So I guess you can think of it as a "re-roll" and if we account for that, it should be about 1/2000 or 0.05%.

Dates aren't taken into account, only the system's time is. Even a single second will produce a different seed. 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, that's 86 400 possible seeds, meaning that statistically, there's only 43 8-roll games.

So I guess all you have to do is go through 86 400 seeds, find the 43 games, and see which one is the fastest. Sounds like fun.

Encode: https://youtu.be/Q_7I5tesEQQ

Very upset with this. That's 42 FRAMES OF LAG.

I think I need to either get help or take a break because racking my brain over this isn't good for me.

Encode: https://youtu.be/AM0p_zP_QQk

Neat game I found back in 2022.

To briefly describe what's going on here, you have to destroy certain types of "Spuds" by shooting Spuds at them. Red can only destroy red, blue can only destroy blue, green destroys both.

This game automatically scrolls. Staying at the top of the screen will give you max speed. Staying at the bottom will give you the slowest. In later levels, "speed pads" appear, which change how fast the screen scrolls.

The idea behind this TAS is to simply beat the game while staying in max speed as much as possible.

Not a very interesting TAS IMO, but I try to go destroy as many Spuds as I can during the process. Hopefully I finish this by the end of Jan.

Edit: Encode added.

Also, just realized this, but this game could have some really big "Ends input early" potential. If I get enough lives, I can simply just end input early somewhere in the final mission and hopefully make it to the end (I have 11 lives by the end of this WIP).

Actually, now that I think about it, probably not. If I remember correctly, I think you have to press A to be brought back to the title screen (there's no credits or anything). I'll probably make two movies just in case then. :P

Edit edit: Apparently I collect a 1-Up but the game refused to increase my lives counter for some reason. Upset about this, since I’m already 18 minutes through the TAS and would have to basically redo a big portion of it.

Mini-game collection-esque GBA game. Don't have the time to really explain, but I've done lots of speedruns of it. Figured I'd try to make a TAS of it. Game has some RNG segments but also a good chunk of auto-scroller ones too. This WIP could probably be better, as I didn't use any memory reading tools.

Planning on TASing this game after I finish the Ratatouille TAS. Tried TASing the first level just to see how things go. There's some weirdness to the loading screens in this game. I TASed the game how you usually do, doing the inputs on the first possible frame after a loading screen, right? But in playback, the loading screens somehow went faster? I really can't explain what's going on here. All I know is that I tried deleting those extra frames so that the inputs register on the earliest frame and it affected the rest of the TAS, so I think I'm just going to leave this here for now.

Did some more work today.

Spent an hour typing the description only to get Error 413. Feel too demotivated to type it again, so I'm just going to upload this.

Encode: https://youtu.be/TxFU7G7FJqI

Fix for my submission.

My attempt at redoing my Ratatouille GBA TAS.

This was my first attempt at creating a TAS for Ratatouille GBA. 6/20 levels completed. It was going well until I found about a second of timesave in Kitchen 1 (jumping up the shelves is faster than climbing the wire). I tried to implement this timesave, but it messed up the rest of the level, and I couldn't sync it back properly, so here is the TAS before I tried to fix it.

After this, I decided to redo all my work. I ended up saving time in the first level anyway. I could probably copy+paste inputs of later levels from this TAS to my current WIP, but I guess more timesave is possible.

This TAS stops right before the first actual cooking minigame. You need a certain qualifying score for each, but the game doesn't show you what this score is or what score you have. For now, this is my roadblock.

Encode: https://youtu.be/xjXHMtx6VIQ

Before I get into this, I want to explain the 3 game modes that Arkanoid DS has: Clear Game, Uranoid, and Quest Game.

Clear Game is a standard 35 round game. You play 7 zones of 5 rounds each. After clearing a zone, it branches out to 2 more zones. This means that there are 64 possible routes. After clearing the final zone, you rescue an alien (Zones Z', V, W, X, Y, Z, & V' all have one). The credits play after finishing a Clear Game, so you could consider this to be an ending for TASing purposes.

Uranoid is unlocked after rescuing all 7 aliens. 7 zones, but it's a linear path that only splits to 3 zones after the penultimate zone. You could consider the "true ending" of this game to be rescuing all 7 aliens and unlocking Uranoid. The credits also play after beating Uranoid too.

Quest Game is basically a mission mode. Every mission is unlocked by clearing it in Clear Game/Uranoid. Finally, there's also a shop to buy extra stuff using Reward Points you gain from playing. So if you really, really, really want to, you could make a "100%" TAS where you play every level & unlock everything. This would require 47 050 Reward Points (which requires 14 115 000 total points). I only get 1/49th of that in this movie, so, yikes. But honestly, I wouldn't mind trying to do this if I had the time. Alternatively, you could just have a "Quest Game" TAS where you start from a sram, which probably sounds the best.

Anyway, onto the actual TAS.

I chose Hard difficulty because it makes the Energy Ball accelerate and move faster. Clearing a zone without having your barrier touched gives you bonus points depending on what you set your barrier to. Barrier of 1 is 3 000 points. Barrier of 0 is 5 000 points. If you have a barrier of 1, but get it touched, it'll skip the bonus point tally at the end, which is roughly 23 frames faster than having a point tally. However, I used a barrier of 0 because I believed that that timesave would be negated by the extra distance the ball needs to travel to hit the barrier (and because I thought it would be more entertaining). I went with stylus controls because they basically let you move the Vaus instantaneously.

Initially, I was going to TAS all paths and pick whichever was the fastest, but I simply just lost motivation on this. That's why you see me choosing the left branch all the time. I don't know how RNG works in this game, and the closest I was able to manipulate it seemed to be based on whether or not I picked up a power-up capsule or not. I mostly went with Laser (L), Disruption (D), & Megaball (M) but sometimes I went with Catch (C). I almost always avoid Slow (S) and Reduction (R) because they're absolutely useless. I did pick up Slow a few times however, because I could then grab a better power-up later. Warp capsules that allow you to skip zones do exist in this game, but they're rare. If you could find a way to manipulate RNG, you could just grab a warp and skip most zones.

I didn't use any tools, and I'm not really proud of my work. But I figured I'd upload this anyway just so that there's something to compare to in case someone else decides TASing this. Besides, I guess it's not all a waste.

5 frame improvement by resetting on frames 15, 22, and 25.

No idea how I even found this or how to find a better one other than brute force.

Maze Craze is a simple two-player Atari game. Find the exit in a randomly generated maze. This game has a boatload of customizable options, including adding enemies, changing the maze's visibility, or even placing fake walls.

This TAS aims to clear one maze as fast as possible. Mazes can be randomly generated by pressing the reset button. At first, you can only generate a maze on odd-numbered frames, not even-numbered ones. Once you reset, it switches.

I reset on frame 31 to generate a maze with a path that requires minimal turns and complete it with both players. Could be improved by resetting multiple times. I only reset once on frame 31, but if you reset multiple times and then reset on frame 31, you'll get something different. So there is a possibility that you can generate something better, faster.

270f improvement over submission

231f improvement over submission