Emulator game movies (NES)

Resources for the players

Are you planning of making a tool-assisted movie yourself? Here are some tips and other information I think might be useful.

Guidelines for players

Competition is welcome.

- Many players compete with themselves, trying to improve their own movies until there's nothing to improve. This is good.
- To prevent the players becoming too content with their plays, it's good to challenge existing movies. Competition breeds perfection.

Be quick.

- Never wait for anything unless it's absolutely necessary.
- Compare different paths and select the one that can be done fastest.

Even if you have to wait, look like you don't.

- If possible, hide your waits by averaging them in a larger time scale.

Keep an eye for low probabilities.

- If something most likely doesn't happen, make it happen. The game is only as random as you are.
- You can affect the outcomes of lotteries. You can affect the behavior of monsters.
- If you drool over a route that seems blocked but would speed up your play significantly, find out how to go through, over or under it.
- Don't sleep. You are supposed to be the master of the game, not the slave of the game. Aim for the impossible. Drool.

Be interesting.

- If you have choice, try to do things in a more impressive way than the easy way.
- If enemies are hard to kill, kill them.
- If an object is hard to miss, miss it.
- It's better to leave your audience asking "how" instead of "why".
- Avoid repeating your stunts too much.

Be accurate.

- Don't miss your target.
- Even with autofire, don't shoot more shots than you need to.
- Don't jump longer/higher jumps than you need to.
- Don't have slow reactions. Act as soon as possible. Don't stand still for even 0.2s, if it is not necessary. Redo it until you succeed. Yes, it does take some time to get it right.
- Don't waste effort collecting items you will never need - unless you can get them without wasting time.

Be determined.

- If you choose to do something, don't change your plan while playing.
- Act like you own the world :)
- Never hesitate.

Be aware.

- Be sure you know what kind of exploits you can try.
- Be sure you know what the internet knows about the game.
- Probe the game. Try, observe and learn how it calculates things, and use the data to your advantage.

Criticize yourself.

- Replay and review your movie cynically (or at least objectively). Look at everything that could be improved. Then improve it.

Select your game well.

- Not all games have potential for entertaining movies.
- Select the one that give you the best chance to do something absolutely stunning.

So far nobody has followed all the guidelines perfectly, but the better you follow them, the more chance you'll have on having your play published on this page and on other speedrun sites.

Tips for playing

These tips may help you if you're making timeattack movies.
They are my experiences.

Redefine the keyboard shortcuts so that you can use them fast

In Famtasia, I have assigned the keys as follows:

• Arrow keys = directional controller
• Keyboard "A" = keypad "B"
• Keyboard "D" = keypad "A"
• Keyboard "S" = Save
• Keyboard "F" = Undo (load)
• Keyboard "P" = Start
• Enter = Pause emulation

You can select whichever keys you want, but you should design them so that they are quickly accessible at any given situation.
Don't assign the Reset key anywhere near your playing keys, and don't use Alt or Ctrl for your playing keys because they might activate operating system functions exactly when you don't want that.
Alt+number changes the number of quicksave.

Use the emulator features to your power.

• Use Autofire when you have to shoot/hit/jump very rapidly without delays. Famtasia has a very good autofire which hits about 30 times in second when "max speed" is used.
• Use Pause to prevent wasting time when you shuffle with quicksaves.
• Too many quicksave slots is bad (you may mess up).
  Not enough quicksaves is bad (it's important that you can undo all mistakes).
  Find your balance. See below.
• Slow down the game to improve your accuracy. See below.

Use more than one quicksave, but no more than necessary.

I use always 3 to 6 quicksaves. I have designated them as follows:

• Save 1: Shortest range. Quick redoes for perfecting the little details. Sometimes used even 3 times in second, never used for undoing a period longer than 20 seconds.
• Save 2: A "safe" backup copy. Always saved when there's time for that (during a walk, jump or other non-reaction-intensive) and before the next Save1-loop.
• Save 3: Usually done at start of level, sometimes mid-level. Can be used if the save 2 can't save you from problems.
• Save 4,5,6: Backup copies for save 3. Done always at the beginning of level -preferably with much time for reaction.

During especially hard sequences, like the walljump trick in SMB1/SMB2j, I make the backup copies with filesystem copy, because there might not be enough time to switch between save 1 and save 2 in the emulator. I don't trust the "pause" function of Famtasia.
 
If you notice that you have made a major mistake that none of the quicksaves can save you from, stop the recording and watch your movie. Make a quicksave where you would want to start rerecording, and then load it while your movie is playing. You're back at recording.

Use slowdown, but not too slow.

According to my experience, 40% is a perfect speed for doing timeattacks (on the standard 20 fps Famtasia). For sequences that require especially accurate timing, I use 30%, but I can't use slower than that because the emulator starts responding worse. Michael Fried tells he uses speeds from 15% up.

Review your playing

Your first version doesn't have to be perfect. Just do something that looks good. It's important that you don't tire yourself with the first version. You will probably learn new tricks even while playing.
Then review it. Many times. So many times until you remember everything that looks bad: waits, unused shortcuts, redundant actions etc. Read the guidelines.
After you are certain that you know how to play it faster, start making a new version - from the very beginning. (Because you have probably learned something, and because of the re-record counter.) Repeat as many times as necessary.
When you gain experience, you also start being able to do it faster.
 
Note: AVI files are much better for reviewing than the fmv files, because you can browse back and forth in them. I watch my own movies often.

To avoid broken movies

• Never load quicksaves in wrong order.
  If your save 2 has been saved before save 1, do not load save 2, then save 1. If you do, your movie will be most probably broken.
• Periodically verify that your movie is not broken.
  Famtasia allows you to stop recording and resume the recording later.
  You can stop the movie any time you want and resume it later whenever you wish, at any point of previous play.
  So - stop the movie, play it back. If it's broken, make a quicksave (during the replay) just before it goes out of sync and resume recording from that point.
  Movie recording is resumed by loading a quicksave while in playback mode!
• If you want to change the speed while recording, do a quicksave first, then load the save quicksave a while after changing the speed. This allows the emulator to adjust the timing safely.
• Don't reload saves too fast. If you do, Famtasia may confuse and give you obscure error messages which are troublesome to handle.

Make backups

• Make backup copies of your quicksaves when you have time.
• Make a backup copy of your movie when you are replaying it.

Backups are important. You will be depressed if you accidentally rerecord over your good progress.

Remember that your movie will be judged on how entertaining it is to watch, not on how entertaining/hard it was to play

Thus you should choose well which game you play and how you play it.

Common tricks

There are several tricks that can be used (or at least tried) in many games to improve the time.
If you are doing a movie, be sure to try every one of them :)

Close approach collision abuse

Games don't do collision checks like an eye does. You can often touch and even go partially inside the enemies without getting hurt.
See the SMB1 / Solomon's Key movies for examples of this.

Fast motion collision abuse

Games don't interpolate motion - motion means that you are in one place and next in some other place. This is how animation works.

If you are moving very fast, you can sometimes go through objects, because the game does not see a frame when you are inside the object. Combined with the close approach collision abuse mentioned above, the speed may not even need not to be very high.
See the Gradius movie for examples of this.

Other collision abuses

Using the above mentioned collision tricks may sometimes get you inside an object. This may be harmful, but it might also open you routes that are normally not accessible - for example, you might be able to gain support and jump from a vertical solid wall. See SMB1/SMB2j movie for examples of this.

In most games, if your character for some reason goes inside a wall, the game scrolls automatically your hero horizontally inside the wall until it finds a place where the hero can exit from the wall.
This happens, because the authors have been aware that collision checks aren't always perfect, and they wanted to make sure that the player doesn't get stuck.
This obviously allows you to get some handy shortcuts in some games. Look at the SMB3 / Rockman 2 movies for examples of this.

Invulnerability abuse

There are certain scenes in most games when your character is invulnerable. This usually happens when the game has started a preprogrammed demo that may not be interrupted - like the animation for finishing the level. If your character hits a pool of lava or something else that potentially kills you, the game may very well ignore your potential death and let you continue like you didn't die.
See the Little Nemo / Gremlins 2 movies for examples of this.

Pause abuse

In some games, pause is not very perfect:

• In Mega Man, pause forces collision checks to be rerun, allowing monsters to get damage twice from the same shot
• In Mega Man 2, pause resets gravity-accelerated speed counters to 0, which might allow moving in ways that were not meant.
• In most games, pause creates a soundeffect that momentarily disables a sound channel from music.
• If some scene has a precomputed length and/or is synchronized with the music, using pause may break the scene in some ways

It might be worthwhile to observe what anomalities does pause cause in your game.

Luck abuse

Video game consoles are actually computers.
All computers are simply just calculators - they do exactly what they have been told, and no matter how many times repeated, they always get the same results.
For this reason, there is nothing random in the games.
The games are pseudorandom.

Most games give you bonuses apparently randomly - there might be a 40% probability that you gain a heart from a skeleton you kill.
Observe:
- Every time you replay that movie, you get the same result from that same location.
- Every time you play and kill that skeleton, you get a random result from that same location.

The only source of "true" randomness for games is you.
The game is purely deterministic.

Learn to abuse this. You can affect anything that has randomness in it, by giving the game different input.
You can have perfect luck if you want!

Common sources of randomness:
- Keys you happen to be pressing
- Your timing

The results may be decided:
- The last moment when they are needed (when the bonus is supposed to appear)
- The moment of a state shift (when you kill an enemy and a bonus begins to formulate)
- When you enter the scene (and the objects are created)

This means that sometimes you can experiment by doing different dances just before the enemy dies, and sometimes you have to experiment by entering the room from different angles.

Monster hit abuse

When games are designed, the maps are usually tested so that the character can't go where he should not go.
What they often haven't thought, is that the character may gain extra movement from monsters when they hurt you.
By getting hurt in a right place you can access routes you shouldn't.
Look at the Castlevania and Ghosts'n Goblins movies for examples of this.

Super speed abuse

When you act eyeblindingly fast, you might do things faster than the game developers have thought - for example, kill a boss before it goes serious.
See the Simon's Quest movie (last boss) for an example of this.

Too many objects abuse

This is actually a reverse abuse.
In many games, having too many on-screen objects simultaneously causes the game to slow down. When doing timeattacks, it might be a good thing to ensure things don't slow down.
The slowdown usually affects your character too, so it doesn't have benefits.

Untested code abuse

Try to do something that most probably hasn't been tested, like pressing left+right at the same time or up+down at the same time. It might do something nasty in the game.
Note that VirtuaNES doesn't allow you to do it, but that's not a reason to not try it on real NES / some other emulator.