See title. I dont want to clog up the ST discord with an unrelated game lol. Is there one, or should someone make one?

Just a note, I'll probably make a placeholder if I don't see a reply soon and post the invite link. Just a matter of adding roles and fun crap like that.

This has apparently been floating around for a while now, but I'll be damned if anyone else wastes their time on this one. Please link to this in case the topic ever comes back up.

Tl;dr This video is not of legitimate, unmodified gameplay. I am willing to say it was recorded using Action Replay. The select dialog box is a red herring. I'll be posting the technical details below.

Edit: On retiming and checking my recreation, I was wrong about the message coming up early. I was counting video frames, and not thinking video frames are 30fps, so 11 ticks on the video is 22 frames in game. It doesn't change anything about the debug flag.

At 0x0053, a counter exists. This is Mike's forward, overworld movement counter. The counter ticks up from 0-15, and resets to 0 when Mike changes direction. This address is more than likely used to keep track of Mike's current position using mod division, which is why it counts up and not down. When the counter is not at 0, 15, or 16, the select press is blocked until it counts up to the nearest of those three. Once it reaches 15, or if it was already at 0 or 16, the input is accepted and a clock somewhere in memory (I haven't been able to find it yet, it may not count sequentially) starts, and 22 frames later the "You are in Chapter X" message appears. It cannot appear before this. If this timer's address was known, it would be trivial to reset it to any arbitrary number. The video linked above contains no cuts in the audio at all, and no visible cuts in the video. It does, however, start suspiciously outside of 3-1, after the countdown dialog. I suspect that before recording, two action replay codes were set, one of which changed that counter to 10 frames, one of which set the debug flag. They then walked on top of Miracola with collision disabled, pressed select, and buffered a right press with the text box. This gameplay is not possible within the game mechanics. I spent hours testing setups for this, and unfortunately, I have no choice but to conclude that this is nothing more than an elaborate hoax.

Tl;dr I'm working on a TAS that recreated the glitch, and there is much more there than meets the eye. The first pause needs to be buffered for a specific number of frames, and the second start press needs to also held for a specific number of frames to execute the glitch successfully. I'm looking for those numbers, and learning a lot about how the game breaks here.

Howdy. I've been working on a TAS for StarTropics lately, and pulling off this glitch has been... a good chunk of my day. Since I've spent all day trying to reproduce this glitch. I figured I'd share my findings so far with the nitty gritty of this glitch while I look for a viable setup. In no particular order, here is a list of my discoveries. I'll be editing this as I work more out.

1.) There are two frames after killing this mini-boss during his death animation where pausing will crash the game. Where you are is not important to causing the crash.

2.) This has all the hallmarks of ACE. Running a stack trace shows a ton of reads/writes to registers, and eventually the stack breaks after attempting to read from an invalid register.

3.) Some specific holds of the start button will cause the game to issue a console reset command, even occasionally rebooting the game cleanly to file select.

4.) Moving forward on the ACE assumption, holding pause both breaks the execution pointer, and affects the code being executed. Each frame start is held causes the memory to be set up differently, thus causing one of a cast number of crashes.

5.) While there are a vast number of different crash outcomes, there seem both to be patterns in the mechanics of the crash, and groups of final outcomes.

I suspect that this glitch works by writing a non-zero value to address 8001, which activates the debug flag. By then triggering the cart to crash on one of the combinations which triggers a clean reset, and holding start while the game resets, it brings up the stage select from the debug menu. I would definitely like more information if its available, including maybe a download link for that video. Would definitely go a long way toward cracking this open. Also if anyone knows about NES Assembly that would be willing to have a look, let me know!

P.S. Is there a discord server? Link here is expired.