Ohio, USAI put in a ticket for moderatorship and was granted it due to 2 months + of inactivity across all the prior mods. If there is interest in anyone returning to the mod role, or those with an interest in being added as a moderator, please either post here or DM me.
If we are going to separate by "restricted" and "unrestricted", I would argue that without handcam for what was used on emulation should default to "unrestricted" once it reaches a certain timing or under (maybe like 7:15 is my thoughts). This is entirely my opinion, but if a keyboard key of the size of SHIFT, SPACE, ENTER, or NUMPAD 0 is used (CTRL and ALT are usually not much larger than standard letter keys) they should be placed in "unrestricted" and the smaller keys into "restricted" as even debounce settings would reach physical limitations of the human body missing inputs on a smaller key.
I'm saying this as a prospective runner of the game. I will put a time on the board in the near future, as this is one of the famous MASHING intensive runs of the console. I was considering putting a time on the board last month, but due to the mashing requirements of a different game, I needed to consider arm health.
To clarify this topic, if you roll over the power-ups while you have the basic shot and your score digit for the 1000 place is 0, you will get an auto-fire that was built into the game.
Some kind of hand cam should be required for runs under a certain threshold. In a run where a single button mash determines overall speed, such as TnF and Ghostbusters NES, emulation provides an inherent advantage due to being able to map this single input to the spacebar. A separation between hardware and emulator runs would mitigate this advantage to what would be possible on those platforms, without retroactively rejecting previously accepted runs.
As a handcam requirement would be new, previous runs would be "grandfathered" in, but future runs would require this.
The "controller" in question is a microswitch with a very narrow range of motion required, less than that of a standard controller or even keyboard. It is also on a stick actuator. This range of motion and actuation provides an inherent advantage over a compression style button 99.9% of runners will utilize. Even a mouse wheel requires more range of motion than this switch.
If any run is completed on other difficulties besides Easy, I will add the categories upon run submission. Difficulty settings should be shown before every run.
Because of the advantages that a turbo controller/setting can give, and let's face it, mashing can take a heavy toll on us, I would be willing to add a 2nd category that allows the use of Turbo. As the speed of mashing down the bosses is mostly what the top runs have separating them (that plus not skipping Rayjack's 1st shield), it should definitely be a separate category. If there is any interest in this, please let us know!
If there is a need for an extra moderator that is active nearly daily, I moderate for the Tetris 2 NES board as well.
As I've recently become a moderator for the board, I am having difficulties with finding a consistent start frame from run to run.
The old timing rule is vague sounding - Timer Starts when Start Pushed from Main Menu (scrolling will appear roughly .8 seconds after pushing start).
I will go back over the runs while I can and update them to a standard, easily visible frame of first frame the game play screen starts to appear. This is ~3 seconds off of existing runs, but leaves less guess work on what frame to start the timing with.
I will test this once I get home. That's some significant time save
One more finding to note, it does not matter if you use a hard or soft reset to start the run. The boss cycles are determined by the direction and cycle you finish the prior boss in (cycles are a little more forgiving though).
I want to add this info here. Did some more experimenting. Found a ~2s faster pattern for Zalta, but then I started "choking" my setup for Bandal. Turns out that it wasn't the start press that changes the patterns on bosses. It was what direction you killed the boss(es) prior. We kill Bemel going left, Anrock hasn't mattered if it's left or right (left if I get my menu 1 foot kill, right for the 2 foot kill), Zalta everyone has killed going left, Bandal going left and this gives VZR-5 the double drill pattern going left. My faster kill on Zalta I killed going right, but it made Bandal 3-4s slower than what I could do and it gave a full left movement pattern. I experimented and killed Bandal moving RIGHT, and that did a non-drill VZR-5 fight.
Some day, hopefully soon, I'll get the run in with all the little improvements on the bosses I've found, as well as all the movement (except the frame-perfect platforming jump in Act 3, not worth losing 2s if you miss for .5 gain).
During my attempts at figuring out how to get faster bosses than what I had been getting, it was brought to my attention that utilizing a hard reset will set up your boss fights to have predictable patterns. As long as you move Left or Right at the same times during the fights, you'll get a predictable pattern, but it was also discovered that pausing the game can change the patterns you get somehow.
During my 24:14 session, I experimented more in depth with trying to get ideal fast boss patterns but I couldn't get the VZR-5 fight double drills at first. Tomkabs mentioned about the hard reset, so I did that, redoing all my save-states along the way with a hard reset pattern, but my menu/save/load button combinations all require start and select. This led me to a slightly different Bandal fight and a much slower VZR-5 fight. Tomkabs asked if I was pausing to set up my save states, and I went back through it one more time, making sure every save state was done when it is impossible to pause. This resulted in the same pattern start to VZR-5 as tomkabs and BeetZero, and I had earlier discovered how to change some of the boss patterns by moving left or right, or mixing it up.
As it stands, I need to drill in my movement pattern for Bandal yet, as this fight is the longest one that can lead to time loss if you move the wrong direction once the boss's attack disappears. He can usually re-appear fairly quickly, but I had a pattern I worked on that I just didn't get a chance to have it sink in yet.
Between tomkabs and myself, we found a simpler solution to stage 2's Anrock boss. Tomkabs talks to G-13 twice, then Locke, then G-13 2 more times. This results in only needing to shoot the boss's attack twice then you're at 100%. I found that you can keep talking to G-13 to gain 5% until you cannot use talk anymore to bring the total to 85% which is 1 attack shot and you're at 100%. If you mis-menu, you won't get enough from G-13 to get the reduction, so it's best to just get the 2 additional after Locke and go for 2 hits. This results in around the same time cost for either method.
I experimented Talking with the other bosses, but I didn't find anything like Anrock.
From my experience so far, survival goes until you fight all your unlocked dinos? I gave it a try with my All Dino's save file and made it to fight 11 before I lost that fight. I was confused since there was only 8 fights on the posted runs, then I noticed it was from a fresh save, not a fully unlocked one.
Might want to add the rule that an empty save file should be used?
The largest time losses in 1.1 vs 1.0 are in the Raptor Pen (Ground level dilophosaurs at the 1st door, battery and 4th door, B1 2nd door kind of as well, as these are all needed for a faster ship comms death warp or you're losing bolas ammo that might be needed for the ship), Visitor's Center 2F from Boot Up to Sec 1 (you can't just push past all 4 dinos and take the almost exact damage to die at the PC opening), and Raptor Nest can get rough too (I think 5 raptors en-route, but not all have to die when in 1.0). Beach shed after the battery can get rougher too while trying to take damage without losing speed, and not sure if the diloph before the Nerve Gas can be pushed through in 1.1.
Visitor's Center alone can be 4 seconds saved just by having full health from the chicken and missing the med pack not killing a single dino to the PC. Raptor Pen is around 3 seconds on the ship comms route if you don't kill those 1st 2 dilophs at the door and battery.
I'm not trying to nay-say it, still an interesting find! It would take some routing changes to make the most of the PC speed, like maybe skip the chicken in VC 2F? The loss of damage on the ship comms route is rough though at the fastest end. Could pick up the rockets for .5s loss before the Pen. I'm just estimating the time saves though. ~2 seconds per PC, 4 PCs, 8s on the generous estimate?
After watching your 44:13 run, it definitely was faster by about .7s than my reboot compared to yours, and that's including slightly slower inputs on your side (can just hold down the button instead of tapping). And I also exit that computer as early as possible and still opening gate 1. If we could find a true 1.0 SFC rom, it could warrant checking it out. The 1.1 hitboxes though, will cause at least that amount of time loss that could be gained from the faster PC sections.
For future runners who have the same issue, the version of BSNES 115 that is available on sourceforge . net did work just fine with the autosplitter.
Here is a video link to one of my hardware runs that shows how I did the Load Removed Times documented in the spreadsheet.
