Pennsylvania, USAOK, I'll delete this thread if that is your preference.
Reference for how emulators which don’t randomize WRAM break this game:
@NilssonAlex92 Can you post the exact version of the emulator you’re using? I’m away from my gaming PC right now but by Sunday I can post a video showing your instructions don’t reproduce this glitch on bsnes. I’m confident of this because I’ve done many many runs where I don’t buy nitros in the first race, and I would have noticed if doing so disabled the RNG. It’s a valid strat but risky because internally the game actually sets the CPU cars top speed to match the players car, so buying a top speed initially doesn’t help you win the first race, although reaching full top speed earlier is better since it makes finishing each race faster.
To give more context on how the super off road RNG works, it uses uninitialized RAM as its initial seed like many SNES games. Every time the RNG function is called it permutates the value in RAM to get a new pseudorandom value. However, the algorithm it uses has a flaw wherein if the RAM is ever all zeroes, the permutation cannot change the value and it will always output zero from that point on.
I don’t know all the details but there are definitely older emulators that mistakenly initialize WRAM to all zeroes. For it to happen on a hardware SNES is definitely weirder especially if you’re not using a flash cart / ever drive / etc. but maybe not impossible.
What is perhaps even stranger is that you seem to only get the glitch when not buying nitros. Having looked at the assembly code for the game it’s hard to imagine why this would affect such a glitch. But if you post the details of your emulation setup I can at least try to verify the behavior when I get home. Then we can be 100% sure whether the run is valid.
When watching Alex's run I can immediately see that what's happening is that RNG is completely disabled. I know this because I've spent time with the ROM in a debugger looking for glitches and more effective strats, and when doing this it's easy to find the RNG code and disable it by setting the memory it uses as a seed to all zeros. When you do this, the game exhibits the behavior seen in Alex's run: the CPU cars don't use nitros, they always follow the exact same perfect path down the center of the track (normally they make small bumps left and right at random), and items always pop up in a single location on each track. The last part is especially important as it enables Alex to perform the trick where he sits on the track and collects all the drops one after another; this is only possible because the RNG is turned off and the "spawn location" memory is always set to the value 0 and the timer until the next drop spawns is 0 seconds.
I am personally skeptical that it’s possible to glitch the RNG like this using only controller inputs. The method Alex gives doesn’t work. Anyone with a working emulator can verify this easily. I think the most likely explanation is that the emulator Alex is using doesn’t handle the RNG seed memory properly. It’s confusing that Alex says he used this same method as a casual player when he was younger, but maybe he either is misremembering or he was using the same emulator set up then too.
I think it would be fair to have Alex explain the details of his setup and provide a set of inputs which can reproduce the glitch in order for this record to be considered valid.
