So, after doing some reading and watching the other runs, I now realize that the DOS version (and maybe some early Windows versions) and later versions for Windows (like the Gold edition) have a major difference.

On DOS, the highest speed is Cheetah, but the later versions have an extra speed: African Swallow.

I have a run submitted with my Gold edition of the game where I use that speed, but I really don't think it's terribly fair to unless there's a category for it. Also not sure if there's other differences in mechanics.

I don't know. What do folks think?

There's also some significant version differences in the SNES, Saturn, PS and N64 versions that I know of from playing them. I actually still own the SNES, N64, and PS versions (because I have an unhealthy obsession with this game) and I'm actually kind of interested in documenting the differences now, so I might try to run each of them and see if they're fair enough to compete with each other.

It basically is, if Phase Door cooperates. It can crash the game if you save too many times while you use it in town, but it's relatively safe on XP. I'm not sure if there's a difference in stability on other OSes. The one rule you have to follow is that you can never take everything the shop has. That WILL crash the game and may corrupt your save.

Using it and the item stacking glitch, I can consistently get under 30 minutes on Part 2 runs, but really that's all it provides, consistency. You end up losing around 6 minutes to uncooperative Phase Doors on average. Theoretically, a lucky series of shops, a lucky phase door and a bunch of stacking weapons with the "very" prefix could potentially make the run ridiculously quick as you tend to kill all monsters in 1 hit (heck, I've done Surtur in 3 before), but it's very unlikely to happen, and THEN align with a dungeon that's easy to traverse.

I actually tried a few part 1+2 runs recently.

I do my runs in an XP VM, and the problem with leaving both up is that the game can sometime crash if left open with it's counterpart for too long. The 16bit memory space isn't very reliable. I've found leaving Part 2 up and closing Part 1 when switching is relatively safe though.

That's not what I do below though. Here's how I did the switch in a very unplanned Part 1 + 2 run:

Compared to the shop glitch that seems mandatory (to me mind you... maybe someone a bit better at this could do without it or shorten it's use greatly) and the small amount of extra time to build to a level that can get to negative HP, A switch of a few seconds isn't a big deal. I'd rather play it safe for a gauntlet style run like this and take the extra time to close the part 1 window, or manually open things.

The most annoying thing about Surtur is his ability to run from you. You could save scum your way around it, but it tends to be slow. There are two interesting ways to do it without too many save reloads though.

1. Dragon's Breath: Get a Very Old or Ancient Dragon and lure it in position so that it's breath hits you and Surtur. This is usually pretty easy as Dragons tend to spawn near him. Surtur appears to be especially weak to Green Dragons (he appears to have a lot of elemental resistance, but not poison res). He seems to die in 3-4 Poison breaths, which tends to make this the fastest way to kill him.

2. Slow monster: Whenever he runs, reload and cast this on him. Eventually he'll be unable to escape. I'm assuming his chances to disappear are based on your dexterity versus his, and this evens the playing field a lot. Sleep Monster might also work for this, but Slow seems like it lasts longer.

Assuming you don't want to use my save in resources. >_o

Or if you know the Ice Exit levels and you just want to cut to the chase in Ice Secret:

I'm not sure if it drops every time from those laser bubbles, but it's pretty close to it. Your consolation prize, the red laser, is pretty decent as well.

So @firefyte, you're partly right. looks like the invincibility twiddle and plasma storm makes for extremely quick boss kills, but only in certain situations. Pretty much instant on the first one. But really not useful once the bosses get past a certain point in health, and near useless against multistage bosses. I could be doing something wrong though.

Here's the video of the first boss:

Here's a few of the later ones:

Also, in Super Tyrian, I was wrong the twiddle doesn't cost armor, but it does cost all your shields. Could be worth it in some situations. It really doesn't last very long though, and the recharge on it seems like its 3-4 seconds (based on your shields).

I keep revising this, damn.

So in my testing with the debug cheat, Tyrian runs at 47-48 FPS in Turbo.

Long story short on the testing:

1. Tyrian runs at 47-48 FPS in turbo, not 35 FPS. Weirdly enough, this is seemingly confirmed by Jason Emery himself in this thread that I didn't notice till now: https://www.gog.com/forum/tyrian_2000/how_to_get_60fps

2. Playing with fixed CPU cycles does not increase the FPS, no matter how high or low you go. It does eventually slow down the game and cause various sound issues though!

3. Playing with Ctrl + F12's 5% CPU overclock on the normal MAX setting in DOSBOX does nothing to FPS.

4. There's little time difference in killing the first boss quick or leaving the top behind.

5. Detail settings don't affect FPS.

Here's the Video:

Takeaways:

1. Kill Bosses any way you like for speed.
2. Play any detail setting you want - no affect on speed.
3. Changing the dosbox CPU game settings does not affect FPS positively.
4. The FPS is 47-48 on turbo. so close range kills and the top screen warp are at most a 20-30 second time save. This also explains some of the weird inconsistent frame counts on certain specials, and my odd screen tearing and sound issues that I don't see on real DOS with a CRT. Basically my 7 year old monitor sucks and can't stay in sync to such an odd value.
5. There's a lot of menuing and screen transitions in this game! Probably at least 4.5 minutes worth. If there ever was a Menu% category, it would likely be the least fun cat.

Interesting, the first u-ship seems to give a repulser in Super Tyrian. Not sure if it drops any other specials.

The speed of the projectiles in this mode seems to negate a lot of it's usefulness though. It's not easy mode with it like the rest of the game modes, but it does seem to help a lot for bosses.

Hmm, so my theory doesn't seem to pan out. If anything, ramming bosses while using plasma storm seems to deal tons of damage and perhaps even kill them faster, but it's not instant, even with pause. I'll have to try the USP invincibility next.

Well, it looks like I'm only partly crazy. There's no difference in how Tyrian runs on a real non-vm DOS machine that I've seen yet, but there does seem to be a difference in how it runs outputting to a CRT. No stuttering or tearing. The sound is a bit better as well for some reason. Maybe something to do with video sync? Still have a few more things to test, but it might all be CRT related.

That might be an extension of what I was seeing with the pause/framestep cheat.

My theory is that if you can get all of the plasma storm to insta deploy, it should be an instant kill. Wonder if plain pause does the same thing.

The invulnerability twiddle likely would act similarly. Since your sheilds deal tons of damage, and there is no knock back effect, you can deal tons with it over only a few frames. We might even be able to use pause to achieve similar without the twiddle!

I think it costs armor. It would certainly be needed for levels, but not indefinitely usable for bosses.

I played part of EP3 last night on slow and it was doable. I think with a lot of practice I could do it all on normal. But the bosses on EP4 would really be the endurance test.

You'd need the lighting twiddles and maybe the hotdog blast one for the EP4 bosses, hilariously enough.

I could do it, but I'd probably need to map a gamepad at this point. My keyboard is still not up to snuff.

Oh dear. I can't believe I'm doing this, but it's the only way I can prove to myself that I'm not crazy. I just saved a moderately old Core 2 duo from the trash.

I'm gonna put DOS on it and hook it to my CRT. And I'm gonna test out Tyrian. >_<

Shhh don't tell my wife!

Nah, not rude at all.

Actually, it could partly be my monitor, but there's occasionally some odd delays with keys and crackling in the sound. It's likely just an annoyance, not something that affects runs, but it's not how I remember Tyrian in the 90's.

I built one in VMWare Player (the free one) based on some IBM DOS 5.0 disks I had lying around. Then I used WinImage to add the GoG version to the image. I could post a guide or add a disk image of Free DOS to resources.

There's really not much point to the Virtual Machine. It actually seems like Tyrian runs a bit slower than in DOSBox. Granted I haven't touched the settings (or DOS in years for that matter) and there's certainly some better suited VM software out there that properly emulates Sound Blaster cards.

I might give vDOS and a few others a whirl as well. I don't like the DOSBox setup on my machine and I'm trying to find a replacement or tweak it to my liking.

For the life of me I can't figure out how Super Tyrian is even feasible with the late game levels. I can get up to Assassin on normal speed with no deaths, but that's as far as I can go. Can't get past the boss without lowering things to Slower or Slug mode.

I'm certainly not quite as skilled as that Eric guy on YouTube, but even his videos seem to end at Assassin, and probably for good reason.

If some one wanted to brute force it for kicks on Slow / Slower, I did some quick calculations:

First level runs about 10 minutes on slower. 30 major levels with bosses. Assuming you'd switch between speeds during the downtime in levels to save time, you'd still be looking at a run of at least 5 hours on average. Probably more since this mode follows arcade rules for bonus levels.

Yipes.

Maybe one day when I'm unfathomably bored.

Just accidentally discovered it while doing a run of Part 2:

It would be inanely difficult to actually take advantage of during a run, and without a way to fix your max mana, it's reset on level up. Still though, if you get lucky, it might shorten an otherwise terrible run into something competitive.

So yeah, Custom icons that actually work with this game are difficult to make, mostly because the tools and settings are hard to find and harder to get working on modern OSes. They really don't provide any benefit and they glitch out 10% of the time when you load saves, but here's how you can get them working and even make your own to add that extra early 90's swagger to your runs!

Full guide is below, but I'll attempt to summarize: http://37911.activeboard.com/t55774287/found-out-how-to-get-icons-working/

Get the EDITICONS program here: http://people.umass.edu/~verts/software/software.html#EDITICONS

Extract the files within and open the one labeled 32x32 4bit.

Open an icon with it or roll your own in the editor.

Place the new icon in the same folder as Castle of the Winds.

In the character creator, just type the name of the icon and click the custom icon toggle.

If the icon isn't showing up (you're on an OS that doesn't natively support 256 color mode, like Windows XP), go to the Castle executable and right click to choose proprieties from the context menu. Go to the compatibility tab, then click the 256 color checkbox under display settings. Reopen the game and you should be set! ...At least until it glitches out.

Have fun!

For Arcade mode I've been toying around with Zica instead of Laser due to it's higher damage output at lower levels. Since there's no generator and the goal is to get the repulser special, Zica might actually be the better weapon for Arcade. I don't know, in my testing I sort of still prefer the laser.

Here's the damage tables form OpenTyrian that -nic pulled:

Name Lvl Cost Dmg Dly DPS Pwr Pwr/s Special attributes Laser 1 900 0.3 1 10 20 600 Laser 2 1800 0.7 1 20 20 600 Laser 3 4500 1 1 30 20 600 Laser 4 9900 1 1 30 20 600 Laser 5 18900 1.5 1 45 20 600 Laser 6 32400 2 1 60 20 600 Laser 7 51300 2 1 60 20 600 Laser 8 76500 2.5 1 75 20 600 Laser 9 108900 3.5 1 105 20 600 Laser 10 149400 4 1 120 20 600 Laser 11 198900 6 1 180 20 600

Name Lvl Cost Dmg Dly DPS Pwr Pwr/s Special attributes Zica Laser 1 1100 7 10 21 90 270 Zica Laser 2 2200 9 9 30 90 300 Zica Laser 3 5500 11 9 36.7 90 300 Zica Laser 4 12100 13 8 48.8 90 337.5 Zica Laser 5 23100 17 8 63.8 90 337.5 Zica Laser 6 39600 18 8 67.5 90 337.5 Zica Laser 7 62700 20 8 75 90 337.5 Zica Laser 8 93500 30 7 128.6 90 385.7 Zica Laser 9 133100 34 7 145.7 90 385.7 Zica Laser 10 182600 38 8 142.5 90 337.5 Zica Laser 11 243100 44 8 165 90 337.5

Also just a point on #2: you CAN kill most of the U ships and still get a secret level orb spawn. You just can't kill the middle ships in the first line. It's not terribly helpful to do in Arcade though.

FYI, Tyrian actually runs at 35 frames per second on Turbo according to Gamfaq's -nic who has been going through the OpenTyrian source code here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564490-tyrian/faqs/75999/what-is-this-guide

So this is a little bit less of a time save, but not by much. Probably a 40 to 50 second time save if executed really well.

Check out the guide's info! There's some interesting stuff there. Not much that isn't already obvious, but at least there's numbers to back things up now!