I want to improve the WR, does anyone still run this game?
5 years ago
Arizona, USA

I played this game as a kid and it always seemed unique. It was a game based on a movie/book that was actually GOOD. It seemed like a ripoff of Final Fantasy but with its own intriguing item and level systems. The map is so open, there are so many secrets to find. When I found it at a game store about a month ago, I knew I had to speedrun it and find all of the optimizations. It's obvious even to a casual player that it has some glitches. I am so curious about this game, I want to discover more game breaking glitches so that it can be beat in under an hour. There must be some sort of memory manipulation glitch to save a bunch of time, like frogEXP glitch. I know it must be possible, and if nobody else will run this game then I guess I will have to dig through ROM, ORAM, etc in an emulator until I figure something out. I can tell that there is so much potential speed tech possible, why has nobody come up with anything new in 2 years?

Lorraine, France

HI guys, it's cool to see someone who want to speedrun this game. As far as I know, there's only me who post any run in this game (i mean at this moment), but moderators (like SMP or StarrlightSims) continue to be part of this speedrun's community. And I didn't post run for 5 months cuz' my RNG aren't good so I haven't finished run for few months, but I'm still trying to do a pretty good run & still trying to find new glitch or route's optimization (e.g: I need to time smthg about F3 to F5 to F3 about DADA's Split cuz I think the route used by WR can be improved without RNG - for this part at least). About that: "I guess I will have to dig through ROM, ORAM, etc in an emulator until I figure something out", there're some people who actually worked on it few years before, here the discussion about their work: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12190 I don't work on ROM/ORAM, etc. cuz' I don't understand anything of this ^^' (tbh, about the thread on tasvideos above, there're kind of stuff where I was like "well, i'm lost here :^)" What we need to exactly know now are: What can we do with the "Yes' item? Could it be usefull? Can we manipulate RNG when we do DW? How? Etc.

And I see you posted something like "I found a new DW" but i didn't see this on forum, can you explain what you found?

Edited by the author 5 years ago
Italy

Hi all, so the game atm is pretty much dead speedrun side. Years ago we work with some guys to get consistency in the Frog glitch, runners like me and smp works on trying to get consistency in the troll skip and DW. If you like to get a big derust on the game go for it.

if you find a better route for the "no frog glitch" i will take the game back xD (i don't like too much that glitch)

Is possible to duplicate drops using "combination" out of fight, but we don't know how to control how many times doit before the game crash.

The other warp, in the train, is the forest warp, but the game "event" is "go in the train" and not some kind of trigger inside the castle. If you find something tell us :D

GL

United States

Glad to see that there is some interest in the game again. I haven't ran in a while, I lost interest in running after some time and ended up making more progress in HP2 instead.

There is a glitch item called 'Yes' that has limitless potential, from what us and the TASer understand, but there hasn't been a consistent way to control what it does yet. It often crashes the game, having no use outside battle aside from resetting the game with a 50/50 on making a save to be played on or erasing everything that you have done. In battle it can do some more things that can help, like I once was able to use it to skip all of lake. Other than that one instance though, I haven't gotten anything really useful from it.

If you have any questions, there is a discord for handheld HP games here: https://discord.gg/9kMfkrz

Arizona, USA

I'm so glad to see replies! I did a lot of research and fishing around, I am going to try to include everything I've found that is not already known around here. I could be wrong about any of this but I just want to show what leads I am looking into.

The Gameboy uses a modified Z80 processor which runs Assembly code. I don't know assembly, but Nintendo has used/been using it for a long time to power its systems and I have always been intrigued by it so I will probably learn it over time. It is very small and compressed, commands can be as small as 2 or 3 bytes. I found an emulator called BGBW64 ( https://forums.emulator-zone.com/showthread.php?t=25908 ) which emulates this game perfectly, as well as having very powerful debugging tools, as well as seemingly anything you could ever want to have in a gameboy emulator. It shows all of the source code for the game as well as a live display of all of the memory and you can change it all frame by frame. I found the memory address that handles warps, you can change on byte and walk through a loading zone to any other loading zone you want. I even got it to kill me, put me in very glitchy battles, and just glitch the game into a crash. The train glitch warping you to Forbidden Forest proves that wrong warping is possible. We can search in the code for commands that change that memory address, but I don't know what any of the code means yet. If someone wanted to, they could read through all the code and potentially find something to exploit with warps, I believe they are held in ($FF00+86) and a little beyond. The TASers mentioned have probably already worked on this and I will definitely look at that discussion in the link, but that is what I gathered by myself. I want to find how quest flags are stored, I can't seem to find them anywhere and I hope that clears it up for me.

That leads me to the Yes item. I got it on my GBC copy but I want to get it in the emulator and mess around with it. The Yes item is probably the thing that could tear this game wide open. We get it so early in the game, I bet we could potentially use it to wrong warp to the final boss with the right memory manipulation, similar to games like Zelda for NES's flute skip, Super Mario World empty item credits warp, Mario 3 wrong warp, etc. It would just take a LOOOOT of digging through the code to find something consistent. Maybe I am just being ambitious or having some kind of speedrunner fantasy, but the Yes item does seem to have limitless potential for breaking this game.

Skyword572 that thread about the Death Warp was deleted because I found out that it was already used in Troll Skip.

The RTA WR for this game looks pretty good. I can see that there were some movement mistakes and the commentary video describes a couple failed tricks or unnecessary steps pulled from old routes. I wonder if the current route could use an optimization. The RTA WR stops to pick up a lot of sickles but the TAS gets a big glitched gift of Sickles in the train, I wonder which is faster. If I wanted to WR this badly enough I could look into the exact hitbox limits for things and test which spots are fastest for those triggers where it forces you to move to another spot for a cutscene. Maybe the TASers have already worked on it but the RTA record looks like it could use some improvement there. If I reeeeeeally wanted the WR I could run this game until RNG gave it to me.

I am not sure if I should get a good time or first work on glitches and route optimizations. I am mostly interested in any% where you can pick up a fresh game and beat it from scratch. I do not want to run NoFrogGlitch, NG+, or 100%. I don't TAS at all and I would only learn how for testing. I only ever played this version as a kid but I got the sequel recently. I might be interested in running that as well, but probably not until I am happy with my time in this one.

Anyway that's all I got. I will report my findings, and I hope that I can eventually upload a good run because top 10 is basically free. I want a RCA capture card and a Gameboy Player for the Gamecube but are camera recorded runs accepted? It's nice to meet you all, you will probably see me in the discord.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
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