Hi everyone,

I just found a message in my inbox from BOP95 about a difference they discovered on the 6-Pak cartridge. The message has been sitting in my inbox for 2 months without me realizing so shame on me!

I have done some testing to verify and added screenshots here https://imgur.com/a/QicucFx

The left/right screen boundary is extended slightly on the 6-Pak cartridge on all thief camps. This makes it easier to hit a thief when they are off screen which can be very useful for pretty much every thief camp for all characters on beginner/arcade.

This is in addition to the RNG benefits InTheMug discovered where all RNG is fixed for the first 30 seconds of each stage.

I thought I would ask for thoughts from everyone here to see if this is a big enough difference to re-evaluate our stance on 6-Pak cartridge. Which is currently allowed in all categories as long as it is flagged in the run submission so it can be seen in the leader boards.

I have been doing some research into the RNG in Golden Axe and found that it is based on a timer that resets at the start of each level. If the timer is on the same value, you get the same RNG patterns every time. The timer increases on every frame of the game (60fps) so it is impossible to take advantage of it.

However, I have found that both the 6-Pak and Mega Games 6 versions of Golden Axe have a glitch with this timer. For the first 30 seconds of each stage, the timer is ignored and the RNG always has the same pattern. This is very useful for levels where you can reach the thieves before 30 seconds are up, such as stage 6 and stage 7. The thieves will always use the same pattern, and on stage 7 this is a fast pattern where the thief on the left runs along the top of the screen.

I have tested on all the revisions of Golden Axe I could find and only these two games had the glitch. Both the games are also region locked so 6-Pak can only be played on NTSC-U Genesis (US console), and Mega Games 6 can only be played on PAL Megadrive (EU console). The EU consoles run the game slower at only 50fps so they are not useful for speed running. This means that 6-Pak seems to be the best version of the game to use. I have created a video to try to explain my findings here .

The physical cartridge seems to be relatively common and cheap so I don't think it is any more difficult to obtain than a normal Golden Axe cartridge. The ROM files are just as easy to find as the regular game too. However, anyone playing the game on other platforms will be at a disadvantage, such as Steam/Wii/Xbox/Playstation, as there is no way to play 6-Pak on those platforms.

I think we should update the leader board to give visibility of which submissions are using 6-Pak. But I don't want to make any changes without asking everyone in this community their opinion, so I have created a poll here https://www.strawpoll.me/20361555 .

I will leave the poll open for a couple of weeks and close it on 30th June 2020.

I would also like to propose that we update the submission rules to make cheating more difficult. At the moment the rules are very lax and it would be possible for someone to use various tricks with an emulator to fake a good time. I think the rules on Sonic for Megadrive are a good starting point so I think we should copy those (https://www.speedrun.com/s1). These rules would limit emulator use to 2 known emulators where it is possible to show that no cheats are being used in the video. For other platforms it would be required to show a game reset and/or show the system menu for the console being used.

Again, I don't want to make changes without asking here first. I am mindful of making the rules more strict as new runners could be put off, particularly if they don't read the rules before recording their first run and get their submission rejected.

I have made a second poll here https://www.strawpoll.me/20361596 . I will leave it open for 2 weeks also and close it on 30th June 2020 .

Please comment with your feedback, I don't want to rush into anything or do anything that is not accepted by the community.

I got bored and made a table of health values for all the enemies in arcade mode. Posting it here in case anyone finds it useful.

(With formatting)https://hackmd.io/RXGnpTdSQFOtWgHQr9zNmQ

A TAS maker ThunderAxe31 has recently been able to make the below damage table for Tyris' attacks. I thought it would be useful to share it. It was created by watching the RAM addresses in Bizhawk emulator, and the address values are below too. Hopefully this will be useful for someone looking for new strategies as you can leave the RAM watch open and see the current health values of each enemy on screen.

From: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20436

Damage of Tyris Flare's moves 16 huge dropping stab 12 reverse swing 6 jump swing 4 flying kick 4 frontal stab (only against beasts) 4 standing kick (only against beasts or during combos) 4 throw 2 most combo attacks

Useful RAM addresses (BizHawk .wch format) SystemID GEN 00D164 b s 1 68K RAM enemy 1 health 00D1E4 b s 1 68K RAM enemy 2 health 00D264 b s 1 68K RAM enemy 3 health

It's happening December 2018 in Japan http://spiralchariots.com/goldenaxe

Probably left this a bit late. But in a matter of hours 2 Golden Axe runners, InTheMug and Anthopants will be running Golden Axe and Streets of Rage 2 at SGDQ.

If anyone wasn't already aware, go check the twitch stream and and cheer them along!

https://gamesdonequick.com/schedule

Best of luck to you both!

First of, congratulations to InTheMug and beadle111 for their tied WR runs. But it got me thinking if we need to start timing the runs more accurately.

I wanted to ask the opinion of the community before I make any changes to the leaderboard. But I thought that now the run is getting quite optimised we should time runs to tenths of a second?

This also made me think about having a consistent start and end frame we agree on for accurate timing. I've made a couple of gifs to show what I mean.

Starting frame:- http://imgur.com/a/cTy66 This gif shows that when I press X to start the game, the screen does not change for another 3 frames. As it would be impossible to tell when a runner hits the start button, perhaps we should start the timer on the frame when the two un-chosen characters disappear?

Ending frame:- http://imgur.com/a/M4AKp The ending frame is more clean cut I think. When you land the killing blow death adder begins his death animation. So we should stop timing on the first frame of this animation.

Tools:- https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Yua I have been using Yua to extract runs from my OBS studio recordings. I like it's ability to step through a video frame by frame so I have been using it to look at the time at the start and end frame of everyone's runs. We could potentially use this tool to count the frames in a run too, as it has a frame count at the bottom left (as seen if the above gifs).

Rounding: I noticed that before I started verifying runs, Jesse_Porter seemed to round to the nearest second. .5 would be rounded up, and anything lower rounded down. I admit I've been a bit lax with this and usually always round down. Should we always round down, or should we round .5 up? I think this is important if we swap to tenths of a second or not.

What do you all think? Is this overkill?