Whoa, I saw an e-mail that my run got beaten, and didn't expect it to be a run from 15 years ago I didn't even know existed. xD

To clarify, in my run I actually still do the second training because it makes Rocky throw punches much faster. It looks like DTysonator skips all three training sequences in his run though. I had considered trying to do that, but figured it would make the run much harder to complete so I ended up just not bothering lol.

I may try to see if I can replicate his strats at some point or if I can find any improvements and do a run without any of the training sequences.

This is all pretty funny honestly lmao.

DTysonator just being a legend as usual. xD

Hey guys, thank you for the advice! I was able to get the 24 after about 2-3 more hours of attempts and trying to incorporate the tips you gave me as well as hitting the invincibility monitor in the tree from below, which I'm not sure whether that actually saves any time or not to be honest, but I saw some people doing it. Here is my 24, if anybody wanted to see lol.

I'm not sure whether or not I even did the fast acceleration correctly, but I think that the tip about tapping left in the first tunnel may have been crucial. I did it on my successful attempt here because I was feeling like I might die if I didn't... I don't actually know whether that was true or not in this case, but clearly it didn't hurt anyway, since I got the 24. I imagine that some of this stuff would be easier to figure out with save states, and I do actually have a Mega EverDrive Pro coming that I bought on Black Friday, so that will probably help if I want to keep messing around with other levels in this game.

Anyway, thank you guys again for the help, and I'm probably gonna try some other levels now! xD

Hi,

I'm new to trying to speedrun this game as well as Sonic games in general. I was wondering if anybody could explain to me where I am losing frames, and how to correct it so that I can get the 24. Here is a video of possibly my closest attempt that I think might still be 4 frames off (does the timer stop on the frame when the screen stops scrolling at the act end?)

General mechanics advice would also be appreciated in terms of non-obvious things I could be doing during attempts that are sub-optimal.

I was also wondering if anybody could explain why I sometimes die to the second tunnel after the loop. This seems to happen to me frequently when I feel like I am doing well. Is it just an issue of actually doing too well basically and my speed being too fast?

Henlo~ =3

So, I was interested in possibly trying to run this game sometime, and so I was messing around with it a bit in an emulator, and while I am absolutely not well-versed in 6502 assembly language, I think I can at least confirm or correct a lot of the speculation above and hopefully provide some additional information that will be useful.

STAR ROD: 0x0544 seems to increment each time that a crystal despawns without being collected, and when the value of this address reaches 7 that appears to be sufficient to allow a star rod to spawn, so the information above seems correct.

SHOES: 0x0545 seems to at least most of the time be increased by 2 each time that you bounce on a bubble, and when the value of this address reaches 10 that appears to allow the shoes to spawn, so it seems to be correct that the shoes require either 5 or maybe 6 bounces sometimes on a bubble to spawn.

HEART: 0x053F seems to increment whenever you collect a food item that has been dropped by an enemy (I'm not sure if other items also increment it, but the food that falls from the sky occasionally apparently doesn't.) When the value of this address reaches 10 that appears to be sufficient to allow a heart to spawn. So it seems that a heart will appear for every 10 food items dropped by an enemy collected.

CANDY: 0x0546 seems to increment each time that you fire a bubble, and when the value of this address reaches 50 that appears to allow candy to spawn, so candy apparently appears based on bubbles shot.

CRYSTAL: This one is a little complicated and seems to involve two different memory addresses working together sort of.

0x0014 - A timer that I believe starts from 0 when the game is booted, increments every frame, and loops back around to 0 after reaching 255. 0x0543 - A counter that (generally) increments when the timer at 0x0014 hits the value of 254. So most of the time it will increment every 256 frames. When this counter reaches 16, that appears to be sufficient to allow a crystal to spawn, so essentially a crystal can (usually) be spawned every 4,096 frames assuming that you are currently in a level in which another special item such as the ones above hasn't already spawned.

An exception to the 256 frame rule is when first starting the game. After you press start on "1 PLAYER" the first increment to 0x0543 seems to occur in 656-911 frames depending on what the value of the timer at 0x0014 was on the frame of your button press. Pressing start when the timer has a value of 111 appears to produce the slowest increment taking 911 frames, with this time decreasing by 1 for each subsequent frame until the timer reads 110 which should give you the fastest increment of 656 frames. I have no idea what would be an ideal timer value to start the game on, since I guess that it would depend on what the optimal route even is, but I imagine that you could probably experiment with this and come up with some sort of strategy for starting the game at around the ideal timer value that you want from a reset.

Anyway, based on the above information, probably the most important takeaway for routing purposes is that it is basically going to take a minimum of around 8 minutes in order to have skipped the 7 crystals required to spawn a star rod assuming you can spawn each one of them immediately once it's ready and not waste time waiting for them to despawn at the end of levels.

Also, the timer at 0x0014 continues to run even while the game's paused, but the game has to be unpaused when it hits 254 I believe in order for 0x0543 to be incremented... I mainly just mention this because I don't know if it could potentially be a strat to intentionally pause the game repeatedly in order to build up the time for a crystal to be spawned without taking too much time and spawning Sawbones (the white whale.)

UMBRELLA: 0x054B seems to increment each time that you collect the shoes, and when the value of this address reaches 2 that appears to be sufficient to allow an umbrella to be spawned, so it does seem to be correct that collecting shoes twice (I don't think they have to be collected consecutively) spawns the umbrella.

The order of precedence when you meet the criteria for spawning multiple items simultaneously seems to be:

HEART > CRYSTAL > STAR ROD > SHOES > CANDY > UMBRELLA

I guess that hearts could be strategically spawned in order to delay a crystal or star rod spawn, but otherwise I imagine you'd generally want to avoid spawning hearts in a speedrun by avoiding/minimizing the collection of food dropped by enemies, or you can clear the counter for the heart spawn by continuing I believe.

I believe it's correct that if you have collected two shoes, you shouldn't spawn any more of them until you collect an umbrella.

Candy unfortunately seems to block the umbrella, but it could be possible to overflow your bubble shot counter past 255 and back to 0 to avoid spawning candy, with pretty careful management I imagine.

In terms of trying to route this, it seems like you could either deliberately take parts of the game slower in order to spawn more crystals and go for more star rods or else just continue to spawn the one star rod and otherwise spawn as many umbrellas as possible... I'm not really sure what the ideal strategy would be.

I'll probably continue to look into this stuff but just thought sharing this information could be useful! ^^

Hi,

I'm thinking of possibly picking this game up to run next, and I was wondering if there's really a consistent strat at all for the ship glitch or if it's likely to just kill pretty many runs? I see that in the WR and other top runs it looks like the players are basically trying to take damage at a certain position but I don't really understand how exactly that's meant to help. I tried it a bit and it didn't really seem to be helping my consistency personally.

Here's what I've generally been doing currently:

Basically, when I do that first jump to take damage I do it about when the eye on the ship is in the bottom left, then jump again and try to shoot like very slightly after the eye looks right. I would say that my consistency is maybe somewhere between like 25-50%, but sometimes I'll get it like three times in a row, and other times it'll take me like five tries lol. I guess I was mainly just wondering what kind of consistency I should be shooting for on this before seriously doing attempts and if anybody has any tips for cues or anything else that would help.

Are there updated notes for this category? I was thinking of possibly trying to learn to run it, but I've noticed that the information provided here seems to be outdated at points compared to the strats being used in the WR. I'm sure I could probably at least piece parts of it together just by watching the most recent runs and comparing what's being done to these notes, but I just figured I'd ask in case the route is already available somewhere in a written form.

Sorry, I have been busy with some other things for the past few days, but I was actually able to get the wrong warp to work playing on emulator (so that I could use save states for assistance.) I haven't gotten to testing it on console yet, but I imagine it should be the same. Thank you guys for the help!

I was still wondering if anybody can explain more in depth what exactly the goal is in that room with the glitched fishmen and the really glitchy graphics though. It seems like your movement in that room affects whether you'll be able to do the rest of the warp or not (in particular for me it seems like if I do it wrong then a few rooms later there will be a bone dragon blocking my path.) I feel like that's the main part that's still confusing me... does it have something to do with having to scroll the screen to certain positions while going up and down the stairs multiple times?

Hi! I was trying to learn the wrong warp used in the Any% category to go from level 4 to level A, mostly just out of curiosity but possibly to try doing some runs in the future. I've tried following the movement in the WR video as close as I could, but I appear to be not understanding something about how it works, because most of the time I crash the game or get stuck on an invisible platform, or one time I did make it to the screen where you fall off and die but just crashed the game instead of reaching level A. I haven't been able to locate an actual explanation of how the glitch works mechanically online. Also I was using a password to start directly at level 4, so I don't know if that would cause it to not work.

Can anybody give me a rundown of all of the requirements to make the glitch work? In particular in that one horribly glitchy room with the glitched fishmen and going up and down the invisible stairs multiple times, I feel like I'm probably missing something there. Thanks for any help in advance!

Hi, it's me again, lol.

I was practicing this game a bit after not playing it for about a month due to IRL stuff, and I believe I may have discovered a new exploit as shown in my video:

I found that you can pause buffer a turnaround throw by first building up a charge, then pausing while moving forward, switching to holding the opposite direction while paused, and then when you unpause you will be moving in the opposite direction, still retaining the charge. This actually makes turnaround throws extremely easy to perform, at the expense of less than a second of time pausing and unpausing. This could have potential to speed up most of the bosses.

I guess my question is... is this allowed? I know that some games allow pause buffering such as some of the Sonic games I believe, but I wasn't sure if there is a general rule about it being banned unless explicitly allowed for specific games. I wanted to check first to make sure before I possibly do go back to doing attempts.

Also, unrelated question for the mods about submissions, but is it necessary to stream ALL attempts live? I want to make sure that I am following the rules this time if I do return to this game again, but unfortunately I am working with 0.7 mbps upload speed, which makes it difficult but I don't think impossible for me to stream. It will also probably choke the connection for everybody else in the house, so I don't think it is something that I would be able to do on a consistent basis to be honest.