This run improves the published run by 462 frames, or 7.7 seconds. The improvements come mostly from using the spell Illumina on the first visit to the Gargoyle-room, as well as throwing the key1 in the lake. More information on the improvements can be found below.
Improvements information
First off, the small improvements. I found a few places where it's faster to enter a door via the picture instead of the minimap, for example the horseshoe room and the library. Then there are a few other cursor optimizations, but they don't add upp to a lot of time.
On my first visit to the lake room (the one where the shark swims by), I throw Key1 in the lake. This might seem odd, as it's not necessary and obviously takes some time. The reason this is done is because if Key1 is discarded, all items will move up one step in the item list. This will have a big impact on the rest of the run, and actually save time in the end. In the room where I get the sphere, I save a whole 75 frames due to different item order.
The biggest improvement is using the spell Illumina on my first visit to the Gargoyles' room. By doing this, I save a lot of item list scrolling, saving about 5 seconds in total.
Then there's the randomness part. The two random events are what question the sphinx will ask and how many lightnings that will strike on the last boss. These can be manipulated by waiting before pressing A. I didn't lose any frames at all on the sphinx part, and only 8 frames on the last boss, compared to ~60 frames in the published run, so all randomness manipulation went very smoothly.
Final words
My goal with this run was to break the 9 minute barrier, which I eventually did. This will probably be my last storybook TAS for at least quite some time, I've had my fair share of storybook TASing lately.
Big thanks goes to the FCEU-development team, Lua scripting was used a lot in the making of this run. And hat's off to Maximus once again for his TAS movie editor.
Enjoy the run!
NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots
of this movie and placed them here.
Oh! I also corrected the ROM name.
- You indicated
Shadowgate (U).nes - I updated it to
Shadowgate (U) [!].nes
Truncated: Accepting.