Submission #6955: Vhyrro's NES Quattro Adventure: Super Robin Hood in 04:36.36

Quattro Adventure is a cartridge released by Camerica in 1991 packed with 4 games - one of them being Super Robin Hood, the very game present in the run. The game is a platformer that requires the player to find keys to advance further into the Nottingham Castle, all while collecting treasures that allow the player to complete the entire game.

Game details:

This game, being one of the childhood games that I would play on the good ol' Nestopia emulator (no, we didn't have an NES), was an obvious first candidate for both speedrunning and TASing. Thankfully, the game didn't (and doesn't, which is something I really want to change) have much traction, which gave me the perfect opportunity to attempt to discover some new techniques to fully unleash the power that this game has. When I joined, Alyosha's TAS had already been out for SIX years - time to modernize some techniques, I guess. All in all massive shoutout to all the people before me who'd already discovered the most efficient routes and basic glitches, else my life would be so hard right now :)

Before I discuss the run (which beats Alyosha's TAS by almost HALF A MINUTE, btw), I would like to say that all the glitches seen here have already been discovered UNLESS I explicitly state that I discovered it. There's a lot to unpack, so hang tight!

Right off the bat, I would like to introduce you to a new glitch that I accidentally discovered while messing with the game; something that I call the hyperjump. By climbing onto a ladder, briefly looking right, and then holding down + left, Robin's velocity (located at $0311 for those who care) will blast from 1-2 units to 255. If you jump during the brief period where you are shot out of the ladder, Robin will shoot up into the sky. This glitch only works for the left hand side (what is it with the left side being so broken in this game?).

In order to save some precious time, Robin lets go of left a frame before jumping, making the jump a little less... extreme. After that, however, there really isn't anything new to see when it comes to the beginning - in fact, a large portion of this run inherits from Alyosha's run, so enormous kudos to him. The only new (by new I mean: more commonly used + better optimized) minor trick that is used is the LTJ (Ladder Tip Jump) and DLTJ (Double Ladder Tip Jump), where Robin can jump from a ladder when almost perpendicular to a block, allowing him to get to the top of the ladder faster.

Right before the warp, Robin jumps off the ladder, but how? Using buffered jumps, of course! Now I'm certain that someone has figured this out before me, but I haven't seen anyone ever use it or talk about it so... I'm just gonna snatch that for myself ;) Whenever Robin jumps, a value at address $0317 gets changed from 0 to 1 - the game only allows Robin to jump if he is both standing on a block and if that value is 0. Whenever we fall off a ledge, the game does not treat it as a jump, and does not update the value. Since the game treats everything as blocks (including chains, ladders etc.), we satisfy all the requirements to jump again :). Do note that all treasures up until the warp point are awarded to the player when they warp.

All in all, there's nothing really new here, except a DLTJ at the end of the purple room and a relative teleportation exploit (discovered by me during messing around with the game's RAM).

This is a slightly technical explanation of the RTE, so skip ahead if you don't care, but for those who do...

In SRH, whenever your Y position exceeds a certain amount, Robin will be teleported to the next level above or below the current level (this happens when you e.g. climb a ladder) - but instead of the teleportation being absolute (that is, the game tells Robin to teleport TO a specific location), the method used to teleport Robin is relative (the game tells Robin to move BY a specific amount). When we gently clip into that top block at the beginning of the purple level (how do you even call that level?), it changes Robin's Y position, but his X position stays untouched. This means that when we go to grab that treasure, Robin's hitbox will be slightly off centre when he spawns, allowing us to snatch the treasure without even needing to get off the ladder - pretty neat, huh?

At certain times, falling onto the bottom of a ladder and pressing down at the last frame will cause Robin to completely absorb the impact and go for a nice stroll as if nothing ever happened.

Surprisingly, the barrel room has now become one of the easiest levels of the entire game - that's a massive leap from being one of the hardest. I had devised a tactic back in the day to make the level a lot easier by despawning the bat by not collecting a trophy at a specific time, but that's obsolete now since we have the power of hyperjumps at our hands.

LEAP OF FAITH!!! Yeah, that's basically all this section is really.

Honestly, screw this level - it's an absolute laggy mess, really difficult to manoeuvre around. But, with enough hours of banging my head against a wall, I think I managed to make it faster than any previous TAS around.

Nothing too insane to be quite frank - no new tactics, all just standard get-through-with-the-least-amount-of-lag gameplay.

We die here in order to speed things up a little :)

This version is faster from what I can see than any previous TAS, mostly thanks to that sneaky wall jump haha.

And there it is! The entirety beaten in under 4 minutes and 40 seconds. I really hope to see how far the community will be able to push this game, and I encourage you to try speedrunning it to spread the word! :)

OK, so I just finished writing this and decided to fiddle around some more with FCEUX before submitting and HOLY COW. Turns out, you can do a hyperjump at the final ladder where Maid Marion is and complete the game WITHOUT NEEDING ANY TREASURE.

ASFTHSKYVFTDOKISOHTYVsth

This is revolutionary, let's see how far we can push this time limit :D

Memory: Claiming for judgment

Samsara: File replaced with an FM2 that trims both blank and unnecessary input.