Table of contents
Introduction
I wanted to work on this game ever since I finished my first Arkanoid movie. However, the main limiting factor is that the mapper wasn't supported by QuickNES (the emulator core I used for botting). So I decided to update QuickNES to its latest version in libretro (one with many more mappers supported). In the meantime I also improved its performance and added support for the Arkanoid inputs. This work resulted in the new QuickerNES core, which allowed me to start this work.
There are several new features introduced in this sequel:
- The game starts with an initial "easy" boss fight. After that, the player can decide which direction to go at the end of each level. This decides whether you play the "Left" or "Right" versions of each of the 34 rounds. I had to bot all 65 possible stages and, for each level, select the fastest one. This means that a full game of "unselected" stages will never see the light of day :/
- Powerups are more diverse and useful than in the first game. Lasers, super-powerup, 8-ball multiball and the mega-ball are all used in my solution.
Category Rules
- Heavy glitch abuse
- Heavy luck manipulation
Software + Hardware
Rom Information
- Name: Arkanoid II (Japan)
- ROM: Arkanoid II (Japan).nes
- SHA1:9300EE2ACFE7F43CBC72CAE4E57FC5A60837C4B4
- MD5:7C8518AF66A21D87557128E4873AEF66
Emulator
- EmuHawk 2.10 (Core: QuickerNES)
Routing Bot
- Bot: JaffarPlus
- Routing Core: QuickerNES
- Platform:
- 2 x AMD Epyc 7742 (128 cores, 256 threads) + 384Gb RAM
- Exploration Rate: 1.6 Mstates/s
Raw Input Movie
If you find the entertainment inputs too distracting, you can enjoy the following encode of my first draft that keeps the paddle static and only adds precise inputs to solve the levels.
Entertainment inputs
After finishing the first draft of the movie, I felt the movie was missing some 'spice'. So I decided to develop an 'entertainment' algorithm that allows me to create some cool effects while checking that none of the additional inputs caused the solution to desync. I hope you like the effects I came up with!