Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine is a short but difficult game where you pilot a spaceship around enemy filled rooms to reach the elevator at the end of each of the 3 stages. The NES port is not particularly good, as you must choose between sound effects and music. The current submission is an improvement of Randil's run by 615 frames.

I noticed this game after jlun2 pointed it out in the 'First 500' thread of old runs that were originally rejected before the vault was available. I noticed that it was a curious run in that it had no music, so I decided to take a little deeper look and see what this game was all about.

The improvements are just movement optimization, nothing special really, the only interesting thing to me was some discussion in Randil's submission thread about why the game had no music. Adelikat mentioned something about a bad opcode somewhere, but I couldn't find anything of the sort. In fact, the game seems to be a rare case where the starting RAM state used by an emulator effects the initial state of the game. There are 2 effects, initial difficulty selected and music/sound effects choice. Music is default to off because FCEUX initializes 05FB to 0. Similarly, Initial difficulty is set to Easy because 0523 is set to 0. In Nestopia for example where music is default, 05FB is set to 255. So, if an emulator happened to set 0523 to 2(+4n given how menuing works) the default difficulty would be set to Lethal and 4 more frames could be saved. You can see this quite clearly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDe3rupHxnI where initial difficulty is normal but the selection goes backwards to easy, meaning the initial value of 0523 in that case was 3(+4n)

Also, it is Start+A which changes music, not select+A.

I hope this clears this up a bit and serves as an illustrative example of emulation choices effecting game play.

There is not much else to say. Other ports of this game have far superior graphics and sound/music, so it might be worth it to have a TAS of one of those at some point.

Special thanks to jlun2 for the research in old runs.