Post subject: Rockman World
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
(you can move this to "Game Boy Games" if such a forum is created) Okay, I've decided to post my progress on this game in this thread now. I've also decided to switch to the Japanese version of the first Mega Man game for Game Boy, Rockman World. This is because the American version makes you wait two seconds longer at the title screen for no good reason, and it will be less confusing to discuss and process when it doesn't have the same name as an NES game. But if lots of people gather together and demand I use the American game, well, I guess I can switch back and start all over. So after doing some analysis of all four stages, I figured that the best order would be CutMan, ElecMan, IceMan, and FireMan. I haven't put much thought into the Dr. Wily stages yet, but we'll see when the time comes. I'm guessing that most important there will be the effective use of the Carry and finding a good way past those knife/drill things that pop out of the floors and ceilings in a couple of areas. I made a new version of the CutMan run to start my complete movie, as I could play more precisely, and I discovered a few new tricks. http://www.geocities.com/ryan_ferneau/rockman.zip If you see anything that could speed it up now, please tell me, and I can probably play the level ONE MORE TIME. Remember that you need to have the game Rockman World, and you need to be using the very latest version of VisualBoyAdvance for it to work. (Shaneduddy assured me that he wouldn't be making any more changes that will affect movie timing.)
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1311)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Uh, for me, using VBA rerecording alpha 5, and the ROM Rockman World (J).gb, it desyncs immediately after you start the cutman stage (you shoot the first screw enemy once then walk into it before jumping). Could I be forgetting to do something?
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Aha! I believe I have found the culprit! Set your sound frequency to 44 Mhz. Using 22 Mhz causes the movie to do just what you described!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Former player
Joined: 3/13/2004
Posts: 1118
Location: Kansai, JAPAN
Always amused when the Japanese version is full of English. Seems like a good start. I liked the Cutman battle.
Do Not Talk About Feitclub http://www.feitclub.com
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Ah, thanks. Yeah, I don't believe the first three Rockman World games have any Japanese in them, and the American versions didn't even bother to localize the enemy names at the end. So language shouldn't be an issue until 4 and 5. I started to play ElecMan's stage, but then I noticed an interesting cause of desync. If you play the video and use frame advance for more than about 90 frames, the movie will fail to select ElecMan at the end. This also happens if you set the sound frequency to 11 Mhz. (But why would you use that setting anyway? You may as well have pillows over your head!) In my video that continues into ElecMan's stage, if I advance more than about 50 frames beforehand, RockMan'll get into the stage, but he jumps at the wrong times and falls into the spike pit. So it seems as though the bug where frame advancing alters the timing is still there in minor amounts. The bug where your current action gets applied to the frame before the one you loaded a state for still crops up sometimes, too, though it's much less frequent now. And now Rockman World 2 has a strange graphical error in the bottom of the stage select screen and in the weapon select menu ("Hey, I can see to the left of where I am!").
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 143
Location: Valencia, Spain
In my opinion the best route is: Elecman > Iceman > Fireman > Cutman. Reasons: - Elecman is easy to defeat because he has a terrible a.i. - Cutman's level has lots of enemies. i have a question? is mega buster the best weapon againist Enker?.
I am a Mega Man fan that hates Megaman X8.
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Mega Buster is the ONLY weapon that works against Enker, actually. And I chose Cutman first for several reasons. The Rolling Cutter is immensely useful, beating enemies a little faster than the Thunder Beam or the Fire Storm in almost all cases. Cutman takes only double the damage from his weakness, the Fire Storm, while the others take quadruple or octuple damage; thus I don't lose as much time by fighting him with the Mega Buster as I would with the others. (In addition, Iceman and Fireman have a secondary weakness to Rolling Cutter, in case you ever wanted to break order after Cutman.) And since Cutman is the toughest to beat, it looks the most impressive to beat him with the Mega Buster.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1311)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
OK, yeah it was the 22 KHz sound. (I always set it to 44 KHz but VBA keeps resetting it to 22 for some reason.) Maybe this should be reported to Shaneduddy (both the reliance on the sound rate to stay in sync, and also the frame advance bug) in the re-recording VBA thread. The run looks good, the only thing I can think of that bothered me is that some of the jumps looked unnecessary, but they probably aren't.
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Heh, yeah, I threw in some unnecessary jumps just to get close to enemies without actually hitting them. You know, to be DARING.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1311)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Oh, ok, it looks like you move slower when you're in the air though. Or maybe I'm just thinking of the conveyor belts, was there any way to kill the enemy on it instead of jumping over it? (Anyway, I just went ahead and posted a bug report on the other forum.)
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Yeah, those Cutting Wheel enemies take 8 hits to defeat, so I rarely think it's worth it to shoot at them, except for that one time I added in this movie. Maybe I should check a few more, though, just to be sure. Okay, I just checked and replayed, and as far as I can tell, I don't have a fool's hope of beating any of the other Cutting Wheels early. You'll just have to settle for dodging. But did you like that I destroyed a Screw Driver at the last second for no reason? Or was that just annoying? I could probably hex-edit that out without changing the timing if you want. (Just erase the "2"s, right?) Oh, one more thing: I don't know why your VBA would switch back to 22 Mhz when mine doesn't. Do any of your other settings get reset after closing the program? Maybe you should check to make sure that your vba.ini file is being written to and stored properly.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Hooray, now ElecMan is defeated. http://www.geocities.com/ryan_ferneau/rockman.zip It went smoothly enough, but there was one curious recurring desync. After I fired the first two shots at the third lightning lord, I wanted to hang to the right so I just barely snagged the platform and got another jump in. When I recorded it, it worked, but when I replayed it, Rockyman would always fall straight to the side. So I held back a little, then speeded up as I made the jump. I wonder if this problem is worth looking into... There was also the fact that I had to redo a whole bunch because I saw a way to save 6 frames and I failed a whole bunch at hex editing, but you don't need to know about that.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 6/11/2004
Posts: 35
Location: Quebec, Canada
What version of VBA are you using to view the movie ? 1.7.2 ? 1.8.0 ? Also, VBA movie files have a .VMV extention and this file has a .VBV one ?
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
Megaman951 wrote:
What version of VBA are you using to view the movie ? 1.7.2 ? 1.8.0 ? Also, VBA movie files have a .VMV extention and this file has a .VBV one ?
You are confusing VirtuaNES with Visual Boy Advance.
Joined: 6/11/2004
Posts: 35
Location: Quebec, Canada
What does VirtuaNE has to do with this ? I wanna know what emulator bag o' Magic Food's using for his rockman world GB movie
Former player
Joined: 8/12/2004
Posts: 651
Location: Alberta, Canada
He isn't acually, he is just thinking of vanilla VBA. shanedudddy2 changed the extension to vbv because it used to have the same extension as VirtuaNES. You can get the version of VBA that he is using in the "Other emulator topics" section of the forum.
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Yeah, it's the edited version of 1.7.2 linked to by this post.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 6/11/2004
Posts: 35
Location: Quebec, Canada
Thank you
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
IceMan is here now. http://www.geocities.com/ryan_ferneau/rockman.zip It only really got frustrating at the end because of that stupid, laggy Thunder Beam. I had to try different moves during and after the battle to avoid slowing the game down too much. For some reason, it seemed to work best if I jumped toward the corner while finishing off IceMan and stayed there for a while...
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
The video now includes FireMan! http://www.geocities.com/ryan_ferneau/rockman.zip The Thunder Beam turned out to be helpful because it can usually destroy the Changkey Makers with one shot if I time it right. There were a few at the end I had to slow down a little for, though. And since the previous waiting dance was a little boring, I made this one extra freaky!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Former player
Joined: 8/17/2004
Posts: 377
Looking good. I wonder if VBV movies will soon be accepted as submissions here? There's a ton of great Game Boy games out there to time attack.
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Well, VBA needs a few more bug fixes and interface changes, but if we can keep going off what Shanedudddy did, it's probably almost there. I think the movie format needs to be changed to store a few more things, but hopefully it'll be just stuff in the header that I can insert into my current movie. Or if the format changes too much for my movie to work anymore, then I guess I'll just start over and make a new movie that might even be slightly better!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Ambassador, Experienced player (710)
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
I messed around with this a bit, starting on the iceman stage. Found a neat little trick on the icicles. However, this game will be tough to timeattack, as it's hard to avoid many of the enemies. Furthermore, most of the enemies take five hits and have an invincibility period of about 10 frames, taking away one of the biggest timesavers in most Megaman runs. http://home.comcast.net/~f_amoroso/megaman-test.vbm
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Hey, I was working on this game! I'm going to start over, though, since there's a new movie format now, and I want to round out any last mistakes from my test run. (I haven't put up the progress yet, but my test run has almost all of Dr. Wily 1 done, so all I need to do now is figure out a good Enker strategy and decide which weapons to use and path to take at the fork in Dr. Wily 2.) And I switched to the Japanese version, Rockman World, partly because it lets you start the game sooner, but also because its title keeps people from confusing it with the NES game (though a few people mistook it for Rockman MEGAWorld--argh). Well, I'll watch your movie and see if there are any tricks you did that I didn't think of.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Well, there was a little interesting stuff. At the beginning, I notice that you liked to wait to get up close to the Bunby Heris before shooting them. I guess that looks dangerous, but my style is to do everything as soon as possible, so I show off that I know everything ahead of time. I don't know which is preferred, but I like sticking to one rule all the time. But I did think it was neat that you just avoided one of the Bunby Heris at the end. You took TWO hits in the room with the Suzies? I managed to do that room without taking any hits, and the only time I slowed down was while falling into the room so I didn't hit the first Suzy. (This requires that you don't press against the wall too much as you fall, since the game oddly stores your "momentum" from just pushing the wall.) I just had to do a tricky jump to squeeze onto the platform and fire at the Suzy as fast as possible. In the next section, I noticed there was flickering caused by not killing the third Bunby Heri as early as possible. This brings up the issue of avoiding slowdown by properly timing enemy kills. Destroying an enemy sooner will help minimize its time onscreen, but that requires making a shot earlier, and the shot might slow the game down in busy situations, too. I guess you have to take it on a case-by-case basis. At the first Scworm, I noticed that you caught the edge of the platform so you could jump over and get knocked to the right. Smart. I think you also could have jumped onto the right side of the Sniper Joe when you caught the edge like that to possibly save some time. I figured this issue was moot since I planned on using Rolling Cutter here, but maybe I ought to test again. I could also test Thunder Beam here again, although my initial tests showed that Rolling Cutter was faster, even considering the switch time. And you didn't do anything with the icicles that I don't know about, though maybe it would have been smarter if I hadn't gone to the trouble of adding well-calculated waiting dances to a run that wasn't going to be published. I figured I needed the practice, anyway. It's just annoying that after some bosses, Megaman will teleport out later if you do too much messing around, or mess around too early, or do the wrong kind of messing around. I have to keep toying with the timing until I get what I think is the earliest time.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude