This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7472: ShesChardcore & DrD2k9's A2600 Ghost Manor in 00:21.08

I don't know what I watched as a first time viewer of the gameplay but voted yes cause it's damn short and very fast, also looked funny. Gameplay: A little girl starts from the cemetery to a castle, shoots some arrows, gets in a invisible maze up and down and goes to the stairs with a skeleton.

Yes vote for silly Atari game crushed. Laughing that the game has like a 5 second title screen, after which the 5 separate stages documented in the comments are passed in the subsequent ~17 seconds, including stage 1 which requires obtaining 10 separate items (or 1 item 10 times, but you get the idea...) Since it looks like you only used 7 spears in stage 2, I'm assuming you need to get 10 before you can exit stage 1?

In reviewing this run, I was able to implement some movement improvements scattered through the run. Stage 1 (16 Frames Saved): Started moving earlier and managed to get the 10th hit on the skeleton a bit earlier to move to stage two. Stage 2 (0 Frames Saved): Different attack pattern to avoid the axe. Otherwise no frames difference. Stage 3 (14 Frames Saved): Better movement (more diagonals) to exit the maze faster. Stage 4 (45 Frames Saved): Better movement (more diagonals) to exit the maze faster. Stage 5 (2 Frames Lost): Unfortunately I lost two frames here and can't figure out why. Even just copying the original requires adding two frames. The player character must move up to y-position=15 while touching the freed boy to end the game. Total improvement = 73 Frames Here is an updated .bk2. And a temp encode. https://youtu.be/kZIQXhatvHo Once I have coauthorship/editing rights on the submission, I'll change the main encode to this one. Here's a side-by-side GIF comparison of the run before and after improvements. I also discovered a minor ROM issue. Checking the ROM used for this run using goodtools yields "Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox) [o1].a26" The [o1] indicates that the ROM is an overdump ROM. For those who may not know, overdump ROMs have extra unused data beyond the actual game data in the ROM file itself. This extra data is meaningless and doesn't impact the game in any way. Unfortunately, goodtools does not have a [!] marked ROM for this game indicating a known proper dump of the game. There is a ROM in the goodtools database that's not labeled with any notations "Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox).a26" but this ROM only seems to contain the first stage of the game (it resets to the beginning once the spears are collected). There is a PAL version that has the [!] known good dump indicator; interestingly the inputs from this run sync perfectly on the PAL version but the overall play is slower due to the framerate differences. Due to these issues with the ROM, I think the overdump version is likely the best to use for this game, as it allows a full game NTSC run.

BizHawk 2.8 + DrD2k9's usermovie test Syncs on: 2bee7f226d506c217163bad4ab1768c0 *Ghost Manor (1983)(Xonox)(NTSC)[o].bin 40d8ed6a5106245aa79f05642a961485 *Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox) (PAL) [!].a26 3b10106836565e5db28c7823c0898fbb *Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox) (PAL) [a1][!].a26 Doesn't syncs on: 0eecb5f58f55de9db4eedb3a0f6b74a8 *Ghost Manor (1983) (Xonox).a26 Also I had no idea that an A2600 TAS can sync on both NTSC and PAL ROM.

Also I had no idea that an A2600 TAS can sync on both NTSC and PAL ROM.

This may not be the case for all games, but it does work with this one. The frames are just longer in PAL mode. I've run into something similar before; I think it was with a C64 game (EDIT: If I remember correctly, it was Monty on the Run for C64. Movement synced, but RNG didn't.). It would be interesting to try this on other games as well.

I saw a few interesting notes about this on various not allowed to link sites, so here's one quoted:

Often these games may be stable enough to run on both NTSC and PAL systems. These are the ideal specs that Atari adhered to: 100% standard compatible NTSC games display 262 lines per frame at 60Hz 100% standard compatible PAL games display 312 lines at 50Hz Games in both versions will be off about the same (NTSC will be ~10% faster and PAL ~7% slower). Most companies developed games in NTSC and later converted them to PAL. Since programmers were mainly concerned with having a stable image and acceptable colors, no time was spent on adjusting gameplay so that it ran identical to the NTSC version. What this means for players is, in most cases, playing a PAL version of a game compared to an NTSC version gives the PAL player an advantage, both in time and difficulty (due to PAL games running slower). In addition, the PAL version will offer a larger playfield.

LOL, wth did I just watch? Yes vote :)

This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4691] A2600 Ghost Manor by ShesChardcore & DrD2k9 in 00:21.08