Emulator details

  • Emulator used: Snes9x 1.43v12 (beta 10)
  • Sync settings:
    • Use WIP 1 timing
    • Allow Left+Right / Up+Down

Details on the run

  • 100% item completion
  • Aims for lowest realtime
  • Manipulates luck
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Abuses programming errors
  • Does not abuse X-ray
Suggested screenshot: Frame# 188286

In depth about the run

This is my improvement over JXQ's 100% Super Metroid run, it is 2 minutes and 34 seconds faster than his version in realtime, or 9249 frames, and ~1 minute and 51 seconds faster ingame, or 6636 frames. Ingame clock stands at 00:36:03:43, yes I know, ouch :(
The 3 main improvements here are the torizo skip (21+ seconds) the mother brain stand up glitch (~15 seconds) and the routechange. Don't really know how much it saved though, due to trouble with comparing the routes completely, but it has 6 less doors and less backtracking, so maybe 10-15 seconds in realitime. The rest of the time is largely due to a lot of new room strategies, general optimization, and for realtime, minimizing door scrolling (without this I would actually have reached 00:35 quite easily...).
I have also made a alternative ending to this run, that removes the only pause screen, kills motherbrain without glitching, and saves the animals.
There is a excel spreadsheet formatted by hero of the day, in it are details on almost every room, some are left out due to the routechanges, and for the same reason it is not 100% accurate, but works good for room comparison and getting explanations for some of the things I do which might look a little (and in some cases maybe a lot) weird.

Information about authorship

As many probably know this started out as a team project between me and hero of the day. However, as he gained less and less time to work on the run I gained more, and in the end I did virtually all the work on the actual run, though hero still suggested ideas of improvements and new tricks, and the finial time would have been seconds higher without him. Thus he thought it would have been unfair to include him as an author of the run when submitting.

My two cents about what I presume will be the discussion about this run not having any input animation

Yes that is right, this run does not have any input animations, which I guess will gain me some no votes, but I had my reasons for not using them. I think the main reason they where so awesome in JXQ's run (besides him being an extraordinary comedian) was that the whole concept was new, it was the first run to use anything like that, naturally this run could not top that no matter what I would have animated. And since JXQ is a very funny guy I would have had little chance doing so anyway, and I think anything not as good as his work would simply be seen as redundant to the movie, and perhaps even as a bad attempt to copy his idea. Naturally I was not very eager to spend hours upon hours doing something that I predicted would be seen as mediocre, but I did actually start to add some input a bit into the run (some of which you can still see the bottom line of), and had a few thousand frames covered. It ended up in the trash bin though as I never really got very satisfied with them.
Also I hope that the main interest for most here is the run itself anyway... Oh well enough nonsensical rambling and bad arguments already.

Thanks to

Most of all hero of the day obviously, for figuring out a lot of improvements and new strategies, and it was more or less solely his work on improvements between the release of the last 100% run and the start of this one that made me do it at all.
JXQ, for making excellent runs. This would obviously not have been nearly as fast without his other runs to improve upon.
And pretty much everyone active in the Super Metroid thread during the brief times of peace (almost everyone has done something), you know who you are.

mmbossman: Impressive work. Accepting as an improvement to the published 100% movie.

Chaosv1: Encoding... Saturn's already encoded this one, checking and publishing


Former player
Joined: 3/31/2005
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Location: Argentina
How do I use those "lua scripts"?
Skilled player (1444)
Joined: 7/15/2007
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Location: Sweden
IIRC you can just copy paste the script into a .txt file, change the ending into .lua and then you can run it in Snes9x (don't know how new the version must be, but Improvement 12 works fine).
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
Player (206)
Joined: 2/18/2005
Posts: 1451
Incredible run, Cpadolf! I have no words how many new tricks you showed in it, especially the blue suit tricks to break various blocks much faster. This run once again shines due to the extremely high optimization level and the totally awesome ammo and health management (especially when passing Norfair suitless). Seeing that a 0:35 was only 4 sec away to get, I would definitely rather sacrifice the few realtime frames at the door transitions just as much to break the 0:36 barrier, simply because nobody would notice/care about them anyway. But you probably didn't know it would get so close until almost the end of the run, so it's not a bad thing. This is a huge improvement to the previous run (the missing input animation, even though it looks great in JXQ's run, isn't a criteria to judge on at all IMO, since it's just a side effect added to the run), so it deserves a obvious YES vote. PS: As usual, I'm willing to encode a max quality video file of this run (with the glitched line fix). If you guys want me to do that, let me know please.
See my perfect 100% movie-walkthroughs of the best RPG games on http://www.freewebs.com/saturnsmovies/index.htm Current TAS project (with new videos): Super Metroid Redesign, any% speedrun
Joined: 8/23/2008
Posts: 417
Cpadolf wrote:
No it IS .swc, almost all my ROMs are .smc but for some reason the version of the SM ROM that I have used for all my runs is a .swc file. No idea what the difference is.
Huh. I don't think the extension really matters as long as the file itself is the same, so even if it's named "swc" it probably still is an smc. Similarly, the ROM I originally found has the extension *.fig, yet I renamed it *.smc and compared it to a clean ROM and there's no differences. Sorry, shouldn't presume to know more about your run than you do, eh? I'm just glad you do this. I would not complain about an "Aegis.swc," no sir. And now that I read bkDJ's intriguing post about the lua scripts I am going to re-watch sans pauses.
I will not use self-reference in my signature.
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Saturn wrote:
Seeing that a 0:35 was only 4 sec away to get, I would definitely rather sacrifice the few realtime frames at the door transitions just as much to break the 0:36 barrier, simply because nobody would notice/care about them anyway. But you probably didn't know it would get so close until almost the end of the run, so it's not a bad thing.
Yeah, had I known that a realtime optimized run would get me this close to 00:35 I would most likely have scraped the door optimizations and go for it. But when starting I thought that 00:36 would be pretty hard to reach, and once the MB stand up trick was revealed I still thought that under 00:36:30 was more or less impossible. It was not until around blue brinstar cleanup that I realized how close I was going to get.
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685
As a sidenote, the file extensions are just indicative of what was used to dump the cartridge. The file extension CAN make a difference in some cases, but it's typically just a matter of whether or not it has a header, and this is easily remedied.
Kirby said so, so it must be true. ( >'.')>
Joined: 6/7/2008
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This run was worth the waiting. It's just incredible! Some parts really made me laught. \o/ --- For people who aren't able to view it with snes9x, i've encoded the run. You can stream and/or download it here: http://gromba.nl/cpadolf100p (325MB, h264/aac)
Player (71)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Great run. Thanks a lot Cpadolf. :) gstick wrote: BTW, I found this weird trick some days ago. I had thought of uses of it since then. And I came up with this idea while I was watching this run. I succeeded in improving more 22 frames than this run. However, there's a few lack of optimization, maybe. Ha ha! Very weird thing you found there. Very cool though. :)
Joined: 12/7/2005
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Location: Sweden
I'd vote, but there's no "HOLY BATMAN YES" option
Joined: 1/23/2006
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Hm, was there a TAS reason that you stayed on the right end of the Crocomire room during the death animation or did you just feel like doing that?
Skilled player (1444)
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Lag reduction, that is also why I jumped there right away.
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
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I kept getting desynchs up to Ridley's capture of the last Metroid at Ceres Station. 1.43-dev WIP1 // "Super Metroid (JU) [!].fig"
Skilled player (1444)
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Activate allow left+right.
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
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Joined: 5/22/2007
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I got desynchs too, just after Samus entered the colony. Apparently she just enjoyed hopping around the elevator. 1.43-improvement 15 (lua 0.05) // Super Metroid (JU) [!].SMC EDIT: LEFT+RIGHT was allowed.
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
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For me, it desynced before the activation of self-destruct after killing the mother brain ― i.e. less than two minutes before the end of the movie.
Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685
Watching it on the most recent snes9x lua, I haven't had any desync issues on two computers. *shrug*
Kirby said so, so it must be true. ( >'.')>
Skilled player (1444)
Joined: 7/15/2007
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I think I had one desynch with this smv right at the start, but that disappeared by simply starting the smv again. As for the rest, I can only presum that it has something to do with having a ROM without a header (filesize 3072 KB).
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
Yrr
Joined: 8/10/2006
Posts: 289
Location: Germany, Bayern
This movie was really outstanding! Even after watching like a dozen SM-runs, this wasn't getting boring at all. There were a lot of interesting tricks here and there I didn't see before. Definitly a yes vote. I have just a question: how is the stand up glitch performed?
Skilled player (1444)
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Simply by taking of varia suit and gettng hit by motherbrains hyperbeam with more than 699 but less than 999 hp. The beam drain 600 hp if you do not have varia on and with more than 1 tank left you can stand up again (that part is not a glitch). And for some reason I don't really know (probably a simple oversight, the programmers naturally did not excpect you would do the fight without varia on) the game will initiate the "Metroid to the resque" sequence anyway, but only if you do not have varia on.
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
Editor, Emulator Coder, Expert player (2158)
Joined: 5/22/2007
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OK, I managed to watch the movie. It's hard for me to vote a strong Yes at the moment, since I've spent more than an hour in finding a way to play the movie correctly. Weak Yes vote as I used fast-forward a lot during watching the movie.
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
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That, to me, doesn't sound like a good justification for making your yes "weak."
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Comicalflop wrote:
That, to me, doesn't sound like a good justification for making your yes "weak."
I agree with Flop.
My current project: Something mysterious (oooooh!) My username is all lower-case letters. Please get it right :(
Editor, Emulator Coder, Expert player (2158)
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I think the point is that the poll is "Did you like watching this movie?" rather than "Do you think this movie is entertaining?"
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
Joined: 8/23/2008
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Seems like people are having a lot of desync issues. Be aware, there's a bad dump of Super Metroid out there that appears to be a good one; "Super Metroid (JU) [!].smc" is its ROM name, and it runs fine in regular play, but there are about $B00 bytes in the level banks of this ROM that cause problems for game hacking and for movie playback when certain rooms are entered. It's still the same size as the original ROM, so it's about impossible to tell unless you open up the ROM in a hex editor and compare it to the clean one. Sorry I can't say much more on that, I can only recommend you try downloading another ROM.
klmz wrote:
I think the point is that the poll is "Did you like watching this movie?" rather than "Do you think this movie is entertaining?"
Your original unedited post implied that you felt it lost points because of technical issues, which technically does affect the viewing experience but is against the spirit and purpose of voting. I understand that the purpose of voting is to produce feedback about the video itself useful for a decision of publication, so viewing problems shouldn't change your vote. It is probably still a good idea to say that you had problems viewing it, of course. Far better than to simply not watch a run, or worse to not watch and vote no because it's too hard to run, which thankfully wasn't the issue here.
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klmz wrote:
I think the point is that the poll is "Did you like watching this movie?" rather than "Do you think this movie is entertaining?"
"Did you like watching this movie?" Seems anyone can add emphasis with bold words.
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