I hadn't planned on submitting a new World Record speedrun yet, because there's still a lot of things that need to be tidied up. However, this is close enough to the 7 minute mark, that I might as well start putting some videos up to show the progress that's been made. I expect this record will be broken very soon, as I get a little bit sharper on these frame-perfect gate skips. I had a really aggravating mistake on the Level 17 Reset, where I lost track of my menu cursor, and wasted 1.6 seconds trying to Exit. Without that silliness, this would have been a sub-7 minute speedrun already. Oh well, the best is yet to come!
Time starts at about 36.6233139360593 seconds, when the TV finished drawing the first frame of Level 1.
Time stops at about 457.6545591517749647 seconds, when the TV finished drawing the first frame of the Select Menu, after the Prince touched the Finish Line, and initiated the "End of Level" Music at the end of Level 20.
These virtual timestamps give a total of 25303.478451227 console frames, which must be rounded up to the next whole frame; the imperfect time is due to the variable frame rate of the camera's video encoder. So, 25,304 console frames gives an official time of 07:01.0399234031746031746031746, which is only 63 frames away from a sub-7 minute time.
The projected TAS time for this route is about 10 frames below the 6:50 mark. For a human, a sub-6:54 will be tough, but possible. So I've got a good 7-8 seconds worth of mistakes to clean up.
This Guard & Skeleton sprite has a very wide collision box, so with a perfectly timed and spaced double-turn, the hit box can clip past a gate or 1-unit wall, and allow the Prince to clip through. Clipping through the 1-unit wall near the beginning of Level 16 (4th room) requires an extra input. Here, you must push "down" for 1 frame during the turn-back towards the wall. But as soon as the turn is completed, you must be holding Forward + Jump to jump through the wall, and avoid the buffered crouch.
A side effect of the Warp-16 is a change in Jaffar's status to "dead." When Jaffar is already dead, it is impossible to access Level 20. The only way to fix this is for the Prince to die, which resets Jaffar's status to "alive." The best place to die is at the beginning of Level 17, where you can quickly land on the spikes, and Exit the level to avoid the lengthy death music. Exiting to Main Menu also resets video corruption, so upon Continuing to Level 17, level visibility is restored, and the rest of the speedrun may be completed under "normal" conditions.
Credit to Challenger for finding the Warp-16 setup, and realizing that the Guard & Skeleton sprite could clip through gates & walls!
For further reference, see my latest Gate Thief #1 video for Level 16, which shows essentially the exact same route through the level. Whereas the level was "Blind" in the present video, you will be able to see everything in the GT1 video.
• Prince of Persia - SNE...
EDIT: I have also uploaded a video for this Guard & Skeleton sprite, completing Level 16 under normal conditions. This new video demonstrates the optimal route to be performed during the sub-7 minute speedrun. I still need to tweak a couple of things to get the real time below 65 seconds for Level 16, as well as display a "1:02" on the game clock.
• Prince of Persia - SNE...
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29 сен 2021