There's actually another video on my channel where 5 men meet up in the bedroom at the end of Level 20. 💀 🤣 (Because the mouse sprite is replaced by the sprite of the 2 guards carrying the Prince away -- from the intro scene.)
It's basically playing blind. If you look back, you can see my "GT1" Level 16 video, which follows the exact same route. There's another fun video where I caused a warp glitch to make the whole run blind for levels 4, 5, 16, 17, 18, and 19, just to see if I could do it. Also worth checking out is my "GT1" compilation video, where I spliced together all my best Individual Level runs for all 20 levels. After running the same route over and over again, it's actually pretty easy to memorize the levels. Unlike SMB1, with 60fps controls, and progressive acceleration & deceleration, in Prince of Persia you always run at the exact same speed, and your footsteps always tell you exactly where you're going to be. And in this game, controls only need to be accurate to the animation, which is 15 fps. So you've essentially got a 4 frame window to hit a jump, or release the running (d-pad) button to stop on the right spot, etc. That's not to say it's easy to execute. There are many tight commands, and tough manoeuvres; but it's always easy to know where you are: to know if you got the correct spacing with a jump, or if you've stopped at the right place. So playing "blind" isn't too tough if you know how to listen. Of course, playing blindfolded would be completely different. I'm constantly using whatever clues are available onscreen to monitor my progress. If I had to be blindfolded, I doubt I'd get very far. (I could just slow-step a bunch, but that wouldn't be worthy of Speedrun material.)
@@Oakshield2 I've been working closely with Challenger, who created the definitive glitchless TAS some 5 years ago. If you're interested in following the progress of these new warp & glitch routes, we've got a very lengthy discussion going on the TASvideos forum. The current TAS version of this 650 route is just 2 frames away from breaking into the 649 second. But we're hitting a dead end on trying to save those last 2 frames. At any rate, I expect a human could theoretically duplicate the TAS, but lose time on menu navigation, since humans can't hit the arrows every frame. With some minor concessions on conservative play, we should still be able to come within 3-4 seconds, so I'm eventually hoping to get a 655 or 654. It all comes down to execution. Very tiny mistakes add up. So a "perfect" run will actually look almost identical to this video. I'm just a couple of small mistakes away from a really low time.
@jaimdiojtar6515 it has to do with some temporary overwriting of instructions, so the game starts reading arbitrary code from the wrong places. In this case, it's even pulling the wrong animations from different characters. Each character probably has 50+ animations for different poses, so the game may have called for Skeleton's 25th sprite instead of Prince's 25th sprite at the beginning of a climb or squat, for example.
If you've watched many video game documentaries, you may be familiar with the idea of games reading data from the wrong place, which causes glitched graphics. Examples include level 256 on Pac-Man Arcade, or the glitched piece colors on NES Tetris. The setup early in this run is an elaborate combination of precise moves that cause the game to jump to Level 16, so that the vast majority of the game may be skipped without using a password. The first time you see all of the visual mess of colors in the background, the game has changed the level counter to Level 0. It's a special level in the game, which can instantaneously Warp the player to another level if his sword is pulled out. So, in order to complete the Warp setup, we make sure not to approach the guard again! In this particular setup, many pieces of data are being collected from the wrong place. Here's an example of how it might work: The game wants to draw some bricks in the background, so usually it would read the byte at location #6,804, which contains the correct background tile. But instead, the RAM gets screwed up, and the game tries to read the background tile data from location #4,186. This could be completely random data relating to a different process, but the game reads this data anyway, converts it into a jumbled of random colors, and spits it out onto the tv screen. So Level 0 is shrouded in video corruption here, and the Prince's animation tiles are given in the wrong order, so he starts wiggling around like a weirdo while he's running around. Finally, the setup is completed, the Prince is Warped to Level 16, and the new level begins with the Level 16 music, as usual. But the video corruption hasn't been fixed yet, and the Prince's animations have now been pulled from completely different character sets, including Guard, Jafar, and Skeleton. At the beginning of Level 17, progress has been established by completing Level 16, and then we can exit to main menu, continue saved progress, and restart Level 17 without the video corruption, and actually see where we are going. So this speedrun does require some memorization of Level 16, since you can't really see where you are going.
