@@josephgallardo1450 Yeah, I really hope to see a TAS of SM63. Somebody in our discord mentioned a pretty good idea that is like a perfect method of TASing Flash Games. Just use Cheat Engine to slow down, and do them Segmented and there you have a way to TAS Flash games on windows.
A tool-assisted speedrun or tool-assisted superplay (TAS) is a set sequence of controller inputs used to perform a task in a video game. The input sequence is usually created by emulating the game and using tools such as slow motion, frame-by-frame advance, memory watch, and save states to create an extremely precise series of inputs. The idea is not to make gameplay easier for players, but rather to produce a demonstration of gameplay that would be practically impossible for a human. Tool-assisted speedruns often feature gameplay that would otherwise be impossible or prohibitively difficult to perform in real time. Producers of tool-assisted speedruns do not compete with "unassisted" speedrunners of video games; on the contrary, collaborative efforts between the two groups often take place. The opposite of "TAS" is "RTA", which refers to regular speedruns performed by humans. RTA stands for "Real Time Attack", a portmanteau of "real-time" and "time attack". History 1999-2001 The term was originally coined during the early days of Doom speedrunning, during which the first of these runs were made (although they were sometimes also referred to as "built demos"). When Andy "Aurican" Kempling released a modified version of the Doom source code that made it possible to record demos in slow motion and in several sessions, it was possible for the first players to start recording tool-assisted demos. A couple of months afterwards, in June 1999, Esko Koskimaa, Peo Sjoblom and Joonatan Donner opened the first site to share these demos, "Tools-Assisted Speedruns".[1] Like many other tool-assisted speedrun communities, the maintainers of the site stressed the fact that their demos were for entertainment purposes rather than skill competitions, although the attempt to attain the fastest time possible with tools itself became a competition as well.[2] The site became a success, updating usually several times a week with demos recorded by its maintainers and submitted by its readers. After a short while, when version 2.03 of Lee Killough's Marine's Best Friend Doom source port was released (based on the Boom source port), it became even easier for people to record these demos, adding the functionality of re-recording without having to replay the demo until it reached the point where the player wanted to continue. The site was active until August 10, 2001, at which point Jonathan Donner posted a news message stating that their site would be an archive from now on, and pointing towards The Doomed Speed Demos Archive, a site mainly for non-assisted speedruns, of which the author agreed to take over the posting of tool-assisted speedruns. Although popularity had dwindled since then, built demos have still been submitted until as late as November 2005, and are currently usually being made with PrBoom.[3] 2003-present In 2003, a video of a Japanese player named Morimoto beating the NES game Super Mario Bros. 3 in 11 minutes and performing some other incredible stunts as well started floating around the Internet.[4] It was a very controversial video because not many people knew about tool-assisted speedruns at the time, especially for the NES. As the video was not clearly labeled as such, many people felt like they had been cheated when they found out it was done using an emulator. The video, however, gave the inspiration to Joel "Bisqwit" Yliluoma to start a website called NESvideos, which was dedicated to tool-assisted speedruns for the NES. At first it hosted videos only for the NES, but as the community grew, members of the community managed to add the features required for tool-assisted speedrunning into emulators for other systems. Later the name of the site was changed to TASVideos. As of January 2014, TASVideos is the largest English-language web community that produces and hosts tool-assisted speedruns; the site holds 2512 complete speedruns, of which 1319 are the fastest of their kind.[5] Tool-assisted speedruns have been made for some notable ROM hacks as well as for published games.[6] A joke personification of tool-assisted speedruns, called TAS-san (Mr. TAS), has become popular among Japanese Internet users. Tool-assisted speedruns uploaded to video sites like Nico Nico Douga, RU-vid or TASVideos may be described as a new world record by TAS-san, who is said to have the superhuman memory and reflexes needed to execute such a speedrun in real time. Method Creating a tool-assisted speedrun is the process of finding the optimal set of inputs to fulfill a given criterion - usually completing a game as fast as possible. No limits are imposed on the tools used for this search, but the result has to be a set of timed key-presses that, when played back on the actual console, achieves the target criterion. The basic method used to construct such a set of inputs is to record one's input while playing the game on an emulator, all the while saving and loading the emulator's state repeatedly to test out various possibilities and only keep the best result. To make this more precise, the game is slowed down. Initially, it was common to slow down to some low fraction (e.g. 5%) of normal speed. However, due to advances in the field, it is now expected that frame-advance, manually stepping through emulation one frame at a time, is used. A tool-assisted speedrun done without this technique will most likely be criticised for sloppy play. The use of savestates also facilitates another common technique, luck manipulation, which is the practice of exploiting the game's use of player input in its pseudo-random number generation to make favorable outcomes happen. Using a savestate from before some event, it is possible to experiment with small input variations until the event has the desired outcome. Depending on the game and event, this can be a very time consuming process, at times requiring much backtracking, and can as such take up a large portion of the total time spent making a tool-assisted speedrun. Making the ideal piece drop next in Tetris, or getting a rare drop the first time one kills an enemy, are examples of luck manipulation. A rarely used tool is brute-force searching for ideal inputs by making a computer play the game, trying all possible inputs. In theory, this process could find the ideal set of inputs for any game, but since the space of all possible inputs grows exponentially with the length of the sequence, this is only viable for optimizing very small portions of the speed run. Instead, a heuristic algorithm can be used. Although such approach does not warrant a perfect solution, it can prove very effective for solving simple puzzle games.[7] Another rarely used technique is disassembling the game executable. By exposing the game logic, this enables the player to manipulate luck without trial and error, or reveal obscure bugs in the game engine. A more common, related technique, is to monitor the memory addresses responsible for certain effects to learn why and when they change. Memory watching is supported by most emulators used on TASVideos.org. All these techniques involve direct interaction with the game state in ways not possible without emulation, but the final result, the set of inputs that makes up the speedrun, does not depend on such manipulation of the state of the emulated machine. The tool use in tool-assisted speedrunning is therefore different from the sort of state manipulation tools like Gameshark provide, since such manipulation would not be expressible as a sequence of timed inputs. Re-recording emulators Tool-assisted speedrunning relies on the same series of inputs being played back at different times always giving the same results. In a manner of speaking, the emulation must be deterministic with regard to the saved inputs (e.g. random seeds must not change from run to run). Otherwise, a speedrun that was optimal on one playback might not even complete it on a second playback. This loss of synchronization, or "desync", occurs when the state of the emulated machine at a particular time index no longer corresponds with that which existed at the same point in the movie's production. Desyncs can also be caused by incomplete savestates, which cause the emulated machine to be restored in a state different from that which existed when it was saved. Problems with emulation, such as nondeterminism and incomplete savestates, are often only discovered under the precise frame-by-frame conditions of tool-assisted speedrunning. Emulator developers often do not give speedrunning issues high priority because they have little effect on regular gameplay; consequentially the community has forked several emulators to make them suitable for the task. These include Snes9X improvement, Gens rerecording, VBA rerecording and Mupen rerecording. If a forked emulator is used to produce a TAS, playback on the normal, unmodified version of the emulator will usually result in a desync. Emulators that currently feature the tools necessary to create tool-assisted speedruns include the Arcade emulator MAME (MAMEUI's option to record an uncompressed AVI slows down a game), the NES emulator FCEUX, the Super NES emulator Snes9x, the Genesis emulator Gens, the Game Boy Advance emulator VisualBoyAdvance, the Nintendo 64 emulators Mupen64 and Project64, the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin, the Nintendo DS emulator DeSmuME, the Sega Saturn emulator Yabause, the PlayStation emulator PCSX, and several others for these and other platforms.[8] In 2012, there was a release by TASVideos.org which is an all-in-one emulator called Bizhawk. Due to the success of some of the core
I've already watched the full TAS on nico. Amazing speedrun zelpikukirby!! 30:32 Hardest level in the game. This was my favourite part of the TAS. Cheers!
8:15 Mario: You may know everything I'm Going to Do! But That's Not Gonna Help You! *Mario Dives Into the level before Shadow Mario* Mario: Since I Know Everything You're Going To Do! STRANGE ISN'T IT?!
Native resolution, to save you a wiki search. Basically the game was built to run at a certain resolution. I'm not certain if this is a tas running off game code or emulator, most likely emulator. Not a lot of games have upscaling for their native resolution without looking ugly. The notable exceptions are the notable games commonly emulated, like sm64, smash, and a few others.
Agreed. The times could have been displayed on the edges that would be black anyway due to the 4:3 resolution. I would actually be happy with native resolution, upscaled in post for the video. Otherwise, very good stuff.
I love all of the tom-foolery that takes place while you're waiting for a shine to be accessible or a cutscene to finish. All of the crazy stuff going on kept me laughing
And sms runners say theirs no more room for improvement in any% And I know most crazy things that you see are not humanly possible but some are. I would say a sub 1:11 would be possible for a human but every thing would have to be almost FramePerfect.
Man, the Japanese sound effects are so off. Where is Mario's "shoo" after completing a mission? It was so in character and now it's just gone. And why does Mario scream *before* he's shot out of the canon? It's just a little unsettling is all XD
![[TAS]スーパーマリオサンシャイン Any% in](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
