Hi,
I love this game and I'm planning to be a runner in the Original Mode (maybe also arcade in the future). A few questions before I dive in:
- What are the difference between revisions? Found something about Rev00 and Rev01, but the ROM I found says Rev A!
- Do we have an autosplitter? If not I might start working on one, both for arcade and original.
Also, any tips would be appreciated as I try to understand how everything works.
Hey! Welcome in. <3 I started a tutorial a while ago, I would love your feedback on what is good and bad about it.
The Rom with Rev A is showing up as Rev 01 when I load it. The two versions handle differently and have some cosmetic changes. Rev 00 is the one with Morobare/Bridalstone signs; Rev 01 has Soroban/Genesis signs instead. Almost all top runners prefer Rev 00 for the way it handles: its frame rate is uncapped meaning there is speedup/slowdown depending on traffic, which effectively gives you a bit more reaction time in difficult areas. Rev 00 also has more responsive steering. The two feel very very different, but both are permissible for runs. In fact emulators have a really hard time with Super Hang-On and a console tends to run slower, though again most top players have found using emulator has sharpened their skills.
There is no autosplitter because the in-game timer is what we use, and it's bugged: subseconds carry over between sectors so currently we have to manually retime runs. Because of problems with emulator timing accuracy, nobody has yet done a speedrun of Original Mode. It would have to be done on console therefore. It would be a giant, giant pain to route and would likely take hours, but if you want to do such a run I would welcome it.
You can also find a tutorial on Original Mode mechanics here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/genesis/586503-super-hang-on/faqs/15481
If you are set on running that mode let me know and we can work on routing together. I imagine there will be pinch points where we want to repeatedly abuse the break bike/retire function to get lots of money and do massive upgrades.
Any further questions please ask away!
Thanks for the warm welcome! And the quick reply :)
Great tutorial, had no idea that going to the inside would be faster in-game time wise. Guess it aplies to Original mode as well? And it seems you already poked around with the memory addresses, those will be valuable to make the autosplitter. I will also look for other variables in the Original mode for debugging and quickly testing different parts and their advantages.
No matter how buggy the game is I'm sure there's a way to autosplit it, just might take some time to figure it out specially since you guys already know how the bug works.
Thanks for the FAQ, I'll dig into it and see what we can figure out on a route. Doubt that the fastest way will be crashing on purpose because that takes quite a long time and the time saved by upgrades should be only seconds, but research will tell.
Since Original has no one running it I think it's a nice groundbreak but Arcade is also fun and can help hone skills. Plus I played Original way more than Arcade mode.
Yeah one thing I could easily do in the next few days is auto-test a number of things by doing a hack where I fix track position and remove collision, and race the same course at the same speed each time but changing different parts to see what works best. My thinking with early crash upgrades is that the sooner we get top accel, handling and speed, the advantage multiplies through every other race we do in the run. I would be very interested to see you submit some Arcade times! There's a bounty on Africa right now so just submitting any runs before new year could win you $30 up to $100. If you'd like to add me on Discord feel free, I'll start tinkering in the next few days and we can post significant results here to encourage competition.
Is it wise to apply the same thing we do on Arcade Mode to the Original? I mean, the Original Mode you have to buy parts for the bike and mechanics, so you would need to stop by and renew your stuff.
It's something that should be tested before anything, I think.
Shime, what do you mean by apply the same thing? ^^ The plan is to use RTA for Original Mode, to be clear.
No one has done Original Mode runs because emulators can save anything from 1 to 5 seconds every minute and the differences between emulators are massive. And almost no one runs this on console
Too bad everyone wants to use rev0 :P
Hi everyone, apologies for taking long to reply.
I don't have a Genesis anymore, used to have one when I was a kid. So emulator it is. Is there any emulator that can run it precisely? Otherwise I'll stick to Emuhawk.
RTA I think is the proper way to do it since we can crash on purpose to generate funds, but it needs to save more time than the time lost getting into the race. So I doubt it's worth much, specially the first ones that are quite short.
About Africa, who knows? I might very well give it a try :)
Do you guys know any memory variables that change when each race is finished? That's all I need for an auto splitter if we are going RTA.
As I understand it no emulator runs Rev 00 correctly. Just don't use Fusion. Idealy Bizhawk because it has a native frame counter and is a more known quantity (at least for me). Tako or other observers can you help me confirm an understanding here?
When I've modded other emu-primary leaderboards with Bizhawk runs I've done (frame count) / vsync (59.92274) - is that a sufficient equivalent to console RTA or does it fail to account for lag properly regardless?
I'm not sure what memory variables you'd like - but I have access to the money area, parts levels, and win/losses, things like that. An autosplitter would simply need to take account of the change of opponent after each series of races, so it could flick depending on opponent memory value.
For now I'll say that emulator runs would be branched off from console, but depending on responses we may be able to bodge it.
I'd probably accept rev1 if you want to run this on emulator. Bizhawk would probably be fine. Just don't use Fusion.
Unfortunately, there's no emulator that runs revision 0 properly. BlastEm comes closest but it requires a beefy CPU. Someone should try out the newest version and see how it plays.
Hooray, my cpu has a U after its number, useless ftw :D I agree Rev 01 is a far safer bet, thanks for the advice. @Cecil, you should use Rev 01 for Original Mode since its frame rate is constant. That will make things far easier at least.
Original Mode rules updated 27/10/21
Congratulations to our four new runners on the boards! Although Gustavo_Kennedy came in fourth place due to the time limit, later in the day he achieved a new PB time of 3'19"46 putting him in the top 10 on the board!
In third place came CecilMonk, $30, a WR holder in Top Gear, who has recently
