It would count

Thanks for the clarification!

Thanks for the explanation. I tried a bit more and it seems to help!

I watched OddBod's movement tutorial and a couple of runs of the first chapter, so I wanted to try it out for myself, but it doesnt work as advertised :(

OddBod says "when you first hit the ground [the cooldown] is already expired". Here the timestamp in the video: .

However when I try the wave dash in certain situations, it simply doesn't work that way. Here an example: I get the wavedash, but the hair are still blue. I had around 20 successful attempts at the wave dash and my hair was blue every single time, so i couldn't do the up dash.

In other situations however i can get it to work.

• Has there been a patch (I am on 1.2.1.11) which changed the behaviour?
• Am I doing something wrong?
• Is OddBod's explanation inaccurate?

I don't understand why new categories don't get added. I don't understand why there is such a lack of action and communication from the moderators.

@moderators: Please give the community a clear view on where you stand on this topic. Also please take the SRC moderator guidelines into consideration: https://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/qkvjz “You do not decide for the community, the community decides for you."

@Drakodan: That is a great example of a memorization/note heavy game. Still I assume that the Megaman BN3 run still needs much more skill beyond that (I don't know the game). TIS-100 really is just typing + menuing if memorization is taken out of the equation (which may be true for many puzzle games in some way or another).

@All: Thanks for the answers! I take it then that there is no doubt in the speedrunning community that notes should be allowed no matter what.

Thanks for the answers so far! I really just came here to get a feel of how the community feels about this, which I think I got.

Nonetheless to shine some light on the other side... European Union said: "you're allowed to use anything that doesn't influence the software or hardware of the game" I know of at least one game, where the rules explicitly state that it is illegal to use a RAM watch (Cuphead). This would contradict your statement, as a RAM watch doesn't influence the game in any way, However I guess this rule is implicit for many games however or am I wrong? I mean a RAM watch can give someone an unfair information advantage (the same way notes do... it's just that in almost all (but not all) cases the advantage is too small to matter).

I have a request: While it seems obvious to you, could you please add that Ctrl+W is banned?

The reason for this request: -One big part for me about speedruns is knowing about glitches, cheats like this and arbitrary code execution in games... while I agree that such a run run is not worth doing/having a category for, I would at least like to know about the potential for such a run when looking at the any% rules (so it would be documented without looking at the forums for a game)

Hi,

I am still kinda new to speedrunning (first run ever ~3 months ago) and I thought about doing a TIS-100 run. While thinking about it I got this question:

"In general: Is it allowed to use notes on a game during a run?"

Obviously for most runs, it is irrelevant anyway, but what about games like Adventure games, RPGs or runs like SMW ACE runs (with a couple of pixelperfect actions in somewhat arbitrary positions)? At first I tought it should be allowed because if you have to look up notes during a run it will be slower anyways, so looking up notes would have a definite time disadvantage anyways.

At second thought: Memorization in those kind of games aren't really that hard anyway. So what about runs, which are basically totally based on memorization? TIS-100 would such be an example: You have to write thounds of lines of assembler code. Notes would make a TIS-100 run possible with 0% game knowledge or memorization skills.

• Are there other games, which are heavily memorization based (more than your typical RPG/Adventures)?
• How do they handle notes during runs?
• Is there a general guideline on how to handle notes during such runs?

Am I missing something, werster?

There is a good and a bad ending in Sonic 1 SMS. Why exactly would it be stupid to make seperate categories for seperate endings? What would be the difference to the Sonic 2 SMS leaderboard where such category seperation exists, without anyone caring about score?

With all due respect to the mods and all the appreciation for verifying the runs (must be such a big time effort), I am pretty unhappy when it comes to the current state of Cuphead speedrunning. Not because of the new patch, but how it is handled.

1. Glitchless runs: From my understanding (correct me if I am wrong) "Glitchless" is (almost?) not affected by the patch at all. Despite that all runs got deleted. I can understand the logic used by the mods, but by the same logic... shouldn't the glitchless runs be wiped every single patch? So if you submit a run, you basically know at the day of submission, that your record will be eventually invalidated.

2. All other runs: This is what the patch actually tried to fix, but here the patch (and all future ones?) will be ignored for the most part. Except that you basically have to downgrade the game in order to speedrun it (which makes speedrunning it much less accessible). Oh yeah... and you have a Xbox version of the game? You're out of luck... you can only run glitchless now (see "1.") if you want to have a good time (again decreasing accessibility for speedrunning this game). This also means that the pause menu glitch is doomed to stay in the game, from what I understand, which makes a lot of runners don't want to run these categories anymore.

So the way I see it, the situation after the patch is much worse and that is not because of the patch. Basically the newest (and thereby best version) of the game is unrunnable. I think it is the wrong approach to run the oldest, buggiest version of a game by default, especially since there is no real justification for it, besides "there are a lot of runs for the old patch" (guess what... the newer patches will exist for a much longer time):

• Glitchless? Cuphead is dead.
• Xbox? Cuphead is dead.
• Don't want to pause glitch? Cuphead is dead.
• Don't want to WSG/Want to run current patch? Cuphead is dead. (which the new patch specifically addresses)

I think other games (like Bloodborne) have much better solutions like current patch/legacy categories. Even with subcategories like that (like we have for difficulties in Cuphead), I believe such a solution, would make much more people happy. Roughly speaking get rid of glitchless and make the following sub-categories:

• Legacy: We have a category for all old runs. Different versions might get put together, but I feel that old patch runs aren't as relevant anymore anyways.
• Newest patch: Highlights the most current/relevant runs. Also makes glitchless eventually obsolete
• Glitchless: Rules change with every patch (and runs may get moved to legacy) and deals with issues like pause glitch.

Such a solution would lead to:

• Glitchless? Basically only there to increase appeal to running the game depending on the current patch
• Xbox? Alive and kicking
• Don't want to pause glitch? Play glitchless for now and wait for next patch
• Don't want to WSG/Want to run current patch? Just run newest patch.

Another approach would be to attribute a run with a game version (like NieR:Automata does). This way people can differentiate between a good current patch run and a legacy one.

I feel that my suggestions are only rough ideas, but I am pretty sure that the current way of handling things is probably the worst for the community overall.

The only reason I can think of, why such a category (which is basically 100%) shouldn't exist, is the absence of such a run. So if you have a run, I am totally in favor for adding this category.

Having that said, I am not really interested in doing such a run myself atm.

Why is there no SMS Version category? There is an empy GG category, however. I looked at one of the Genesis runs and that version looks very different from SMS. I may would run this on SMS.

I tried to run this game on PAL, to confirm what I already believed.

Summary:

• IGT on PAL are definitely better than NTSC
• PAL is definitely slower than NTSC (you loose 2-4 seconds per level)
• The exit dash timing is off
• You hear the music is playing slower and certain things (like falling) feel definitely slower

So nothing really surprising to me, but a confirmation to destroy any doubts. Just wanted to share my findings. Video here:

Thanks brad, got a new one with 11:59 in verification ;)

Regarding the TAS: I watched mike89's 100% run again and realized, that there is a "skip scrolling screen at end of boss"-glitch, which I didn't know about and which isn't in my run. So there are more glitches to incorporate into a TAS if anyone is going to create another any% TAS for this game...

Here an example of the glitch (@1:32min): You can perform the glitch by simply jumping on the right most pixels without bounicing into the wall. You should do the jump with some speed... the jump has to land within a 3 pixel window. Can be done manually, but I only accomplished to do it 1 out of ~10 times. Thanks to Sonikkustar for explaining it to me!

@kickasspancakes: Thanks for the kind words. I put quiet a bit of time into playing and researching as well... it wasn't just watching runs (e.g. I can't recall actually having seen the special stage glitch in any video).

@bradeh999: Well... the lags are pseudo-random, but the game still behaves deterministically. So if you (as you do with TAS) always have the same inputs, the result will always be the same and the run will be consistent. The problem I experience is, that when let's say I can finish level 2 faster by 50 frames. If I don't edit the rest of the speedrun it may still work (I haven't really tested), but than at the beginning of level 3 i will be idleing for 50 frames (because the level starts 50 frames faster than before, but my level 3 inputs are still at the same time as they were with the long lvl2 version). Now ideally I would just delete 50 frames worth of input and everything should be ok, but it isn't because that messes up the lags for level 3 somehow :( Besides that: TASing doesn't seem to be particulary difficult: You have a "timestamp" at which you tell the emulator to perform an input. You can make a manual run, record your inputs and than refine them afterwards. It seems to be time consuming however, if you want to make everything frame perfect.

As I said before: I am pretty sure my TAS has enough flaws, so that one could push it to 10:59.

I checked setting the emulator to PAL and running at 50 fps... the counter still counts up to 59 and everything is behaving exactly the same way. I haven't tested anything on actual SMS hardware.

I am not sure what you mean by "crashed the game", but tails has no bonus stages as far as I know, which would explain why you never see a special stage glitch with tails.

Hi,

I was doing some runs on this game and even the sum of my best segments was only tieing the world record, so even if I did an error-free run (at least for my definition of that) I might wouldn't get a new record... so I was wondering: How low can you theoretically go?

I created (and commented) a TAS here:

Summary: I think Sonic Chaos sub-11min is possible. If someone has experience in TAS and knows how to get around random lags eating inputs and is interested in creating a sub-11min run, hit me up! I won't create one on my own any time soon, as it is too much work to redo everything.

EDIT: I didn't know back then, that broadcasts get deleted after two weeks, so a reupload:

Good news: I found out under which condition the special stage is skipped!

Bad news: It's basically RNG :(

There is a timer variable @12C2, which is incremented every frame and reset to 0, after it's value has been 59 for the last frame. It is involved in calculating the ingame time (upper left corner). If you trigger the special stage at exactly the frame, where the value is 59, the special stage is skipped. This is at least the one way, i got the glitch. So basically you have a 1/60 chance to trigger the glitch for each special stage and a 1/216000 chance to trigger it 3 times in a run, if you don't actually try to trigger it. Theoretically it is timeable, but you have to hit a 16ms frame window, for when you trigger the special stage, which in turn depends on your position, speed and ingame timer. However, this can be used in a TAS quite easy!

EDIT: Note, that there may be more than one way to trigger this glitch!

I discussed the glitch already in the Aqua Planet Zone thread, but here is a video about how to reproduce the glitch: