New problem discovered involving game time.

2004-03-01 08:23:05 pm

When this game is saved, it keeps track of such things as which Metroids have been defeated and which pickups you have collected as well. It also saves your game time. Unfortuantely, it only saves the current number of hours and minutes, and ignores the seconds completely.

When you reload a save game, it will reset the seconds to zero, but the minute total will stay at what it was before (it basically rounds down.) This can be used to artificially lower your time if you know just when to save the game each time.

Thread title:

Radix

2004-03-01 08:27:55 pm

Thanks for noticing this... it means for metroid 2 runs we'll ignore the end time, and just calculate from loading start to save completed for each segment and add them up. I'll calc bs's "1:12" time later.

Chozo Nut

2004-03-02 04:51:18 am

Quote from Bladegash:

When this game is saved, it keeps track of such things as which Metroids have been defeated and which pickups you have collected as well. It also saves your game time. Unfortuantely, it only saves the current number of hours and minutes, and ignores the seconds completely.

When you reload a save game, it will reset the seconds to zero, but the minute total will stay at what it was before (it basically rounds down.) This can be used to artificially lower your time if you know just when to save the game each time.

How did you figure that out?

Red Scarlet

2004-03-02 05:00:17 am

I('d) like to watch (some MP3 runs)

Bladegash is a game hax0r.

How's Dragon Quest 2 coming?! >.>

Chozo Nut

2004-03-02 05:06:55 am

Ahh of course. That makes sense.

Radix

2004-03-03 01:55:45 am

Brightstar's new run is up at SDA: http://planetquake.com/sda/other/metroid2.html

Tempest

2004-03-03 09:20:04 am

Is that new run a distinctly new run?

I noticed the file sizes are different and that in another thread in this forum Brightstar mentioned having to use a cartridge. So is this the run on a cartridge?

I just want to know before I download since I *just* finished downloading the old 1:12 run last night :)

nate

2004-03-03 10:12:08 am

afaik it's totally new.

Tempest

2004-03-03 10:36:28 am

Alrighty, I'll pick it up while I'm at it.

Thanks!

Emptyeye

2013-12-03 12:42:06 am

This is the BIGGEST BUMP.

Anyway, believe it or not, there is a reason for this. The short version is that it's a good thing in-game time was never a thing for timing this game. The timer is just as useless for single-segment runs as it is for segmented.

The longer version is here. To sum up, though, there are ways of manipulating the timer that have nothing to do with your skill at actually playing Metroid II.

carlmmii

2013-12-04 03:27:34 pm

Awesome. I always knew that door transitions had some kind of effect on the timing system, but I never knew exactly how. Makes sense though that it's a tick-based counter though that would cause it. Simple, low processing impact... but wholly inaccurate.

Thanks for this. :)

Emptyeye

2013-12-05 06:27:56 pm

Woo, I got carlmmii to come out of hiding! I'll call that a victory. :)

In all seriousness, you're welcome. This was only my second real bit of digging into a ROM (The first being to confirm that spider throwing wasn't actually any faster than just rolling/running with the Varia, because my eyes refused to believe it), and it was fun to try and figure out what made it tick (Haha) once I found the timer.

By the way, Bladegash was correct in that, while "seconds" per se don't exist in the timer, the relevant counter (the 00 to 13 counter) resets to 00 upon loading a saved game. The most you could gain from this in a segmented run is actually 55 or so seconds, since the loading sequence itself takes about 6 seconds, guaranteeing that the timer will increment at least once (and possibly twice) before you can actually move.

Zeke

2014-01-21 03:03:32 am

Time bomb set get out fast!

Wow, what an analysis! This was well worth the bump, emptyeye. Thanks for figuring it out for us.

I would absolutely love to see a 0:00 run, though I doubt I would have the patience to watch much of it. (It would probably be more fun to do than to watch -- segmenting the hell out of it, of course.) It's just so cool that that's possible. It's like Phantom Hourglass, where you can use safe zones and time pickups to finish the Temple of the Ocean King with your hourglass full.

carlmmii

2014-02-07 01:47:25 am

Obviously that would be a TAS/emulator task, considering there's no easy way to get any kind of memory readout without some serious hardware modification.

Zeke

Edit history:

Zeke: 2014-02-12 03:37:17 pm

2014-02-12 03:34:25 pm

Time bomb set get out fast!

You're thinking memory readout -- I'm thinking timer. If Emptyeye's math is right, it's just a matter of never having the game unpaused on one of those check frames. It would be easy to whip up a timer that dings when you need to pause or something. The hard part would be actually playing the game in three-second intervals.

Emptyeye

2014-02-12 06:46:39 pm

Yeah, while it would obviously be easier being able to see that memory address, I think it COULD be done in real-time, since it'll increment from the same point when you power up the system (Granting, the point may be different on a GBP or SGB).

BioSpark

2014-02-12 07:18:48 pm

um, why not just time it with real time? it's not like there are cutscenes or text you have to scroll through

TheMG2

2014-02-12 07:25:11 pm

They do, they were just talking about a joke game time run.

BioSpark

2014-02-12 07:45:05 pm

ooh duh. would be interesting to see a 0:00 tas though

kirbymastah

2014-02-13 02:19:50 am

Quote from BioSpark:

ooh duh. would be interesting to see a 0:00 tas though

GTFO, you have a 0% TAS to finish

arkarian

2014-02-13 10:53:47 am

red chamber dream

tas? he has a 0% on console to finish

BioSpark

2014-02-13 12:06:44 pm

i have school to finish >_>

carlmmii

2014-02-22 01:51:12 pm

Quote from Zeke:

You're thinking memory readout -- I'm thinking timer. If Emptyeye's math is right, it's just a matter of never having the game unpaused on one of those check frames. It would be easy to whip up a timer that dings when you need to pause or something. The hard part would be actually playing the game in three-second intervals.

Interesting thought. I might play around with this a little bit.