Red IGT tracking FAQ

Pokemon Red IGT tracking research FAQ

Q: What are you doing?
A: I am researching a method of tracking Pokemon Red's in-game timer for use in a glitchless speedrun.

Q: Why is the in-game timer important?
A: When you save the game, the game stores the IGT in hours:minutes:seconds:frames. There are 60 frames per second. RNG manipulations require saving and resetting, and if you save on a bad frame, the RNG will shift and the manip will fail. Frames 36 and 37 almost always fail, and longer manips usually have 3-10 additional fail frames. So, if you could track the IGT from the start of the game to a save point, you could attempt to save on a cluster of good frames, thus improving your success rate from ~90% to 100%.

Q: How do you track the IGT?
A: By running a program that attempts to emulate the IGT each run. This is done by using a regular timer with a few modifications. First, the game actually runs at 59.727 frames per second, rather than 60, so a simple conversion is made. Second, the IGT freezes whenever the game's LCD turns off, such as when entering/exiting a building or a battle. Using emulation tools, the community has figured out exactly how many frames are lost this way. However, since the number of Route 1 encounters varies from run to run, I need to count how many I get in order to accurately track the IGT.

Credit to Narmno2 for making the tracking program, and to Gifvex for making the emulation tools.

Q: How far will you track the IGT?
A: Just to the save tile in Viridian City. From this save, I'll manipulate a perfect Nidoran that always gets in the ball, no encounters from the Nido bush to Weedle Guy, and turn 1 String Shot from Weedle. Without IGT tracking, this manip would get the Nidoran on 57/60 frames, the encounterless forest on ~48/60 frames and turn 1 String Shot on ~37/60 frames.

Q: Why not further?
A: Using Potions also freezes the LCD briefly, but how much time is lost depends on where you Potion -- in the forest, outside of the forest, in battle, on Route 3, etc. Tracking this requires too much mental energy, and the manips in Mt. Moon have a high success rate anyway.

Q: So what's the downside? Why hasn't IGT tracking been used before?
A: Two reasons. 1) The Nidoran manip didn't extend into Viridian Forest until recently, so its success rate was a reasonable 57/60. 2) It loses a bit of time to synchronize your timer with the game's timer, and then to wait for a good save frame. Losing 2 seconds every run to avoid a 3/60 chance isn't worth it.

However, I recently thought of a method that would reduce the wait time to less than a second. When you exit Viridian Mart, try to pause the timer on a frame that is a whole number of seconds before from the frame on which you will save. An audio cue seems best for this. If the frame is a good one, save and reset ASAP once you reach the save tile. If the frame is bad, take 2 extra steps or wait before saving.

For example, let's say I pause the timer at 00:05:09:50 and I expect to reach the save tile at 00:05:15:50. Frame 50 will fail, and the most reliable cluster is frames 14-32. I could try to wait 24+ frames before saving, or I could take 2 extra steps (34 frames) for consistency. Either way, I would know in advance how long I needed to wait. This should make the execution a bit faster and easier, and thus make IGT tracking optimal.