TAS Plans (Jan 2018)

I've had TAS WIPs of different games all over the place but no submitted TASes in a while so I want to clear up what I'm working on all in one place. Currently I'm working on 3 TASes which are all on the Master System: Wonder Boy in Monster World, Sonic Chaos and Zillion.

Wonder Boy in Monster World is essentially finished but there were issues with the validity of my region choice. I need to use the Korean Bios to justify my use of NTSC over PAL. The current Bizhawk version (2.2.1) doesn't support the Korean BIOS but it should be in the next version. When the next version is out I'll resync the TAS with a slightly improved ending and submit. What I ended up with before running into this issue can be found here: http://tasvideos.org/5773S.html

The other 2 TASes are both for the Dega project: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19272 so they will definitely be my next submitted TASes aside from possibly Wonder Boy in Monster World.

I've started work on Sonic Chaos any%: https://youtu.be/mwICIkmPEwk
There's a glitch where you can skip special stages by entering them exactly as the game time ticks over a second and also the game time milliseconds carries over between levels so I was pretty much on a frame rule whenever it was faster to fail a special stage than to complete a level. But this morning I realized that you can pause and unpause after finishing a level to start the game timer again. This means I can advance the game time to any precision that I choose and only sacrifice 2 frames by doing it. This means that if a level has a special stage that I want to skip, I should pause and unpause in the end of the previous level exactly so that if I get to the special stage on the first possible frame, it is also the frame to trigger the glitch. This sounds ok in theory since I can just see how quickly I can TAS the level with the special stage, then resync that with a different game time. But this is not the case since Sonic Chaos has a massive problem with lag and I would need to TAS those levels probably 5-10 times or maybe even more to find the optimal frame to pause in the previous level. I was doing Sonic Chaos any% as preperation for 100% (basically so I had all the timings for special stages that were worth it) but after this discovery I think that any% would be nearly impossible to optimize. 100% would be  better so I will work on that in the future and abandon my any% attempts for now. However 100% still has a lot of these problems. I'm already at 30,000 rerecords for Sonic Chaos and I'm essentially back to the first level now with the change to the 100% goal (and only the 5th level in any%). This is extremely demotivating so I'm going to move onto Zillion for now just to have a break from the ridiculous lag reduction in Sonic Chaos.

I've started work on the Zillion TAS today and I've mainly done routing. The existing TAS seems quite good but there are a few new routes that I want to test. I'll also look in to utilizing the invincibility glitch which I think will save time.

After these 3 TASes are done I'll probably either do some that have been suggested to me by the Master System community or redo Land of Illusion with the new toy factory skip. I'll be focusing on Master System this year but I have a few ideas that might involve venturing out into Megadrive or N64.

I've been very busy over December but I'll have more time to work on TAS stuff from now on. 2017 was a great year for TASing and I hope to contribute even more this year to come