submission_ace_v2.txt

[module:youtube|v=Po-kw96T4lg]

* Emulator: lsnes rr2-beta23
* Rom: Final Fantasy VI (J)
* Aims for fastest time
* Manipulates luck
* Executes arbitrary code
* Features mid-frame resets
* Corrupts save data
* Ends input early

Here is an improvement of 8661 frames from the [5145S|previous submission], thanks to a route change. Most of the tricks and glitches leading to ACE are identical to the previous submission, so we will only describe the changes in the present text. Comments are embedded in the above video and are available [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/clementgallet/ff6-tas/master/ff6_ace_v2_captions.srt|here].

!! Route change

To reach the Phantom Forest, Sabin and Cyan are mandatory. We choose in this TAS another way for them to join the team, by doing the Kefka at Narshe section. Normally, when you leave Narshe the first time with Locke, you cannot enter Narshe again until much later after the 3 scenarios. However, if you overwrite the events flags stored in the savefile with the ones from the beginning of the game before Locke joins, you can freely enter Narshe. By heading north to the snowfield, you will be able to trigger the fight against Kefka. After that, you can form your team, which contains Sabin and Cyan. Because they did not actually join the team yet, they are replaced by their Moogle placeholder. After that, the route is pretty much the same.

!! Executed code

The code executed to trigger the ending was improved a bit. We were very lucky this time to encounter the Goblin*2 fight, so we only had to kill one enemy, which shortened the code.

  3A             DEC                   A = 0xFF
  9E 55 3E       STZ $3E55,x [$3EEC]   Unflag enemy death, to avoid an XP/Gold message
  0C 3A 3A       TSB $3A3A             Remove enemies from the fight
  C2 20          REP #$20              16-bit accumulator
  A9 62 13       LDA #$1362            Loads the ending sequence event address
  0C 4F 1F       TSB $1F4F             Set NPC event bit to avoid the ending softlock
  9D 4E 12       STA $124E,x [$12E5]   Set event pointer to the ending
  69 7F 02       ADC #$027F            A = 0x15E1
  1B             TCS                   Fix the stack pointer
  5C C9 18 C1    JML $C118C9           An address in the C1 bank that contains SEP #$20 then RTS

Also, the offset in the color configuration to write this code was optimized to minimize the number of color values to change. Both changes accounted for a total improvement of 7 seconds.

!! Suggested screenshots

Frames 62280, 95655