Zelda speedrunners are attacking the memory allocator | Hacker News Reader

Zelda speedrunners are attacking the memory allocator

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If you are at all interested in speed running, check out Summoning Salt's YouTube channel. It breaks down the world record progression of many classics games. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w

Another great channel is DotsAreCool. He explains how to manipulate the stack by placing turtle shells to skip to end credits. https://www.youtube.com/user/dotsarecool

It is seriously amazing how inventive the speedruns get once you do what is humanly possible to achieve the best time. Glitch hitboxes? Sure. Abuse internal map workings to skip to "parallel universes"? You bet it's been done. Hecking up the memory allocator? What?

The whole popularity of the "parallel universes" thing seems weird to me because I think it's just modular arithmetic? Weird way to describe it.

this is precisely what’s cool about speed running, boring computer bugs and exploits become a kind of magic when you put them in the context of a game people already know and can understand.

I'm not really a fan of such speedruns to be honest. It's just like abusing Mario/Pokemon buffer overrun to inject a jump to the credits sequence. Sure, you jumped to the end credits quickly, but have you really beaten the game quickly?

You got to the end state of the turing machine, of course you did.

The communities for these games decide what categories are run, so if lots of people agree that e.g. memory corruption is no fun they can either restrict it to a special category or forbid it outright.

It's pretty rare to have games where only the deeply technical memory glitch speed runs are a thing, much more often that's either a category few bother with or its forbidden.

It's more common in TAS because a TAS can manipulate things to a state where it's hilarious. e.g the increasingly deranged "correct" answers to TASbot brain age.

> e.g the increasingly deranged "correct" answers to TASbot brain age.

Video link: https://youtu.be/mSFHKAvTGNk

It's stupidly funny.

The people who speedrun have already beaten the games they speedrun dozens if not hundreds of times.

There are different categories of speed runs on most games. It's not about "beating" the game (however you choose to define that); it's about satisfying the parameters of the given category.

For example, here are the categories for SMW: https://www.speedrun.com/smw#0_Exit

You’ll find it valuable to dig a bit more deeply. Look for the 100% or glitchless category runs. Some of them are indeed breaking the game, but so many more categories involve skill to do crazy things.

A great example of the latter are the super monkey ball speedruns.

It's a bit like winning a game of chess by angering your opponent to the point where they have a heart attack and die.

That's why there are various categories for the speedruns. I just checked speedrun.com and there are 13 categories for Super Mario World, one of the games most famous for a jump to credits glitch. 23 people have scores for "0 exit" (jump to credits) and there are 203 for "96 exit" (100% completion effectively).

Abuse the exposed circuitry of the controller? Also done: https://youtu.be/tr6txZdNcc0?t=445

This is, by now, basically a Zelda speedrunning tradition. They also used it to much success in Ocarina of Time, where it was possible to overwrite the pointer telling the game which cutscene to play by doing a very specific sequence of actions, which allowed you to basically jump to the last battle of the game.

The stairs glitch is more like this, as you walk up and down the stairs to the graveyard the game keeps instantiating objects until it runs out of slots and the grave that you normally remove using one of the songs can be bypassed.

For those curious, the techniques referenced are Wrong Warping[1] and Sun's Song without Zelda's Lullaby[2]

[1] http://zelda.speedruns.com/oot/wrongwarp/wrong-warp-explaine...

[2] https://youtu.be/kr-D0gn27J0?t=45

It's not clear... which Zelda game is it?

The Gamecube version of The Wind Waker

Wind Waker, on the GameCube. The next tweet is a link to the speedrunner's twitch stream (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/450136461##)

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