Bufferable RNG-timing calibrated movement setup for damageless NTSC & PAL Ceres Ridley encounters

Channel:

eternisedDragon7

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Published on May 14, 2021 10:22:04 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hC4uN3UheY

Game:

Super Metroid (1994)

Duration: 17:43

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8

Normally, getting past Ceres Ridley damageless can take 50+ attempts in the hope Ridley uses a workable pattern of attacks, namely mostly fireball attacks consisting of 2 Fireball waves each (F), or flying in a Circle (C), but not the hard to dodge Rams (R), especially if one's unpracticed at firing at Ridley at a fast and steady pace

This is an improved (this time audio-cue based) setup over an older (rapid button-mashing based) setup that I devised for the same purpose ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySq5z2GxTG8 ), but since both setups have a lot in common, one can find further related info on the general kind of approach in my response comment under this other video, too. This new setup should at least on emulator allow getting 1 of 4 workable Ceres Ridley attack patterns most of the time and be at most 1 times frame perfect (namely for the Jump button press to advance the game from the Start Game screen to Ceres, with much longer frame windows for all other inputs), and on console it might possibly be slightly less consistent dependent on the synchronization of the Sound Processing Unit with the rest of the CPU.

For the starting point of this setup it is assumed that the last used savefile (so that the Missile cursor selects it by default) is a savefile just past the introduction scenes so that it starts at Ceres.
By advancing the game from power on straight to Ceres the order of RNG values (which change almost without interruptions continuously over time) is fixed into a known sequence ( https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/396448200447361024/842820074988372048/main_path.txt , https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/396448200447361024/842820084752973824/main_loop.txt ), and Ceres Ridley's attack pattern up to the first ram attack (besides Samus movement dependent tail swipes) is (indirectly) entirely determined by the RNG value in which Samus enters the last Ceres room. Using this fact, Taco made a text file with a chronologically ordered list (up to the point at which the RNG starts looping) of Ridley attack patterns (using the F/C/R notation, and up to the first ram attack each) depending on arrival frames since the start of the game which is the same for NTSC & PAL ( https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/396448200447361024/842816288153403412/ridley_stuff.txt ), and I devised (new) suitable bufferable Ceres movement setups (for NTSC & PAL) based on this that are adjusted in such a way that they aim for Samus arriving in Ceres Ridley's room within a small frame range that correspond to the most dense and largest available cluster of long enough and consequentially most suitable Ceres Ridley attack patterns (with at least 4 fireball attacks among at least 7 attacks before the 1st ram). The beginning of the whole setup starts by starting to hold Start just not too long after the game starts up, so that the game is in a buffered manner advanced to the game title screen from which point on the notes of the title screen music (which come at least 3 times consecutively in pairs of a louder note quickly followed by a quieter one) are used for timing Jump (or by default A) button presses. In NTSC the A presses are meant to happen in each of the 3 screen advancement steps on the 2nd note of these note pairs, and in PAL it's the same except for the 2nd instance of pressing A, that is aimed at the 1st note of the pair of notes there (since the screen change otherwise takes too long for when the 3rd A press is meant to happen), but all of this should be possible to be read off of the input display on the bottom of the video screen, with the movement part through Ceres included.

The video shows (first for the 4 cases in NTSC, then PAL) the following cases in this order:
Pattern for frame 812: CFCCFFFR
Pattern for frame 813: FFFFCCFR
Pattern for frame 814: FFCFFCFCFFFCFCCR
Pattern for frame 815: FFCFFCCR

For the details of the setups and a lot of further information check out my continued elaboration in my comments beneath this video.

This setup also has been tested on lsnes and it has been confirmed that it's accurate there as well (and on SNES9X 1.51 RR as well), and since lsnes is the closest emulator to the SNES console in terms of emulation accuracy, this setup should work just as well on console.

Aran;Jaeger

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