[Myria]

Recently, like in the last week, I made a practice ROM for Rockman X1 speedrunners.  It's a hacked X1 ROM that has some changes in order to assist speedrunners in practicing for their events:

• Game goes immediately to stage select.
• Infinite lives.
• Can always use Escape.U.
• Stage select lets you select the four Sigma levels via corners.
• When you choose a level, your items are set to what you should have for that level according to the typical "100% waterful" route.  Sigma levels give Hadouken accordingly.

You can see why speedrunners would like this for practicing...  I think it's an interesting ROM hacking type that I haven't seen before.  I'm not a speedrunner, least of all not for Rockman games.  I like to try speed runs of Triforce of the Gods 2 (A Link Between Worlds), but I suck at it =)

By the way, I think that me having the "Newbie" label here is quite ironic... =)

[FAST6191]

I must confess I rarely see such things get worked up beyond a collection of savestates and cheats, even for tool assisted speedruns. Such things as your example I tend to only see in boss rush hacks.

[TheCape]

How would you market this and how would you determine what needs to be done at each portion of the game?

I speed-ran Mischief Makers for a long time and I mainly tried to do 100% runs. The issue with those runs is that you can only collect each Gold Gem one time. If there was a way to reset each level individually when running it, that could be very helpful.

[FAST6191]

How would you market this and how would you determine what needs to be done at each portion of the game?

I speed-ran Mischief Makers for a long time and I mainly tried to do 100% runs. The issue with those runs is that you can only collect each Gold Gem one time. If there was a way to reset each level individually when running it, that could be very helpful.

That is always the question with this sort of thing. Trouble is speedrunning is an interesting world with regards to what people allow, disallow, wish for and otherwise do. Obviously the main two distinctions would be stock and tool assisted, though they each break down several more times and it all gets very odd; I could understand a spectrum but at points there were things I would have thought would have been fine would have made the would be runner/hacker as welcome as a bad smell that kicked a puppy. Mind you computer game types have some very strange ideas in general about fairness and competition design.

Reset the level hacks... can't say I have ever made one actually. I would probably look to find the new level command (or the stuff it does to end one level and enter the next), a level skip command or something similar and tweak it to rather than add one to the level counter then force it to remain the same.

[jonwvsu]

I think this is brilliant. What about NWC '90. After each segment, you could have a screen that told your time/score, as well as a level select to help you train. Maybe it could take 6:21, subtract your average SMB/RR times from it and let you practice Tetris with the remainder, over and over. Bonus points if the time could be displayed on-screen.

People from the Hack Ideas forum will be tired of hearing this from me, but for the love of god, let me skip text in SMB3. I'll pay.