I made NES Tetris EVEN FASTER

[@ErenMichelet]

WHEN I WAS TALKING TO YOU ABOUT THIS YOU DIDN’T MENTION YOU DID IT IN ASSEMBLY!!! Wow this is just incredibly impressive and I’m completely blown away by the effort you put into this and the future possibilities. Congrats fractal and can’t wait to see you continue pushing this game further!

[@kreuner11]

On NES, assembly is the only practical way, 6502 assembly was made to be easily developed for

[@masemoney666]

in assembly?? hoooly suit. fractal is such a legend.

[@Kylemsguy]

Honestly the first Nintendo console to use C was the N64

[@gairisiuil]

@@Kylemsguy snes had rarely used compilers

[@EebstertheGreat]

I suspect decompilation is a bigger issue here than compilation. Decompilers do exist for the 6502, but it takes a lot of work to turn a decompiled ROM into something that can be humanly understood. (Of course, it also takes a while just to understand a disassembled ROM, but maybe less time. And I think partially-commented versions of the NES Tetris code already exist.) If you work with the original code, you can copy and paste large sections of it and just make some specific changes. I do wonder why NES and SNES devs practically never used a higher-level language, though. I guess the C compliers for 6502 available at the time must have been really bad. Also, there was no compiler for the PPU, so a lot of memory addresses and registers had to be manually set and checked anyway, so maybe there wasn't such a big advantage.

[@fractal161]

Hope you enjoyed the video! Here are some notes: - In case I conveyed this poorly, this hack is *not* meant to replace any existing hacks, like double killscreen or (more recently) Hydrant's smooth gravity mod. They are both unique ways of creating new and challenging gameplay. All I want to do is introduce yet another way of doing exactly that, just one that uses a trick most people wouldn't think of. - Emulators don't exactly work nicely with this, since they're typically coded to only poll at a rate of 60fps or whatever (boo). You can still enjoy all of the different falling speeds, but you just can't get those 45hz rolls. - More to come! There's no way I escaped video or factual mistakes, so i'll do my best to update this when I learn of any.

[@HeyoNight]

for the pal mod, is it the 12.5/15 hz das or normal 10 hz?

[@Object336Tetris909]

Can you try your own hack of Tetris at Level 29 with 1/2 speed? Let's see what happens with the bugged colors, it could be the same, or it could be even more bugged colors!

[@Thepotatoz.]

How do I download it onto my nes and how can I tell if my game is pal or NTSC

[@Kadencabs]

@@Thepotatoz. get an everdrive like most people including me

[@grimicron]

As a programmer I'm amazed you managed to do such a good ROM hack in assembly. Bravo Fractal!

[@LunamLegionam]

W music 0:32

[@wowyok4507]

he's one of the smartest stem students in the USA so it's expected.

[@DGCubes]

Fractal, this is SO COOL. I'm blown away by the fact that you did all that optimizing in assembly, that's immensely impressive. It's so awesome that this exists :)

[@biggiemac42]

Fractal you are a legend and this is a legendary contribution to the game. I didn't even think twice when you talked about optimizing all the game code during crash storytime, but this is very obviously the project it was part of! I'm blown away, well done.

[@heyitslok]

wtf wtf wtf you are so so SO insane everything about this is amazing from the video editing to the gameplay to of course the actual romhack itself classic tetris is so lucky to have you

[@Owen-bk5fc]

My mans learned Assembly to optimize the actual NES Tetris code to make new breakthroughs in compatibility and it was all just because he really wants to be able to casually play forever into dks and upset vandy

[@MostBased_]

i just watched all your matches in the championship and instantly fell in love you have mad skills bro and your joy for this game is unmatched! and to find out you ALSO have a youtube channel with a BUNCH of good videos?? made my night sir. keep doing great things youre awesome frac

[@Vijver]

This is amazing Fractal!! And a super well made explanation to go along with it

[@JustinEvertrip]

Every time I think the ceiling has been hit.... wow! Great video Fractal!

Okay, this is awesome! Well done Fractal!

[@slidenaway]

Outstanding work as always man, pushing the boundaries as always!!!

[@johnp2860]

holy fractal this video is amazing and the speed hack is beautiful

[@aliengenie8896]

Theoretically, wouldn't you want there to be code to scale the gravity-per-frame along with the increased "frame rate"? That way, the speed at level 19, for example, could be *roughly equal* to the speed at level 19 in the original version of the game, but because there's less granularity in the framerate, you can end up with a situation where the gravity speed *smoothly* transitions from Level 16 speed to 19, from 19 to 29, etc. rather than having levels 16-18 be the same, and levels 19-28 be the same... and of course this would have the consequence that higher levels would eventually get down to one tile drop per frame, even at the highest framerates. I'm don't know enough about NES Tetris to know if the piece fall speeds are simply contained in a table, or if they're actually calculated based on a formula though.

[@punchingplayerpenguin3291]

in the original game it is in a table, I have no idea about this though. though it would be hilarious if it was calculated by a formula and had no cap so level 255 WOULD indeed be a killscreen, though you'd probably be oofed long before that

[@RadekCarda]

omg! this is the best thing that happened to tetris in a long time, thank you!

[@nwimpney]

This is cool. I'm currently working on a tetris game running on my own hardware (microcontroller, and addressable led "screen"). I'm trying to clone NES Tetris very closely, with the exception that I'm not tied to 60.1Hz, so while my piece drops are timed identically, the controls, and even piece moves, can happen at a much higher rate. I haven't even tried rolling, since I'm a mediocre level 7 "hypotapper", but in theory it should be possible to roll at up to the limit set by the debouncing I do on the swtiches. I can also have different speed curves, so I'll have options for nes-style frame limited speeds, same speeds with a smooth progression (since I'm not locked to 3/2/1 frames per drop), and an overall linear speed increase without large steps.

[@galoomba5559]

that sounds so cool!

[@PeterJavi]

This is s huge leap forward for the scene. Thanks for doing all this work Fractal

[@AvGeekW159]

This is of unreasonable quality. I learned so much being around you, and I hope to see you in Portland!

[@aenstreams1998]

I think the title screen is dope dude! So proud of you man. What an accomplishment and even more importantly a testament to your tenacity! Well done!

[@xJAWAx]

Just watched your ctwc finals match. Amazing! Great work.

[@hallomeinnameistkarl216]

another cool thing that makes this hack even more impressive is, that the MMC1, which Tetris normally uses doesn‘t have a scanline counter. The Next common mapper to support this is the MMC3, which means he had to Reprogram the Entire Core of the Game to a completely Different Mapper.

[@CallousCoder]

Nicely done! Just one question though, why did did you optimize the code when you probably could’ve gotten by with just playing the music once a frame. Probably even sounds because the human ear doesn’t register anything less than 3 to 4 frames out of sync anyways. But from one game hacker to another I your optimization was very cool.

[@michael2244]

Congrats on becoming the 2023 CTWC Champion

[@plasmaosu]

Love the time trax music used in Part 2!!!! amazing work

[@SpinningSandwich]

NES Shirase unlocked! On a different front, I'm looking at GameBoy ASM right now, with an eye towards making a TGM style game there. Would definitely be interested in more details on the technical side about how you programmed this ROM hack, particularly the speed optimizations.

[@masemoney666]

fractal - congratulations on an *incredible* semifinal. you earned this final spot & i wish you the best of luck in the finals. you’re one step away from world champion - you can do this.

[@JugglerOfWords]

it would be really cool to see the top TGM players try this out...... and thanks for bringing back memories of CTEC 2019 with a good old Janinsanity clip....

[@JohnnyLeven]

This is absolutely amazing. Major props to you.

[@ZipplyZane]

I would like a video on things you did to optimize the code. I know it would probably be hard to cover everything, but some basics would be pretty nice. Kinda like how Kaze talks about his optimizations for SM64.

[@AndreasToth]

The passion and dedication of this game has turned you into an absolute super coder!

[@coalbucket9383]

Very well edited!

[@meuntraceable]

This must have taken a lot of effort overall and it’s amazing to see the journey to achieve the results

[@halfagon]

rolling is so much better, but it is a lot faster.

[@amberlandball]

Fractal, I want to see the title of the song at the start. Without the jokes, wow. This is amazing!

[@stevemelo]

FRACTAL: 2023 CTWC Champion!!!

[@antonioanto723]

Your rom works so much faster, i am using on my smartphone, really amazing, do you know where i could download the TetrisJonas Rom? And the Rom used for the World Championship is downloadble ? Thank you Fractal, you are a prodigy

[@Kosmo_Z]

Crazy well made video!

[@gabrielbarrantes6946]

Mind blown, this kid is exceptional, at his age I would never think on changing a game like that, nice!

[@jazzthief81]

Very cool. Many congrats!

[@hfcriske]

Omg writing something like this in assembly is insane, very nice!

[@ryanamburgy2791]

this is the best video ive ever watched

[@stefantomas]

It would be interesting to see this hack used in comp. It would enable some double-killscreen battles to happen.

[@Grant-H2O]

Thanks for sharing!

[@muffyio]

Just curious... Have you updated your speedhack rom hack to include the new level 39 super kill screen? And of course.... HUGE CONGRATULATIONS ON BECOMING THE NEW WORLD CHAMPION!!!!

[@zetorux]

What a cool project!

[@matwith2teas]

this could add a new level to strategy in classic Tetris games, maybe some players choose to play faster for higher score vs a player playing a slower frame rate for a safer game

[@aenstreams1998]

Getting that square piece over was nuts…7:22

[@ttpdlistener]

so proud of you today, fractal! we’ll miss you until you get back from homework ❤️

[@man_without_name]

Hi, tell me, what song did you sing at the beginning of the second round against Eric at the championship final?

[@mlunguomnyama5518]

This video was suggested to me after i randomly watched a tetris world cup out of boredom. And I can safely say I didn't understand a single thing about this video lol

[@JohnSmith_1123]

EVERYTHING in this video is legendary

[@eflat7_]

fractal you absolute legend you

[@Kalaphant]

5:50 Oh cool! That's funny lol. Just improving the code

[@isaacramirezrenteria6520]

what brand of control do you use to play the rom and do rolling?

[@NerdTheBox]

sheesh you went all out on this video. pog.

[@NerdTheBox]

also it was very obvious which video was 30 hz lol. and yes it does matter because tucks/spins exist

[@michaelclarkj]

Simply mindblowing.

[@Yamboy_1]

This is awesome

[@legendarygaming5107]

SCUTI, YOU’RE UP!

[@wallbant]

lets go i can pal now

[@ZipplyZane]

Do you even actually need the mapper? The CPU of the NES runs at a certain speed, so you could keep track of how many cycles each instruction takes, and poll at the appropriate time. Don't get me wrong: I know it would be a lot harder, since you'd need to get the timing very accurate, probably making sure your polling happened in H-blank to avoid any graphics errors. It's much easier to let the mapper do it for you. So I'm not saying you *should* do it that way. Just that, technically, you *could*. Or is there some reason I'm wrong?

[@gabrielbondon3673]

The pal rom on 60hz console might be wonderful news for the pal community :O

[@mirabilis]

If blocks fall 2 steps per frame, are some tucks impossible?

[@Nickps]

Will Europeans also be able to play NTSC on PAL consoles eventually? Even if not, it's still a great achievement but I'm curious

[@gairisiuil]

a modded version of pal could play at ntsc speeds if you're curious

[@harrisongiger7874]

This video is amazing holy shit. This deserves like 12M views

[@Manche-De-Pelle]

Pure genius

[@MommyCloudAudiosGaming]

Thank you so much

[@baraYTGD]

Rolling on killscreen X2 mode is like DAS/hyper tapping on normal killscreen

[@ThorkilKowalski]

This is amazing. The skills you show here are more than enough to land you a job as a (top) software developer. Amazing job reverse engineering 35 year old assembly. I'm a CTO and I would be proud of such an accomplishment.

[@kingyodah5415]

Well soon relativistic speeds such as speed of light will be reached and time will slow to a crawl

[@FloydMaxwell]

Mind blowing that you wanted the game to be faster!

[@GregCannon7]

This is so sick

[@Kalaphant]

2:27 Wait is that how Speed Uncap works?

[@TheEntropianist]

Killing it

[@jayyou6125]

Just when I thought me writing c++ is geeky enough...

[@pierluigizagaria]

Could you make a ntsc mode for PAL version?

[@blahdelablah]

Technically I think it's possible, but how well it would play would depend on the TV. Many PAL TVs supported 60Hz refresh rates but not all of them. You could have 60Hz gameplay with a 50Hz display but it might cause gameplay issues.

[@creepercraftytT99]

This is gonna cause crashes earlier i think, since there's more to do by default

[@saturdaymorninggames]

Aquatic Ambience 😌

[@iBall1]

based creative mode music

[@davidpratt277]

This may be a stupid question but if the original game is 60 fps and polls once per frame why is rolling limited to 30 hz

[@fishactivation5087]

There has to be one frame of nothing, otherwise it'll treat it as you holding the button.

[@MylesTheGreat]

fast tetris = fun

[@zipengli4243]

have you ever played guideline tetris?

[@abdullahtayyab8828]

man is a nerd and a tetris master

[@LetsChat]

You need a more ergo friendly chair.

[@stephaniecarcieri8850]

how can you play at speeds over level 29

[@RiayToons]

"פלייטריפטטריס"

[@MannifyYT2024]

Oh my god . . .

[@vintologi]

it would be better to also change the output framerate. There are pc screens even supporting 360hz now.

[@gairisiuil]

this is kind of impossible because (to my understanding) the nes has a graphics interrupt that is only called by the hardware itself 60 times a second to update the screen. you can't really just call your own vBlank

[@vintologi]

@@gairisiuil Yea it's probably not easy to do (if possible at all) on original hardware but it's fairly easy to do with emulation.

[@ZipplyZane]

@@vintologi But if you're going to use emulation, you might as well just run the entire emulation at the speed you want, with the original ROM. You want 360hz? Run the emulator at 600% speed.

[@Thepotatoz.]

Woah damn bro

[@thuglife009]

Swagg

[@SavouryLobster]

Assembly sucks. Props for this.

[@WriteWordsMakeMagic]

Does everyone say ness not N-E-S?

[@Austin_Playz27]

no its typically pronounced N-E-S

[@WriteWordsMakeMagic]

@@Austin_Playz27 ok, good

[@welovemrp00]

I can't get this to work :,(

[@literallylegendary6594]

cool

[@wilsonlopes1402]

Emulation? pls

[@EatCheese11]

WHERE IS CLASSIC TETRIS NEWS

[@MegaMonkeVr]

NES TETRIS ……. FASTER 😂😂😂😂😂

[@JoshWiniberg]

When lvl 29 is too easy

[@jedediahreaver210]

Since when fractal programs and speaks on top of playing Tetris? I thought he was dog archnemesis

[@grzegorzgk31]

Can you make das faster?

[@fishactivation5087]

7:12 20G?

[@gairisiuil]

how would 20g ever be possible in any lifetime

[@fishactivation5087]

@@gairisiuil Doesn't have to be, I just want it to exist in some capacity on the NES.