SM64 - Wiggler's Red Coins - 2x A Presses

I collect the star Wiggler's Red Coins in Tiny-Huge Island using 2 A presses. The first A press is to jump up to the blue coin platform. The second A press is to jump to the pillars in the corner that hold a 1-up and red coin.
This video is an improvement from my previous video in which I entered this course from the huge entrance. You can find that video here: • SM64 - Wiggler's Red C... . Since then, Tyler and I collaborated to find a way to get to the mainland of the island starting from the tiny entrance. Starting from the tiny entrance rather than the huge entrance implicitly saves an A press, because it takes 1 A press to enter the huge painting but 0 A presses to enter the tiny painting. Here is the route for getting to the mainland from the tiny island starting platform:
For the first gap, I activate one of the butterfly bombs, the explosion of which pushes the tiny goomba into the water. Then I immediately bounce on the goomba to get to the fire spitter island.
For the second gap, I strategically manipulate the RNG to have a tiny goomba from above walk off of the cliff. Specifically, I lure him next to the cliff, and then have him randomly jump, causing him to go over the edge. As this is happening, I have Mario perform a dive recover, using the falling goomba to bounce across the gap.
Once I made it to the piranha plant platform, finding a way to the mainland was no easy task. But after several failed ideas, I finally discovered a way to do it. Here’s how it works: I first collect 99 coins using the large piranha plant infinite coin glitch. Then, I kill the mini piranha plant, and have its coin take a very precise trajectory, with high speed at a particular angle. From there, I have to escort the coin across the cork boxes, since if Mario isn’t within a small distance of a box, the box will not be tangible and so the coin would fall through. I also strategically use this to my advantage, by allowing the coin to fall through the boxes just enough to be pushed forwards without actually falling all the way through. Once the coin moves into the correct position, I collect it to activate the 100 coin star and use a star dance clip to get onto the mainland.
So what is a star dance clip? The star dance clip is a technique where Mario collects a star, thereby allowing him to get onto ledges he wouldn't normally be able to get on. You see, when Mario collects a star, he enters a state where he is able to grab onto ledges. But when he grabs on in this state, instead of entering the grabbing on animation, he just appears at the top of the ledge and does his star dance. So the reason that this is useful is because we can ascend by the height of a dive recover, while also being able to grab onto ledges above us.
Note that the mini piranha plant’s coin needed to have a very precise trajectory for this technique to work. Through empirical testing, I determined that the coin needed to have an angle between 28128 and 28511 and a speed of at least 9.5 out of 10. Tyler then looked into the RNG, and determined that of the 65114 possible RNG values, only 17 of them produced such a trajectory. See, the RNG goes through the same sequence of 65114 values in order on repeat. So from there, it was a matter of locating the next closest RNG in the sequence that would produce the correct trajectory, and that was the RNG I would aim for. This RNG was a bit ways off from the current position in the RNG sequence, so I had to wait 45 seconds for the current position to move closer to the goal. Then to make sure the coin used that specific RNG, I manipulated the current RNG position using dust frames, and then killed the piranha plant on the exact frame when my goal RNG was up.
ABC Playlist: • Super Mario 64 - A But...
ABC Routes: docs.google.com/document/d/1y...

[@jetx_47]

You really wouldn't expect there to still be A presses her to be saved in this course. But there's TWO of them.

[@Fritzafella]

This has got to be the single most frustrating Star in a 120 Star game. Everything in TTC is obnoxious because the level is unusually vertical, but you have so much stuff to play with and so many bizzarre tricks. But these damn coins are just on normal ledges, ledges you have an obscene number of ways to overcome elsewhere, that just don't apply here. *And there are fricken two of em*

[@scantyer]

so true

[@ianmathwiz7]

There's also the chest star from JRB.

[@eboone]

@@ianmathwiz7 no longer

[@PlushSM64]

My first ABC improvement was done on this star 3 years ago :'') so much time has passed

[@TylerKehne]

Wow, what was the improvement?

[@PlushSM64]

Tyler Kehne The ZB strat from 7th to 8th red coin =)

[@notchmath9642]

Plush That was insane.

[@notchmath9642]

Tyler Kehne Could your wiggler speed thing help get you forced at a diagonal and through the floor onto the 7th coin, thhus being able to save at least one A press?

[@PlushSM64]

TheLoneWolf We thought of that. However, it seems that you end up always bonking on the wall because of too much speed. I'm happy that somebody suggested this tricky idea =)

[@NCXDKG]

these are the 2 a presses i'm most hopeful for to find a workaround.

[@ccgarciab]

Why?

[@redonaldchannel]

(clueless)

[@ericpeterson6520]

Would it be possible to use a hangable ceiling upwarp to save an A press here? You'd still need to jump to initiate the glitch (probably), but maybe if you landed on the 1up platform you could use it to get to both of the higher coins without jumping again?

[@DebugCat]

i'm going to test it

[@eddiemate]

Just looking at the video, I don’t think this technique will save A presses.

[@ikercalderon163]

No way, you still need the second A press (or if you hang till there you will need another A press to get to the 1up platform)

[@crinknor6083]

That room just makes me sad. That's all that really is for me to say about this.

[@trentthen642]

That frustrating feeling when a star actually makes you use Mario’s jumping ability

[@waffledoctor87]

Mario's long jump and dive moves travel at about 33.5 miles per hour.

[@PerfectPotion]

It amazes me to think that it's easy to write a program that tries to do the A button challenge or tool-assisted speedruns. Take the ROM as input and output the movie file as a series of button/stick inputs and timings. However, without good AI, the program would suffer from combinatorial explosion and wouldn't finish within the Earth's life time.

[@Bobstew68]

Maybe someone could put a proper deep learning AI on this task in the future, yeah.

[@Rotem_S]

the problem is that deep learning is based on there being a smooth solution up to a very high degree, and here it's the exact opposite: glitches, warps, discrete numbers.... you can try to make an AI that tries to find glitches or something, but AI isn't the solution for every problem (until we have something far superior to deep dream, in which point it'll just be a really smart human with unlimited resources)

[@jongyon7192p]

Someone probably already thought of star dance clipping here. (Dupe enough coins from pihranas EDIT: to overflow the coin value, then make star in whatever limited place you could.) Doesn't look like there's a good coin position close enough to a ledge. And even less likely, duping the blue press or blue coin. But there are no grabbables, so nvm that 2nd thought.

[@owenfrazier5209]

Yes, and that person was Pannenkoek2012.

[@jongyon7192p]

Owen Frazier No, excluding him. Of course he thought of everything, that's a given.

[@user-lh5hl4sv8z]

I think this is probably going to be the next a press save

[@ikercalderon163]

I don't think so 😅 there isn't almost anything to work with. They weren't very far to save the A press in fire sea in N64 😅 probably that would come first than this 2

[@gobbleguk]

@@ikercalderon163 SotT 0xA and even BitFS 0xA look more promising than this

[@ikercalderon163]

@@gobbleguk yeah, for sure. There are some ideas, in BitFS something similar like the 0xA on LLL on the volcano star (I can't remember the name of the star 😅)

[@a.d.t.mapping]

@@gobbleguk for SotT 0x it's mostly done, what's left is just tasing. And BitFS 0x (on N64) is definitely on the horizon somewhere

[@gobbleguk]

@@a.d.t.mapping Yea I could see that based on the vids posted last week lol

[@clarise-lyrasmith3]

Now there's hope. I'm hoping really hard.

[@justsomeguy5628]

This observation is from @acblock, 2 years before posting this, but why can't you use the upwarp shown in the BitFS 0xA Ideas video to get to the higher one and potentially save an a press (assuming you can get to the lower one from the higher one)? Is it just that there is no known way to get from the higher to lower coin?

[@Merluch]

If we get a fire clone in position we could use that and a star dance clip to save the first A-press, but idk about the second

[@waterwraith3334]

Has anyone tried to get pushed underneath the floor during the wiggler boss fight? If you can do that in the right spot that should save at least 1 of these A presses.

[@KingMetalMario]

They have, and currently there is no known way to do that

[@JoshuaJustice]

With all the goombas in this level isn't there a way you can set the HOLP in there from another map and clone up a goomba bridge?

[@HeirTransparent7]

+Joshua Justice he doesn't have access to any objects that can be used to clone.

[@turkeycooktime458]

@@HeirTransparent7 He could use the Chuckya, but it gives you such a high VS# that it may not be possible to clone anything in THI

[@mathphysicsnerd]

Clones don't survive map transitions. This is one of the reasons BitS is possible 0xA without crashing from too many clones

[@Sypaka]

I wonder if you can pre-place HOLP inside that room and replace it with wiggler, to save those 2 A's.

[@Sypaka]

Game Buster mh, crap.. so those 2 A's remain as they are

[@Sypaka]

Game Buster This sub-area is very sterile, as I remember. Too bad there is no arbitrary code execution we can apply here, either to swap stars or set "collect_red_coin_bitmask = 0xFF" so the star appears instantly upon entering this sub-area. :/

[@funnydogman9534]

+Game Buster, not very important but D) might also be invalidated as well if someone finds a way to set the camera

[@funnydogman9534]

Game Buster I'm aware, thats why I mentioned the fact that it _might_ be invalidated later on; though for now it's still one of the problems of course.

[@marcscattolin1554]

"A) There's nothing to grab in THI" There's chuckya that could be grabbed (3:47) although I don't know if that would work or not.

[@BrettMKW]

So if I understand the last paragraph correctly, killing the piranha plant on the same frame will always make the coin move at the same speed and angle?

[@pannenkoek2012]

It depends what the RNG is on that frame. Depending on what happened prior to that moment, there might be a different RNG value on that frame.

[@EP1CxEMAN08]

pannenkoek2012 So could you use a TAS from the moment the game starts to get the same RNG every time the TAS happens?, if the TAS requires RNG?

[@Bobstew68]

Yes, the game pulls no values from outside the game (such as PC games might do with the system clock), thus the RNG is consistent in a TAS.

[@acblook]

Honestly I dont get why this is still impossible to at least do in 1.5x a. He's shown that you can upwarp to the ceiling from the entrance in his bitfs 0xa ideas video. And even if you couldn't, it seems like there should be some way to store enough downwards vertical movement to pass through the floor in a quarter step, then release it from the wiggler boss room

[@Yhp420]

see i just thought of something like that too. im thinking why cant we somehow clip through the floor so we can get one of the red coins 0x

[@fuby6065]

@@Yhp420 they've tried, there is no way to clip through because downwards momentum is capped at far too small of a number, and there is basically no way to generate it, and clipping through with horizontal speed is difficult because the floor is such a shallow slope, you need to be basically in the middle of it with a great amount of speed, and there's no way to get enough speed, and get to the middle

[@jetx_47]

I think you need to be in the jump state to grab onto hangable ceiling. Holding and doing DRs wouldn't cut it

[@olipolygon]

@@fuby6065 well, you can generate speed, quite a bit in fact (Tyler Kehne has a video on it--wiggler hyperspeed), but there doesn't seem to be a good way to exit with that speed, and it's forward speed which means you'd need some way to convert it to negative speed if you wanted to do something like a negative jump (which requires an A press, but enough speed and a negative jump could save one of two a presses)

[@ChillyOn]

no more works around this really ?

[@slowfreq]

Is there any hope for this one?

[@Benjamslikestrains]

perhaps, there is always a presses to be saved. some people thought that certain A presses were impossible (like the cannon one in JRB) and they got saved, so there's always a possibility that others we think are impossible now can be saved as well.

[@pedlar6839]

Doesn’t seem like it

[@notchmath9642]

Could Tylers speed thing help with this?

[@pannenkoek2012]

we'll have to ask Tyler Kehne on that one

[@notchmath9642]

Also, could you potentially clone something loaded all the time by holding, say, loaded spot 9 and then that spot unloads while you are using it somehow? And maybe his speed thing could bounce off of a diagonal and hit and go through the floor at the 7th red coin...

[@TylerKehne]

It would let us go through the mesh, but we can't land quick enough to avoid hitting the wall first.

[@notchmath9642]

So you hit the wall and end up landing on the 7th coin platform. Wouldn't that still save an a press?

[@notchmath9642]

Tyler Kehne Just commented, figured I would let you know.

[@NoNameAtAll2]

9 years of stability... sad

[@adealmusic]

Can you conserve secret speed through loading zones ?

[@Quintratix]

No.

[@colmenasio5542]

2?????????