ToxicFrog on 5/5/2007 at 01:17

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I am in fact currently working on a Shock speedrun, although it's still in the tool development (I need high-res maps, I do), planning and testing stages - I'll have to borrow some (fairly expensive!) hardware to do the actual recording, so I don't want to start that until I have the run plotted, planned and practiced (and tested; there's some cunning tricks I want to try involving the use of knowledge from a previous life a la the Diablo run, but I don't know if they'll actually work in Shock.)

Concerning DOSBox: I'm planning to submit the finished run to (http://www.speeddemosarchive.com) SDA, which forbids emulators*, as they can be used to cheat undetectably; I'll be recording it with a cable fork to a DVR. There has been some discussion over at (http://tasvideos.org) TAS Videos about the new recording features in dosbox, though; maybe we'll start to see tool-assisted runs of DOS games soon.

*Unofficial ones, that is. Official ones - NTVDM, Virtual Console, PS2PSX, and so forth - are fine as long as they don't come with cheat features.


I'm going by the SDA rules for my run, which are that glitches that allow teleportation or similar are forbidden, but pretty much anything else is allowed - so shooting through screens is fine, and is in fact a vital component in the first segment of the run (I grab a Sparq, head to the secret room under the hub, shoot out the CPU nodes through the security screen and head straight for the elevator).
I'm also going to try to do this without dying (yes, even on deck 7); a run that abuses death would definitely be faster, but it offends my sense of style. If anyone else wants to give that a try, SDA will accept death-abusing runs as a seperate category ;)