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This movie is the result of decades of routing and discoveries, and has been developed with extensive help from the current speedrunner community. Notable contributors to the routing are the actual game top speedrunners, such as (in no particular order) crem, CapnClever, 7eraser7, Karlgamer, YOLO4GG, GoodSpectre, Higlak, Velcheran, Creditor, WinterThunder, uvq3tsa, Wolfadawn, KenshinTrek, and GMP.

The route has improved a great deal during the last few years thanks to the use of savestate-enabled emulators (e.g., DosBox-X), allowing players to try different tricks without losing too much time. The development of this TAS is largely based on the existing route but has introduced two novel approaches:


Frame by Frame Analysis / Memory Debugging

Thanks to the use of emulators (JPC-RR) and memory debuggers (Cheat Engine), the discovery of new tricks (e.g. level 4, 7 and 8 skips) became possible, as their discovery required a frame-perfect input and RNG-heavy setups. Fortunately, more human-friendly versions of these skips have been developed after their discovery.


Routing by Exhaustive Seach

The development of an open-source version of the game (SDLPop) allowed the development of a high-performance parallel breadth-first search bot, called Jaffar, that exhaustively explores all possible movements in each possible frame. The search is made possible by constraining the exploration space to that of a pre-determined route, requiring a few trillion states per level. As a result, the bot found the most efficient way to traverse the community-established route. We've applied Jaffar repeatedly on a supercomputer to solve for every level. Following strict definitions, the re-Record count is: 817,608,423,040