Enter the Secret Aquarium - 0x A Presses (Commentated)

in this video I'll be walking you through the strat that allowed us to enter the secret aquarium in Super Mario 64 without pressing the a button now before you check the date on this video I should point out that we did actually do this three years ago however that strat relied on using parallel universes or P use inside the castle this causes an unavoidable crash on the Nintendo 64 version of the game since the game crashes when the camera enters a parallel universe and it's impossible to lock the camera wall inside the castle this means that the strat could only be performed on the Virtual Console version of the game or parallel universes don't crash at all despite this strat existing on Virtual Console it wasn't really used this is because there is a glitch called spawning displacement that's only available in the original Japanese version of the game which saves to a presses so that means that VC saved one a press over the n64 but the n64 saved two over VC so in 64 was the optimal console however due to a recent discovery of a wii vc exclusive glitch that gets us past the pole in belgian fire c and zero a presses the a press counts on wii vc and n64 were briefly tied the ability to enter the secret aquarium and 0a presses on n64 therefore not only saves an eighth press but also once again restores the n64 as the unquestionably superior console for 120-star in terms of a press count as with the original vc exclusive strat the core idea that allows us to enter the secret aquarium is speed conservation out of paws exit when paws exiting a level the game developers were careful to reset Mario's internal variables such as speed to zero so they weren't that careful because they missed a few variables such as sliding speed sliding speed is sort of a hidden version of Mira's regular speed that is used during sliding actions such as butt slide stomach sliding crouch slide in normal circumstances Mario's regular speed is copied to a sliding speed however when mario is in a sliding action his sliding speed is copied to his regular speed while the developers reset Maya's regular speed to zero when exiting the level they forgot to set his sliding speed to zero this means that if we press Z in order to start crouch sliding on the first frame after pause exiting a level our regular speed will be copied from the sliding speed that we had inside the level that we just left so for example if I generate a bunch of sliding speed in Bob on battlefield which remember is normally just copied from regular speed and I pause exit and press Z I'll conserve that speed into the castle lobby on VC where we can freely use P use without worrying about fixing the camera we can bring PU speed from hazy maze cave into the lobby and enter the secret aquarium that way on n64 we can still bring in a lot of speed but there's a number of difficulties preventing a secret aquarium entry for one we need to be able to bring a lot of speed up to the top level of the lobby then we need to somehow angle ourselves perfectly toward the secret aquarium entrance even then we are still just too low to ledge grab on to it this brings us to the discovery that led to this new strat when Mario moves the game checks for wall collisions on the upper and the lower part of his body if he touches a wall with the lower part of his body and not the upper the game will attempt to make mile edge grab this involves looking for a floor in front of and above Mario if there is a floor then Mario will let grab on to it when it's emptying the ledge grab the secret aquarium entrance from the height that we have in the room leading to the slide we're simply too low meaning that both the upper half and the lower half of his body are touching the wall however it turns out that because of imprecise normal calculations this wall is slightly tilted upward that means that if we craz against the wall we can get Mario's lower body to touch the wall now his upper body touching this tricks the game into thinking that Mario is touching a ledge when in fact he is pretty far beneath it the game done looks for a floor to grab on to and finds the secret aquarium entrance because we're grabbing a Ledge that would normally be too high to grab we call this a glitchy ledge grab this solves the problem being too low too ledge grab but there's still other problems for one it's unclear whether we can bring enough speed up to the area by the slide in the first place since navigating lobby with high speed is difficult even if we could get enough speed to that area there seems to be no way to angle ourselves to point directly toward the secret aquarium entrance even using tricks like the sea up wall hug which allows you to orient Mario to face directly toward a wall the achievable angles are just slightly off however there is a way to change your angle arbitrarily even when moving at fast speeds when you activate a text box the game places you in the idle or standing action as though you're standing completely still however it doesn't actually reset your speed to zero this means that if you read a sign or activate the text from a star door for example while moving with a very high negative speed you can arbitrarily choose which angle you move in after scrolling through the text this is called text redirection conveniently there is a star door before the room leading into the slide by using text redirection with this door we can choose the perfect angle in order to get the glitchy ledge grabbed that allows us to enter the secret aquarium but there's a problem this text box only appears before you've collected a single star once you've collected one star the star animation plays instead which doesn't work for text redirection that means that if we use this strat to commit to doing it at the very beginning of a new save file and we're not allowed to collect any stars in the process at this point we began to question the viability of this in the VC exclusive strat we were able to bring speed from hazy maze cave into the lobby however we have no way of accessing a jump C with zero stars first because it's in the basement and second because we need MIPS to enter it without pressing a [Music] indeed all of the levels that we knew we could get that speedin were simply inaccessible when restricted to 0 stars and 0a presses so let's look at the levels that we do have access to really the only two levels that we can enter at the beginning of the game are Bob on battlefield of course and vanish cap under the mode the ladder is possible because we can use hyper speed walking to enter the level without draining the moat at the very least we need more than about 2000 speed to make this strat work one idea for obtaining this is teams the Koopa shell and Bob on battlefield to perform shell hyper speed which is an exploit that lets us build a large amount of speed while moving backward on a Koopa shell while this might get us the necessary speed the Koopa shell only appears after collecting the star from racing Koopa the quick meaning it's not available to us vanish cap under the moat contains a pedlar spot which allows us to get enough speed but there's not really a way to pause exit with this speed in order to pause exit you need to be in a specific class of actions for example you can pause exit from standing hanging on a pole or landing from a dive rollout B can't pause exit while in the air or while running we realize that the accessible levels simply weren't cutting it we would need to figure out how to beat the first Bowser level giving us access to the basement but clipping past the star door leading to Bowser in the dark world without pressing a had never been done before given our lack of level accessibility we had to come up with some slick movement to do this we ended up using a trick known as the sea up slide which prevents Mario from sliding on slippery slopes allowing him to continue building up speed we can use this in Bob on battlefield on this white slope in order to gain about 230 speed now part of what makes speed conservation difficult is that sliding speed is angled this means that when conserving speed into the lobby we don't just care about how much speed we have but also what angle it's directed in so here notice how we have to turn mario wall in the air in order to get the angle we want we then use the key door text to redirect our speed toward the star door and clip through after the spouse in the dark world can be completed in 0a presses note that even though this is part of a 120 star run we can't actually collect the red coin star yet so we have to come back later now that we have collected the first key we have access to the basement while your first instinct may be to head to hazy maze cave and build up speed using the hyper speed walking spot we can't actually do that since the normal zero a press strat to enter HMC requires mips who only appears after we've collected 15 stars this leaves us with shifting Sandland m lethal lava land with the shell strange slope geometry and several interesting enemies shifting Sandland is easily the more promising of the two the most useful aspect of shifting sand land is actually the fly guy when you land on a fly guy you keep your speed and begin spinning spinning has a nice property that it gives us a ton of control over our sliding speed angle doesn't kill our speed when hitting walls or out of bounds and we can pause exit when landing this makes it perfect for secret aquarium entry one idea for building speed and SSL is using shell hyper speed of course this requires accessing the shell located in this item box it's not immediately clear that we can even get to it but even if we could it just isn't really feasible to build up that much speed as you move faster we have less and less control over Mario's movement and it comes hard to avoid hitting walls or out of bounds while still gaining speed there's several places where sea up sliding could be used to build some speed but it's still just isn't enough [Music] however there is one last hope hyperspeed punching hyperspeed punching or HSP is newly-discovered hyperspeed method when mario punches while moving his abnormally low friction this means that on certain surfaces downhill acceleration can overpower this friction allowing him dev net positive acceleration if we find such a surface we have some way of holding Mario in place then we can gain unlimited amounts of speed so are there any HSB spots in SSL well turns out that this little corner happens to satisfy the requirements while visually there appears to be a regular floor in front of Mario actually everything in front of him right now is out of bounds meaning that it'll hold Mario in place while he repeatedly punches and builds speed and builds speed we can all it takes quite a while Mario will continue to build speed and eventually even reach PU speed but there's one tiny little issue we can't stop indeed if Mario stops punching for even one frame his speed will immediately be capped down to 32 we could continue building speed until we get PU speed but then we would have to face the complex challenge of getting back which is much more difficult with forward speed than with backward speed if we want to avoid using P use we only have one option if he presses either frame you stop punching maya will start crouch sliding this will cause him to turn a little bit potentially bringing his intended position in bounds allowing him to escape the HSP spot however this brings its own set of challenges when Mario slides whether it be butt slide stomach slider crouch slide his speed is intended to be capped to 100 however due to a bug in the sliding code this cap is delayed by one frame this means that we get one frame of crouch slide and if we don't get out by the next frame we will lose all of our speed thankfully for us the HSP spot is actually located a higher elevation than the floor at the beginning of the level this means that with proper speed and angle Mario's next position after turning will be located 100 units above ground and so Mario will exit Crouch light and enter freefall great so we've avoided the 100 speed cap that happens as a result of sliding but now we have a ton of speed our way above the ground and were headed directly toward out of bounds this is a recipe for disaster need were moving so fast that we can't even move a quarter step for my current position without bonking on our bounds and losing all of our hard-earned speed now here I want to point out something subtle if we did nothing at this point and just let Mario bonk he wouldn't actually lose his speed until the next frame this means that if we somehow cancelled the bunk we could actually keep our speed after bonking remember that our ultimate goal here is to land on the fly guy so the question is could we cancel the bonk by landing on the fly guy well the answer in general is yes and in fact we're gonna use that later however if we did it here we would have way too much speed if we did this right now and posited with as little speed as possible we would unavoidably bonk as soon as we entered the castle and would lose our speed so clearly we need to slow the heck down we need to do so extremely quickly enter the 10k glitch the 10k glitch is a strange property of sliding that allows us to instantly change Mario's speed given that he already has a lot of speed to begin with the game uses a multiplier to scale Mario's speed when he's sliding when pulling back on the control stick this multiplier depends on Mario's current speed this means that with large amounts of speed you can increase or decrease your speed by huge amounts this is called the 10k glitch since for each additional 10,000 units of speed you have to begin with the maximum speed multiplier goes up by one what originally made the 10k glitch so exciting was its ability to rapidly increase Mario's speed however here we're going to be using it in the opposite direction to decrease Mario's speed by a huge percentage using the 10k glitch we could instantly draw Mario's speed from 45,000 to 2300 which is slow enough to avoid bonking on out of bounds while still being fast enough perform the lobbying movement however in order to activate the 10k glitch we need to once again enter a sliding state now we couldn't have done this with the Crouch sliding state that we just exited from since we needed enough speed to get Mario over to this area and off the ground so the issue is that right now we're stuck in the air which is gonna make it difficult to enter a sliding state we have one obscure trick up our sleeves while riding on a Koopa shell you can press Z to stop riding the shell and start Crouch sliding but you can only do this wall on the ground not while in the air however when you first touch the shell the game doesn't immediately check whether you're in the air or on the ground and that means that if you press Z the frame you touch the shell you'll start crouch lighting regardless of whether you are on the ground or not as we'll see later we can use shell cloning to place a shell in midair by touching it and pressing Z we can begin sliding allowing us to activate the 10k glitch to bring our speed down to something reasonable great right well that would be too easy there's several issues with this the main one is that you actually need to be falling down to land on a Koopa shell while we are in the air we've been in the air for less than a frame and so haven't started falling down you this means that in order to activate the 10k glitch using the shell we first need to spend at least one more frame in the air but now we're back to the original problem which is that we have to way too much speed to avoid bonking in other words we need to stay in the air avoid bonking and keep our speed we can actually accomplish this using fire when mario is burning and in the air he'll continue to fall down without bonking or losing speed so all we need to do is line up a flame above our shell touching the flame will let us stay in the air long enough to be moving downward which allows us to begin riding on the Koopa shell don't worry landing on the shell puts out the fire so now we can activate the 10k glitch and kill our speed so now we have a manageable amount of speed enough that we can afford to take another quarter step without bonking this is important because we need to enter the air remember we're crouched sliding right now if we bonk directly from sliding we'll down warp to the ground and end up losing our speed so we take a step and now we're above the ground and so we enter freefall G now we're in the same situation we started in right we're headed toward out-of-bounds and if we take another step we'll bunk however this time we only have 2300 speed instead of 45,000 this means that if we bonk and it'll land on the fly guide to cancel the bonk we'll be able to spend the rest of our time fine-tuning our speed and angle for the perfect pause exit so that's how we're gonna get our speed and paws exit however we just use like every object we could think of the shallow flame the fly guy all of which will require work to get into place so next we should figure out how we're actually going to do that the first thing we need to figure out is how we're gonna get access to the shell and SSL normally we could do this pretty easily by using this tornado to twirl into the box however the tornado doesn't appear until after we've collected the star inside the ancient pyramid remember we're not allowed to collect any stars the easiest way to get access to the shell is by remotely throwing of a bomb to destroy the box and then cloning the shell however to do this we need a preset hole at the right position as a quick review the hole or held objects last position is a point in 3d space that the game uses to track the position of a held object normally when holding an object the game updates the Hulk to a position in front of Mario however in certain circumstances we can pick up and release objects without updating the hole allowing us to remotely throw objects in this case we need a Hulk near the shell item box so that we can throw up a bomb at it from in order to place the hope in the correct location we begin the task by entering the bomb battlefield remember that we have to start from a new save file we're not allowed to collect any stars before entering the secret aquarium the hope that we acquire is located on the floating island which means that we have to carry an object onto the island the island is a bit far from the mountain though so we need to place a Goomba clone to give us a bit of extra distance to start off we grab up the bomb and set the hole to this location this is where we want to place our Goomba clone we now need a clone a Goomba and release it at the hole one way to do this is to use the hat-in-hand glitch to avoid updating the hope while holding an object but we can't do that in this case since we have an unlock to the wink app instead we use a glitch called pause buffered hits done when mario gets hit by an enemy he begins to blink each frame he alternates between visible and invisible the hope is tied to rendering and so it turns out that the hope will only update on those frames where Mario is visible this means that if we pause and unpause the game repeatedly being shared all only unpause it for frames where mario is not being rendered and the halt won't update and we can pick up objects and release them at the hole in this case we take damage from water balloon all invisible we grab up the bomb just as it explodes this lets us hold on to a vacant object slot which is just a region of memory that an object is stored in while holding a vacant object slot there's a chance that a new object will load into that same slot letting us hold it this is called cloning which is a bit of a misnomer since it really just lets us hold an object we aren't supposed to in this case we line things up so that a Goomba loads into the slot that we're holding we throw the Goomba to released at the hole all wall Mario is still flashing now we see that a cloned goombas positioned at the Hulk we set earlier it won't move because clones which again are just objects we held the horn supposed to don't update like regular objects and this Goomba is gonna let us reach the floating island in order to move a bit faster we grab this bomb shortly before it explodes this allows us to hold it while it's in a bloated State which pushes Mario backward since hitbox is constantly intersecting with Mario's we have to propel you back up or else it will explode we use that bit of extra displacement combined with bouncing on the Goomba clone to reach the island while carrying the bomb now that we've successfully carried an object to our target Hulk location we're done with a bomb and can drop back down now using the slip movement we found earlier we can conserve enough speed into the lobby in order to enter Bowser in the dark world and collect the first key now we enter shifting Sandland and begin the setup as a reminder we need a shell clone of flame clone and a fly guy all positioned in specific locations by the red coin over here we begin by once again using pause buffered hits done in order to throw the bomb at the item box containing the shell we're now done with the hope that we said earlier we can actually take a breather now because the bomb isn't gonna activate until we get closer to it we now grab another bomb as it explodes in order to hold a vacant object slot even activate the bomb that we previously threw at the hole which explodes the item box thereby loading the Koopa shell we manipulate the object slots in such a way that the Koopa shell loads into the vacant objects lot that we're holding letting us hold the shell when you clone a Koopa shell you can place it down somewhere and then after you've placed it you can ride on it as many times as you want without it unloading even if you crash into a wall and it breaks you can go back to the shell clone and ride it again we use this repeatedly here just to make the setup process go by quicker note that because we carried the Koopa shell over to the corner of the level our hope is now positioned at the Koopa shell the next thing we have to do is position a flame clone above the Koopa shell we do this once again by using pause buffer hits done while holding a flame that was shot by a fly guy in this case we stay inside the pokies hitbox which ensures that Mario continues to flash from taking damage we navigate up to a nearby hill and press Z to release the clone pressing Z when releasing the clone as opposed to pressing B places the object at Mario's height but at the hope laterally so we can use that here to position object at the shell but a little bit higher now all that's left is to get the fly guy to fly over to where we want him when manipulating a fly guy there are three height ranges that we need to pay attention to low medium and high depending on which height range Mario is in the fly guy will behave differently thankfully because of the quick Senen hills by the entrance to ssl it's straightforward to move Mario back and forth between these height ranges are these height ranges are relative to the fly guys current height meaning that we have to be careful not to let the flag I move too far up or down we also of course need to be able to get the fly guy to the right height to pull off the bomb cancel later the resulting height range is pretty tight and getting the fly guy into it is pretty tricky itself since we have to leave its activation radius mid lunge thankfully the numbers work out and we're able to manipulate the fly guy into the spot we need him now that all of our objects are in place we perform HSP touch the flame phone fall down to the shell canceling the sliding use 10k glitch to reduce our speed into the air bonk cancel the bonk on the fly guy adjust our angle and speed and then pause exit wouldn't wheel and we're not done yet however since we still need to get this speed up to the star door by the slide this involves a ton of tricky and clever movement through the lobby first we have to get to the Jolly Roger Bay room then we have to perform an extremely precise dive onto the pillar by the stairs we have to get onto the stairs for one frame and get a short wall push before getting up to the bowser in the dark world star door in the correct location from here we can get over near the slide star door but to actually reach the door itself we need to clip into the room and perform a co-op wall hug to redirect our angle toward the door honestly the lobby movement here is so complicated and precise and they're just so many things that came so close to not working it really deserves its own video now because we managed to avoid collecting any stars the starter text will appear and we can redirect our speed at the perfect angle to trigger the glitchy LED grab looking back this strata somewhat of a miracle there are so many points of failure from flag eye manipulation to the existence of a hyper speed spot to unit precise movement in the lobby I think we're all pretty surprised that ended up working at all but at the culmination of perhaps the most complex strat in sm64 history we were finally able to enter the secret aquarium in 0a presses along the Nintendo 64 [Music]

Channel: bad_boot

Views: 293,599

Keywords: abc, sm64, a button, a presses, secret aquarium

Id: goad2ijHBE8

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/atomheartsmother]

The amount of effort that went into developing this strat was actually insane. There were so many moments where it seemed like it had reached a dead end only for some new adjustment to allow it to continue one step further, only to reach another roadblock shortly after. The fact that it all came together in the end was amazing, and there was talk of how amazing a commentated video would be because of just how much stuff goes on in this strat.

bad_boot and Stickman certainly delivered with this almost half an hour monstrosity. It's unfortunate that this probably won't get as much attention as the Watch For Rolling Rocks video, because this is an extremely entertaining and informative explanation of all the bullshit that went into this monster of a strat. Great job to both of them, and to the whole ABC community.

[u/LuciusDeBeers]

Wow, this is so cool.
ABC is one of my favourite gaming related community challenges. I love the effort that goes into it, and the absurdly clever and complicated ways people find to decode the game to make it happen.

Genuine question for any ABC people that read this, does it seem in any way possible that one day you might get down to zero A-presses? Or are some of the remaining A-Presses so far outside the realm of possibility that they decidedly will never be 'conserved,' no matter how many crazy new techniques and strategies are discovered?

[u/mindbleach]

Recently I saw a video on quantum computing which made clear that doing anything useful requires batshit crazy ass-backwards smarty-pants troll logic just to get the result you want.

Before watching this commentary, I worried humanity would struggle with such obstacles.

[u/--Barry--]

I really enjoyed the video. As someone from the community, I can really tell how much love was put into the video. Congratulations to everyone who helped with the video, with extra kudos to Stick, who powered through this and created this labor of love. Hats off to you, sir.

[u/im_bluemania]

im (still) bluemania

[u/bugybunny]

Really great video! I like the voice a lot, so calm :)

​

The 26min were over so fast

[u/eyesburning]

Great job!! Nice video :)

[u/Aarmed]

I wonder how many strats have this level of complexity

[u/Skazzy3]

Where's pannen