This Insane New Glitch Just BROKE Castlevania!

A credits warp was recently discovered in the original Castlevania game for the Famicom Disk System.

Used some gameplay footage from @Trisk_Speedruns and @NintendoComplete

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[karljobst]

Thanks legends. Got a couple of juicy vids coming up!

[timephire]

"What a horrible night to have Arbitrary Code Execution..."

[NeonVenomProductions]

After beating Castlevania 76 times, no wonder you'd want to skip directly to the end credits.

[SBDWolf]

Thanks to Karl Jobst for featuring this recently discovered ACE! It was very enjoyable to help on this.

A few things I'd like to address that I'm seeing some people wondering about:

Q: Is the discovery of this glitch marking the "death" of this speedrun?
A: Not at all. As mentioned in the video, this was made its own separate category, while ACE is banned everywhere else. The speedrunning community at large still favors the main Any% categories which do not use ACE. This is seen more as a fun novelty so to say.

Q: Why is the time that it takes to acquire the save files not included in the final time?
A: While it would be nice to not rely on any pre-existing save data for this, it's impossible to completely reset the save data to a clean state on an original disk anyway, because this game also memorizes a "High Score" without offering a way to reset it (global across all 3 save slots, never even displayed anywhere which is kind of odd). If someone wanted to rely on a different setup that doesn't make use of the save data from playthroughs on other slots (which does exist and involves using object X-coordinate data, but it's not RTA viable atm), then based on current knowledge they'd need to use the High Score and Current Score as part of the setup (as those are the last things that would get executed as code with this setup, before the game would pretty much inevitably crash). If using those save slots was disallowed, it would create a situation where someone could save too high of a High Score on their disk and "brick" their disk in such a way that they wouldn't be able to pull this off at all, which is kind of undesirable.
Of course, there's external ways to rewrite the data on the disk, and it's easier to just clean save data out if playing on emulator or on flashcart, but then it's kind of a whole thing to have to do. It was easier and more practical to just allow those saves to chill on the disk and do the run :) once they're there, you can grind runs out forever so long as you never overwrite the first two slots.

[PunctualGuy]

As a programmer, I can totally see how something like this could have happened:

"Hey, it looks like there's this weird bug when you exit this level, but it doesn't happen if the player jumps before exiting."
"How long will it take to find a fix?"
"Probably a few days."
"...Just make the player jump..."

[TheNethIafin]

It's also a separate category because it requires you to have a correct save files from before, and not a game from scratch

[brennanruiz]

I really love that the ACE doesn't look like doing a bunch of random movement like it does for other speedruns, and I really _really_ love that he was willing to actually grind out the 76 runs for the second save file. Crazy the dedication that runners put into their games.

[DAcheekO]

Todd rogers already used this trick in the 80s that’s how he got the WR

[theowinters]

I'm honestly more impressed that he made the second save file without an editor.

[whtiequillBj]

@5:59, I'm not sure I'd call it "cutting corners". There just isn't enough memory. Reusing memory was a normal practice. Probably everything else was in use by something more important to the functioning of the game.

[Skymography]

CONGRATS ON 1 MIL SUBS 🥳 you should win a lawsuit to celebrate

[kingdomcomesuperman]

Arbitrary code execution is never the most entertaining to watch but seeing the process of discovery for it is always entertaining.

Especially for one on my favourite franchises in Castlevania, still dumbfounded Konami did nothing new gaming wise to collaborate with the shows.

[Weldedhodag]

"At this point, Castlevania is almost 40 years old"

WHAT


*WHAT THE FUCK!?*

[jcontra]

Imagine being a kid and making it this far back in the 80s and have this crash happen with no idea how it was caused. The rage was real I'm sure

[tiagotiagot]

00:50 Well, there have been some examples where ACE was used to overwrite the game with a completely different game or even other sorts of software altogether; so in a certain sense, it's useful even in some situations where you do completely break the game.

[verbnoun]

4:10 The tiles at the bottom-right of that corrupted screen look like a skeletal Sonic the Hedgehog.

[Ganonmustdie]

Now we need Castlevania ACE%, where the speedrun is less about using ACE and more about beating the game 76 times to set ACE up

[Torta--is--PLUR]

If Milly Bitchell didn't discover it then it isn't real

[lilaccreeper]

I hoping to do my computer science dissertation on ACE in video games next year. This is just one more I can study. Good video!

[ThunderBurgers]

The Famicom Disk version of Castlevania 1 has save files??? That would've literally saved me weeks of my life - that and tears.