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Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop

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Re: Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop

#41
post #10

The show piece at the bottom is kinda cheating, right? One of Tetris challenge is to visualize where the piece will land. Nice project never the less.

Depends on what rule book you're using :) Ghost pieces default to `on` in Guideline Tetris.

They also mandate EasySpin/Infinity, which breaks the game, so I basically don’t trust anything the say. >:)

Re: Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop

#42

I have also added hard drop to NES Tetris. Heh. What are the odds? This hack strays further away from vanilla NES Tetris though and contains further speed, control and graphics modifications; and lacks that fancy looking ghost piece. https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4973/ My approach of hard drop implementation was different, honestly i just looped the piece down routine until it hit the ground. His approach breaks t…

Glad you enjoyed the article! Is there a reference somewhere for how scoring should behave with respect to hard drop? I'm interested in fixing it.

When a piece hits the ground, a point is added for every line you were holding the down button. So, you could probably just take the height difference of the ghost piece and the real piece and add it to the score. Remember to set carry when subtracting =p

I'll bet by directly moving the piece coordinates you bypassed this.

I really like your ghost piece =)

Re: Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop

#43
post #10

The show piece at the bottom is kinda cheating, right? One of Tetris challenge is to visualize where the piece will land. Nice project never the less.

negative. modern tetris has moved way beyond NES' system. there have been many improvements to the game, like a holding piece, hard drop, the ghost piece you mentioned, advanced maneuvers like t-spins, and most interesting of all (to me) is the improved piece selection [1]. you're probably aware of the tall block meme -- when you need it, it never shows up! well that's been more or less solved.

there's also interesting strategies/techniques like 4-wide [2]. there's a whole rabbit hole to follow...

if you want to try out modern tetris, check out jstris [3]. the skill level people have attained is unbelievable [4], and can't be replicated on NES tetris.

[1] https://simon.lc/the-history-of-tetris-randomizers

[2] https://harddrop.com/wiki/Combo_Setups

[3] https://jstris.jezevec10.com/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3QmU79Vli8

Re: Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what rule book you're using :) Ghost pieces default to `on` in Guideline Tetris.

They also mandate EasySpin/Infinity, which breaks the game, so I basically don’t trust anything the say. >:)

It can break Marathon, but infinity spins are not a great strategy for Ultra, Sprint, or 1:1 multiplayer.

Re: Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also mandate EasySpin/Infinity, which breaks the game, so I basically don’t trust anything the say. >:)

It can break Marathon, but infinity spins are not a great strategy for Ultra, Sprint, or 1:1 multiplayer.

I agree, but I play Marathon, and it sucks. :(

Tetris Effect would have been so much better if EasySpin could be turned off.

Re: Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop

#47
Delightful writeup. Two bits that stood out for me:

- The incremental nature of exploration of this type. Often, the results are shown without the messy bits like "then I made it just teleport the piece to a specific spot to test". That matches how many of us operate, I'm sure.

- The use of a number of varied tools from the toolbox. Falling back to the trusty "sort | uniq" after talking about Rust and emulators with built-in memory peeking functionality? Nice!

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