How fast is soft drop in TGM1?

The Wiki doesn't cover this. As many of you know I've been working (on and off) on a tetris implementation. I'm currently implementing all the TGM1 features.


Everything is very well specified on the wiki except how fast a soft drop is. Does anyone know?


Thanks. Hopefully a new version is forthcoming.

 

Actually two questions. The wiki tells me what the DAS speed is for TGM1, but what about the initial shift delay? Does the first shift take longer or are they all 16 frames?


Thanks again.

 

Yes. DAS is 16. And the soft drop speed is 1g.

 

The wiki has level 239 as "243"* 1/256 G. I'm almost certain this should be 160 (from the pattern). Can someone confirm? I don't want to go editing the WIKI on a guess.

 

Thanks, so to move from the center to the far right will take something like 64 frames every time?

 

Yeah, it should be 160. I must have replaced it with the level of the next gravity jump when I was working with the tables.

 

About the DAS:


The Auto-Shift itself is 60Hz (or 1G), so once DAS is "fully charged", the active tetromino will shift one cell per frame.


The Delay is 14-16 frames, depending on how you define it. There's 14 frames of waiting where nothing happens in between the first shift and the subsequent Auto-Shifting. So it's like this:


shift, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,

wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, auto-shift.


I hope that makes it clear... I guess someone really ought to sort out the timing data on the wiki, it's a bit inconsistent at the moment...

 

In TAP, the "so called" soft drop is 1G only if the current gravity is less than 1G. So if the current gravity is 5G, soft drop won't be noticed except for the increase of the lock counter (part of the score algorithm).


For TGM1, I can only guess it is the same. Can probably be checked easily by framestepping TGM1 in mame.

 

Personally, I'd describe that as 15...

 

Key pressed on frame t+0, move on frame t+0, move on frame t+15, move on frame t+16, move on frame t+17, ... I see 15 frames too.


Another way of looking at it is in an audio editor. Assume that either 1. the game has sound for shift, or 2. the player is on 20G and the game has sound for stepping down the pyramid. Record the game, and look at the waveform. In either case, the delay between the start of the first sound and the start of the second sound is 250 ms, or 15 frames.


EDIT: I just frame-stepped lj.gba in VisualBoyAdvance, and it indeed follows the convention that Lardarse and I have described here.


But back to TGM1 fast drop: Does it just mean move the piece to the bottom of the cell every frame?

 

I think that it adds one rows worth of "subpixels" to its position.