What? 

Tool-Assisted speedruns are speedruns played with an emulator which provides savestates and rerecording. Such movies can not be performed on a real console system nor without an emulator . These speeduns exceed human limitations or reaction time. Compared to many rumours across the net there are no cheats used and no action replay or similar. Only the game itself as well as glitches and bugs. Going through the walls in Super Mario games on the NES and Famicom Disk System are glitches. The programming of these games was not perfect so if you touch a wall at the very right frame you have the chance of getting soaked into the wall. This is no hack or cheat. As you see the game itself got this error.

How?

As said before to make a tool-asssited speedrun you need an emulator with savestates and rerecording. Savestates mean that you can save at any time and load at any time. The whole game gets saved to reload it at any given time. The addition is rerecording which means that if you load a savestate during the recording  the recoding will be overwritten to make the result looking perfect. The recorder overwrites everything after the loaded savestate and goes on recording as if the time before loading did never existed. Another great addition is frame advance. With frame advance it is possible to go every frame step by step. This makes a movie more than perfect. A tool-assisted speedrun played with frame advance is much more perfect looking than with simple slowing down. You can find several tutorials on how to use each emulator to make tool-assisted speedruns.

Why?

The most important reason of making these movies is entertainment. Sure a 5.05 minutes Super Mario Bros played in real-time on a real system is more impressive than a 5.02 tool-assisted. But it is not the most important thing to be impressive. Those movies are made to show the limits of each game. What is possible at all. We do not mind human limitations or reaction or concentration. We can be perfect with help of tools which does not mean we are the best players when time runs in real-time. So skill is nothing compared to planning and patience and endurance. We just love to see how a perfect run through any game would look like.

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