Hexagon Skip
From HyperSPRINT, the NordicTrack Hyperciser speedrun international community Wiki.
So I've been up to my arms in PPC disassembly trying to work out the details, but here's my optimal strat. This won't apply for 100%, only Any%, as you miss the pickups and Sparks in 6-gon's normal playthrough, but 100% is boring anyway.
In order to pull the Hexa skip, you have to yump, FULL TILT, into a Dumbersault off the Grassy Knoll left of Hairpin #3. After yumping GK, there's a 3-frame window and a specific handlebar angle, to clip the lighthouse, wallride, boop the loading trigger, and go straight from Penta to Hepta, saving 750kcal or more of Effort and ~6:37.17 even if your disk load/heap management was otherwise ideal through the run.
Even better, you skip a loading seam, meaning you don't have to wait for the disk reseek and library reload, though you won't have music in the Heptagon stages. Not like it matters anyway, the 7-gon VGM kinda sucks. Jans Mittelson kinda fumbled the bassline halfway through FightingPower.s3m and it shows.
Anyway - when even individual frames count, Hexa skip is the only competitive option. Feel free to leave comments on the Talk page and I'll catch up with y'all on the KTOP leaderboards!
Hover the dotted underlines for definition tooltips. If you're on mobile, tap the ▶︎ below:
(Since you can't read tooltips on a phone, I've posted a glossary under this details heading.)
PPC
The NordicTrack Hyperciser uses the PowerPC 405 embedded CPU to run the game engine. The HyperMotion coprocessor in the Handlebars is also a PowerPC 401, with similar code, seemingly built from the same source tree.
100%
A game completion with all Sparks, all Pickups, every Track cleared in every Stage including Nona and Deca in the selected difficulty, and all Exerscenes unlocked.
Any%
A game completion which finishes the final Octagon stage, but not the postgame Nonagon and Decagon tracks, and runs the credits.
Sparks
A pickup which increases your Effort Bar capacity permanently. Think of it like a Heart Container, in Zelda.
-gon
Stages can be variously referred to as names, like 'Square' or 'Octagon', or shortened like 'Quad', 'Hexa', 'Octa', or as numbers, like '4-gon' or '8-gon'.
Yump
'Yellow jump'; jumping as soon as the Burn! Meter hits yellow
Dumbersault
A kinematics glitch, where the Nordictrack appears to tumble end over end while trying to right itself on the track.
Grassy Knoll, GK
A specific hill that shows up in several levels starting at Square and Pentagon, with an angle best for yumping from.
Hairpin, HP
A track turn which requires Power Handlebar Leaning to power through without braking, skidding, or spending too much Effort.
Handlebar, Bars, Yoke, HB
The primary directional input, a 'gaming 8-axis yoke', on the Nordictrack Hyperciser EX, SX and LE series, but not available on the SE, S, or X series, which are rail-based in-game, and only have directional buttons for menu selections.
Lighthouse, LH
A landmark in the Havenspoint Beach sub-track, which you encounter in the Pentagon stages.
Wallride, Wallrun, Wall Wheelie, WW
A maneuver where you pedal H-Fast while pulling the Handlebars back to the Wheelie Position, allowing you to run along the wall in Skid traction for a short time.
Boop
To quickly lean the Handlebar into a position to make your Hyperbike in-game reach outside of its typical bounding box.
Pentagon, Penta, 5-gon
Pentagon, the fifth Stage in the Nordictrack Hyperciser Hypergame disk 'Polygon Trainer II', and also 'Power Polygon Trainer'. Includes the Tracks, 'Poly Park', 'Haven Hills', and 'Havenspoint', with its subtracks 'Havenspoint Beach', 'Blue Lagoon Boardwalk' and 'Seaside Resort'.
Heptagon, Hepta, 'Hep', 7-gon
Heptagon, the seventh Stage in the Nordictrack Hyperciser Hypergame disk 'Polygon Trainer II', and also 'Power Polygon Trainer'. Includes the Tracks, 'Battleship Brigade', 'Seaside Cruise', and 'Havensburg Industrial Park'.
kcal, Kilocalories, Calories, cal
Kilocalories, or in the US version, 'Calories', are used in-game as a measure of Effort. The calculations are derived from physical resistance training values by scientists hired by NordicTrack.
Effort
Effort is the in-game currency, 'health bar', 'magic meter' and overall scoring metric. Effort is measured in 'kilocalories'.
Disk load
The NordicTrack Hyperciser uses the Matsushita Hyperdiskette format, a magneto-optical 260MiB (256MiB addressible, plus 4MiB of boot code and file tables) 'floppy' diskette which looks like a regular Microfloppy or SuperDisk format disk, but with shutters on both sides of the disk, and four heads to engage the disk on both sides and both ends. Despite spinning at 8x and reading sequentially at 24x the speed of a typical FDD (6.2 Mbit/s), the seek mechanism is as slow as an FDD and as a result, loading can take a while.
Heap management
The Hyperciser's OS, based on a microkernelized TRON OS developed by Matsushita, has a dynamic LIFO heap while in-game, to cache items loaded from disk, program code and scripts, as well as objects in the game engine. Managing the heap effectively, through targeted loading and unloading of items and Scenes, can help shave lag frames or load times off the run.
Loading seam
A loading seam occurs when the Track is unexpectedly elongated, because you have moved quickly enough through a Loading Zone that the asset Library on the other side of the Loading Volume haven't been read from the Hyperdiskette in time.
Library, Lib, Libfile
A 'library' is a Hyperdiskette sequential datafile, which contains the assets and data expected to fill the Heap pre-serialized and ready to be read, albeit compressed.
Jans Mittelson, 'd0rkb0mb'
Jans Henrik Mittelson, born July 23, 1985 in the Skøyen region of Oslo, Norway, is a video game music composer, known for his work on the NordicTrack Hyperciser games, several shareware titles on the Amiga and IBM PC, and in the demoscene, under the alias 'd0rkb0mb'. After composing the award-winning Gravis UltraSound tracks for the 'Urban Exploration' demo on the PC by demogroup PREVA1L, he was hired by NordicTrack in 1997 to produce music for their exercise games. In 2003, he left NordicTrack, and went on to work for Infogrames.
KTOP
KTOP is a speedrunning goal, and metagame in the NordicTrack hyperdiskette competitive speedrunning community and the HyperSPRINT record-tracking website. It stands for 'Kilocalorie/Time Optimization', as opposed to HTOP (Handlebar/Trick Optimization) and focuses on the use of the Pedals, rather than the Handlebar techniques, to achieve the highest 'Effort' posting on the website.
