Perfect the Alexandria jump-rope minigame in Final Fantasy IX — natively on your Mac, over PS Remote Play.
Final Fantasy IX hides two of its most infamous trophies behind a jump rope in Alexandria's town square:
| Trophy | Requirement |
|---|---|
| 🏅 Skip to My Lou | Jump rope 100 times without tripping |
| 👑 Hail to the King | Jump rope 1,000 times without tripping — earns the King of Jump Rope key item |
Hail to the King is widely considered one of the hardest trophies in the game: roughly seven and a half minutes of frame-tight inputs through five rhythm changes, where a single mistimed press sends you back to zero. The 200–299 stretch is the killer — the rope breaks into a syncopated jump-jump-pause cadence that has ended thousands of manual runs.
Jumpmaster plays it for you, with real-time-scheduled key presses accurate to well under a millisecond.
Windows players have AutoHotkey scripts for this. On the Mac there was no equivalent — until now. Jumpmaster is a single native app: no AutoHotkey, no Homebrew, no scripting runtimes, no drivers. Download it, open it, jump.
- macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon
- PS Remote Play 9.0.0 or later, connected to your console
- Final Fantasy IX at the jump rope — Alexandria town square as Vivi (start of the game), or the Alexandria Steeple from Disc 3 onward
- Download the latest release from Releases, unzip, and move FF9 Jumpmaster to Applications.
- First launch: right-click → Open (the app is not notarized).
- Grant Accessibility permission when prompted (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility). This permission is what lets it press keys and position the Remote Play window.
- In Remote Play, walk Vivi up to the girls with the rope so the talk prompt is available.
- Pick your confirm button — X or O — to match your console's button mapping.
- Press Start. The app brings Remote Play to the front, enters the minigame, syncs to the rope, and jumps until you stop it.
Press Ctrl+Shift+Q to stop from anywhere — even while Remote Play has focus. Or just enjoy the show: the counter tracks every jump live.
The rope changes rhythm as your count climbs. Each field in Intervals is the gap in milliseconds between presses for a stretch of the run:
| Setting | Default | What it controls |
|---|---|---|
| jumps 2–19 | 667 | The warm-up. Slow, friendly rhythm right after the first jump |
| jumps 20–49 | 532 | First speed-up |
| jumps 50–99 | 467 | Second speed-up — carries you through Skip to My Lou |
| jumps 100–199 | 433 | The steady mid-game cadence |
| jumps 200–299 | 385 | The syncopated stretch — the rhythm that ends most human runs |
| jumps 300+ | 400 | The base end-game cadence |
| alternate | 401 | The counter-beat woven into the end game: the rope drifts between the base cadence and this one through the later stretches, and alternates between them every other jump past 1,000 |
| latency | 710 | The sync offset: how long after the rope starts before the first jump. If you trip in the first few jumps, tune this first — it absorbs your network and controller latency to the console |
The defaults are tuned for a typical local-network Remote Play session. If your run trips at a consistent count, nudge that stretch's value a few milliseconds; if it trips immediately, adjust latency. Defaults restores the shipped values.
Remote Play adds latency, but it's consistent latency — what kills runs is jitter. Jumpmaster schedules every press on an absolute deadline chain, executed by a real-time macOS thread with kernel-level waits, so timing error never accumulates and each press lands within microseconds of its scheduled tick. macOS App Nap and timer throttling are suspended for the duration of a run.
- Wired beats wireless. Ethernet your Mac and console if you can; keep the controller close to the console or use Remote Play's on-screen sync consistently.
- Leave Place window on — it positions Remote Play at a known size and spot for consistent behavior.
- Don't touch the controller during a run; a stray input can desync the minigame.
- Hail to the King takes about 7½ minutes of jumping. The app will happily keep going past 1,000 — stop whenever you're satisfied.