afaik, the reason why Hourglass burned out and LibTAS is going strong is because Linux's API is way more friendly to the idea of being TAS'd inside of than Windows. (Or it could just be bad luck, Hourglass's original dev DID vanish after all. But everyone who took it over was smart and determined and couldn't get it all the way there, which makes me think it's relatively nightmarish.)
Wow, this is extremely creative and clever. I find it fascinating that it seems to be PAL exclusive not because of a PAL bug per say, but because the different times things take to happen on PAL allows for the bug to be exploitable rather than merely theoretical.
Finally got around to watching this; the graze chaining is hilarious, yes vote.
There's some times where you're doing nothing and there's a bullet on screen you could have grazed, or times when there's plenty of bullets to graze and maybe you could have woven in a kill or two you didn't do; I don't know if these are 'there's a reason why this is optimal' moments or 'the points gained from this fall below the threshold of optimization effort I'm applying this time through' moments. In either case I don't mind, since the overall strategy is justified and held up. (And you do indeed say in the description you haven't done all possible micro-optimizations.)
Given custom code runs when you die in this level (it doesn't normally say THE END), it can reasonably be assumed that this is the intended progression.
Ooh, this is going to be a treat! I've been wanting more high score shmup TASes and patiently waited for TAS emulation to get stabler and the right person to come along. Watching this later
Unfortunately all the genres of game that catch my attention aren't TAS-appropriate for one reason or another (traditional roguelikes, rhythm games, shmups). The closest I ever got was thinking about making DOS TASes, but I couldn't wrap my brain around the interface - I really needed something like TASEditor, which now exists (yay!) but I think not for DOS yet (oh no). Windows games are also mostly off the table for a similar reason.
If I had the patience to figure it out I'd do Tyrian [DOS] "SuperTyrian mode", Meritous [Windows], or Meteos [DS] (probably "Deluge, fastest max score" since "Deluge, all max scores" would be incredibly long).
Also, as Arcade TASing becomes more mature, max score TASes of shmups intrigue... buuut I'm not world class in scoring at any shmup, so I'd basically have to write a research paper to do one of those, haha. I'm looking forward to the day when more of those exist.
A lot of fun near misses in this one, and a human would have no shot at replicating this due to all the frame perfect inputs.
I'd also love to see the Arcade version given a similar try. (MAMEJaffar sounds awful to set up...)