It's about a week since I stared using heavy brute force on Contra: The Alien Wars, and it seems it's going to take still a lot. So in the meanwhile I started working on Rolan's Curse. It seems pretty easy so far: I discovered that the RNG is very simple because it only depends from the frame count, wich is only delayed by lag. So the luck manipulation here is elementary at most, just forcing you from time to time to wait before killing an enemy, or before entering to the next area, if this makes the enemy kill smoother. Therefore, the most important tasks for TASing this game are route planning and lag management.
While analyzing, I managed to improve the current record by 1 frame, tough it's still a rough attempt. Here is the movie if you're interested:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1539012064/thunderaxe31-rolanscurse.vbm
About the 2-players run: it's going good. I'll begin posting WIP movies soon.
One last thing, here are the RAM watches:
SystemID GB
FFAA b u 0 System Bus Temp Att
FFAB b u 0 System Bus Perm Att
FFA7 b u 0 System Bus Perm HP
FFA8 b u 0 System Bus Temp HP
FFA9 b u 0 System Bus Left HP
C23E w u 0 System Bus Boss HP
C0A3 w u 0 System Bus Random
C0A5 w u 0 System Bus Random?
C0A7 w u 0 System Bus Random?
C0A9 w u 0 System Bus Random?
C0AB w u 0 System Bus Random?
Note that only the first of the five random values is confirmed to determine the enemy drops.
Edit: The item drop is not as simple as I initially thought. There must be some additional requirement other than the random value at C0A3, maybe a kill counter?