Note: many of the tricks demonstrated in this movie can be found at the TMNT Game Resources page.
As always, I have provided a release package on my my sourceforge project.
It includes the movie file, submission text, and level savestates.
This is a long overdue improvement to my currently published movie of 299 frames. I started this project in the summer of 2008 because I was unhappy with some very small mistakes in the run (mostly on the scale of 2-4 frames). For whatever reason I decided to redo completely and see how much I could improve. I ran into a snag with some bad enemy randomness in level 4 which contributed to the project stalling for most of that 2 years. I picked it up again this summer and was able to break through that snag and of course hit tons of others. But finally, it is done.
Improvements
A lot of the improvement was lag reduction. I started this project after implementing the lag counter feature into FCEUX. I figured with that tool I could do a much better job reducing lag and that was my motivated to start the improvement. Along the way I found a new trick that contributed to a lot of frames of improvement. It involves conveyor belts. If running on conveyor belt in the same direction it is moving you get speed boost. However, if you jump off and immediately let go of the directional pad, the turtle will retain that high speed throughout the jump.
Making this TAS
I don't think I can fully express how painful it is to TAS this game in a highly optimized manner. It is full of random lag, random enemies, lag, random enemy sets, random item drops, and of course, lag. One can find a 10 frame improvement only to quickly get busted with 20 unexpected lag frames as a result, or a different enemy set in the next screen costing several seconds of time. I hit so many roadblocks where I was forced to redo in order to deal with randomness of enemies. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm done and this is my final version of this TAS, so enjoy!
Truncated: Setting this to accepted. Nice improvements.