I don't know where to post this, but a new development has been found in MegaMari that would improve the TAS. Hopefully, should anyone decide to step up and make that improvement, they'll look back at this thread and find it here.
After collecting one weapon, you can use a glitch to add Marisa's Broom and Alice's Doll to your inventory. The Doll would probably do nothing for the run, but this means that you can have the Broom for stages 2-4, before it would normally be unlocked. The steps to do this are:
-Have 80 to 108 energy in the weapon's meter (max energy is 112, and 4 energy is 1 visible tick on the display)
-Collect a large weapon energy item
-When the weapon reaches max energy, pause (I believe this to be a frame perfect input)
---If you can see the weapon's energy through a memory viewer, it should become 116
-Switch to either Marisa or Alice's default weapon, then unpause
After doing this, you will have the Broom and the Doll. If Eirin has been defeated, you will lose her weapon, though it is safe to perform the glitch before defeating Eirin and earn her weapon as normal.
I have been asked if this works with a small weapon energy item, but I do not believe there is enough energy in it to activate the glitch, and I have never gotten it to work. Feel free to prove me wrong.
There's also a variation on the same glitch, which is much less important, but may have uses in weapon energy management. After refilling the weapon and pausing, instead of switching to a default weapon to activate the inventory glitch, you can switch to a different weapon, and any remaining weapon energy in the item will be added to the other weapon.
I have to give thanks to pointblanket, who accidentally stumbled upon this glitch during his first playthrough. His original discovery of the glitch can be found here:
http://www.twitch.tv/pointblanket/c/1873232
And thanks to Jadian who immediately understood and replicated the glitch upon seeing the above video.
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The above is all that's really important, but for people who are curious about additional details, I'll take a moment down here to look at
why this happens.
weapon flags: unused Reimu Remilia Youmu . 00 FF 01 FF .
weapon flags: Reisen Cirno Sakuya Yuyuko . FF FF FF FF .
weapon flags: Eirin Broom Doll unused . FF FF FF 00 .
. 70 00 00 00 . weapon energy: Reimu
. 70 00 00 00 . weapon energy: Remilia
This is a sample of the game's memory. For boss weapons, 00 gives the weapon to Marisa, 01 gives the weapon to Alice, and all values 02 through FF give the weapon to neither character. For the Broom and Doll, all values 00 through 7F will give the item, and all values 80 through FF will not give the item.
In this example, I have the Alice Remilia weapon, so let's work with that. I use up a bit of Remilia's weapon, collect a big weapon drop, and pause the game on the frame that the weapon is done refilling. If paused at the correct time, the line of memory that holds Remilia's weapon energy will be 74 00 00 00.
But wait, 70 00 00 00 is the maximum!
If you unpause with Remilia's weapon still equipped, the game will check Remilia's weapon energy, decide Remilia's energy doesn't need to be refilled, then set Remilia's energy to 70 00 00 00 to account for the overflow.
However, if you change to the buster, then unpause, the game will check the buster's weapon energy, decide the buster's energy doesn't need to be refilled, then set the buster's energy to 70 00 00 00.
Now let's look back at that memory block.
weapon flags: unused Reimu Remilia Youmu . 00 FF 01 FF .
weapon flags: Reisen Cirno Sakuya Yuyuko . FF FF FF FF .
weapon flags: Eirin Broom Doll unused . 70 00 00 00 . weapon energy: Marisa Buster/Alice Laser???
. 70 00 00 00 . weapon energy: Reimu
. 74 00 00 00 . weapon energy: Remilia
After this happens, the weapon flags for Eirin, Broom, and Doll have been overwritten. 70 is not a valid value for Eirin, so the weapon will not exist. 00 is valid for Broom and Doll so those two items will exist.
I chose to use Remilia's weapon as the example, but this will work after overflowing any weapon. You can even activate the glitch with the Doll to delete Eirin's weapon, though why you'd want to do that is beyond me.
