Nice work! Wasn't expecting such a big improvement here.
https://w.atwiki.jp/gball/pages/571.html https://nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8694905 According to the website above, the ending will change if you have $5,963,776 or more.
Awesome! I wasn't expecting to see this game show up again. Interesting strategy changes at the end of the Russia bout. The characterization in this game is really ridiculous with the design of all the arenas.
I wonder: Is that why you never submitted a Battle Chess TAS despite speedrunning multiple categories of that game?
I would definitely prefer it to be redone. Doing a run on a middle difficulty is an unusual case, but if it's the fastest difficulty, then you should absolutely use it.
Have you tried higher difficulties? It looks like the ball moves faster in them. Medium especially looks interesting, because the ball moves faster but the opponent does not, so you get some freebies when they fail to even touch it when the ball is served.
Interesting, I'm a big fan of the PS1/PC version, never knew there was a GBC version. Strategies used look optimal, although at 9 points in Stage 3 it looks like another ball could be spawned? But maybe the opponent would return it. Yes vote.
I looked into the code a bit. There is exactly one frame before every shoot-off (3502 for the first one in this submission) where it runs a subroutine (0xB1AC) which checks to see if the Start button is pressed (by checking bit 3 in 0x58) - if the button is pressed, it returns from that subroutine which begins the code that starts up the break (0xC253), otherwise it continues with the shoot-off and doesn't start the break until after it's done. This specific subroutine seems to be only called in the frame before the shoot-off, and is not called for any other part of the game, as far as I have searched. It's not used for any other instance where the Start button can be used, such as the title screen, main menu, or when exiting the game. This leads me to believe this is some sort of undocumented code to skip the shoot-off. For this reason, I'm requesting that the shoot-off skip is not used for this run. I'm setting the submission to Delayed until this is sorted out.
https://tasvideos.org/3589M It looks like your first fight is faster, so maybe you can improve the other 2 from there, but you certainly don't need to do the training sequence.
Some more info about the shoot-off skip: it turns out you only have to hold Start to skip it, Select is not necessary. This skip is not mentioned in the game's documentation, but Start is used in-game to open up a prompt to exit the game. It's possible that this skip is just some bug with how the screen transitions interact with the exit menu, and it's also possible that this is some leftover debug code. Since Select is not necessary, this is looking less like a code and I'm leaning towards the former. I'll look into it more.