We spliced it because it was impossible to record in in one go. We had to do a few TAS files? Because it desynced very often. And yes, some savestates were wrong as you noticed, but none of these change anything in the gameplay. It's also a few seconds slower.
we'll do our best in our next TAS. Hopefully we'll get it done using one .m64 file.
it probably wouldnt have desynced on bizhawk though
Please share your theory, I'm interested in how you plan on doing it.
You know how if you BLJ a lot, you can end up in a weird invisible OOB area where you can run around (on emulator/VC at least, it always seems to crash on console)? Idk if you know why that is, but for those who don't, the function that checks for the floor triangle below Mario converts Mario's position to short integers for the calculations. Since shorts range from -32768 to 32767, if Mario's coordinates are outside of that range they will overflow back into it. This creates an infinite 2D grid of invisible copies of the level, spaced every 65536 units.
The copies (in the ABC chat we were calling them "parallel universes/PUs", idk if that will catch on) have the exact same arrangement of floor and ceiling triangles, but all wall triangles are missing, as are most objects, and all water is gone. Doors are gone, so we can't just open the moat door in a PU, but the fact that the water is missing is key.
With no water in the PU moat, Mario can get down to the height of the moat door. So if he's going fast enough (REALLY fast)), he can just run right into the door in the real map, and open it in the 1f you get before Mario starts to swim. I confirmed this with hacked position/speed; I placed Mario 4 PU away where the moat door would be, and gave him sufficient speed so he would reach the real door at the end of 1 frame, and he opened it.
The amount of speed you need to reach an adjacent PU is about 4*2^16, or 260k. Apparently this is only possible with a "stuck" BLJ spot, or by hyperspeed walking. I can't find an appropriate BLJ spot in the castle grounds, and hyperspeed walking would probably take about 30-60 mins to get enough speed. Alternatively, with the wing cap unlocked, we could enter VCutM and get the required speed with a BLJ on the elevators there. When you die in VCutM your speed is preserved into castle grounds because you spawn in water.
I've thought about trying to TAS this, but I kinda suck so I hope someone else does. GLHF