I was wondering, has any dis-assembly work been done on this game to get some strong evidence of where things are optimal or not? It still looks like it's mostly empircal guess work finding strategies and it would interesting to know if there are any really un-intuitive strategies that could still save more time.

I did some work around the time of my first TAS to understand opponent behavior better, but back then I was more interested in deciphering their patterns and actions than looking for mistakes in the code that controls those actions. I've lost a lot of what I had back then, but know enough of the important memory addresses and the -- scripting language? Whatever the phrase I'm looking for is -- for their patterns to look them up whenever I need to. (One of these days I really need to make that flow chart showing EXACTLY how messy Piston Honda 1's pattern is. There are random branches, random delays, and random attack skips all over the place, and figuring out his pattern was the only way I ever got the TAS strat to work in the first place.) There are a few weird edge cases and mechanics in this game, but so far none of them have been useful for speeding up the TAS. They always end up not working in the places they would be most helpful. As a sample: Knocking down Don Flamenco 2 at a specific frame at 1:28 causes him to stay in his aggressive pattern once he gets up instead of going into his 1:30 taunting. This would be useful in a few fights if it worked on anyone else; I've especially wanted to find a way to keep Tyson in uppercuts after 1:30. But the only other fight where this works is Glass Joe; knock him down at a specific frame at 0:38, and he'll get up, skip his taunt, and do nothing for the rest of the round. A lot of boxers are scripted to extend their stun timer after one of their jabs if you're in the middle of one of your own jabs, in order to prevent the punch from landing unstunned for a star. On Von Kaiser, this happens a couple frames late, leaving a two frame window where he can be hit unstunned, followed by another two frame window where he can be stunned for SIX hits off of a jab instead of five. An extra stunned hit would be really helpful against say Bald Bull 2, where you'd get more star punch opportunities in the first 20 seconds, or Mr. Sandman, where you could get a few more punches worth of damage in before 0:50. But only Von Kaiser has this weird quirk. The delayed stun glitch used on clock-stop Super Macho Man is possible on any fight where you can dodge an attack and follow up with a blocked punch. I'd hoped to use this on Soda Popinski to speed up the fight; you'd counter the first hook for a star, then dodge the second hook and throw a blocked gut punch. Because of the glitch, when you intercept his uppercut to activate the knockdown flag, it would stun him, and you could use a star immediately instead of cancelling the second uppercut. Unfortunately, even if I left dodge to get a longer stun timer than I would from ducking, it runs out before I get to his first uppercut. Just a few days ago, I noticed that some addresses used by infinite stun combos were active during the Tyson fight. A working infinite would be huge here because of how long it takes to deal damage. After investigating, I found that it was impossible to start the infinite combo because of a bug. There's an address, 03B0, that's supposed to store the ID of Mac's last evasive action; if this indicates a duck, then alternating left-right punches will be an infinite combo. But the code only goes down the branch that stores the last action if it was a dodge, making it impossible to indicate a duck. Freezing that address to hex 0E will allow the infinite to work, and the Game Genie code NYEPKZEE & NYEPSZEE will change Mac's ducking behavior so it can activate the infinite. Even if it had worked properly, Tyson's round 1 stuns are too short to activate it; the only time you can do it is after ducking an uppercut in round 2 or 3. Didn't mean to sit on that question for so long. EDIT: Just remembered that 03B0 actually does double duty. After the infinite combo starts, it's used to indicate which hand Mac punched with last; 01 for a punch with the left hand, 00 for the right hand. These are used to check whether Mac is punching with the correct hand to continue the infinite, and freezing it to hex 0E will cause those checks to fail. Editing the address without freezing it will still work.