About the Game(s):
Action 52 is an unlicensed game made for the NES and Sega Genesis, featuring - you guessed it - 52 different video games. The NES version was published in 1991, whereas the Genesis version was published in 1993. Both versions were published by Active Enterprises.
Knockout is game 20/52 in the Sega Genesis version of Action 52. This is a 2 player game with blue and red boxers fighting each other for 9 rounds. You play as the blue boxer.
About the TAS:
This TAS aims for Any%, which means completing all 9 levels.
The Improvement:
This is a 39 frame improvement over my previous TAS due to faster menuing. The current publication presses S on frame 442, but I discovered that you can select the game without having to wait for the menu scrolling to finish.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Well, first...lets discuss my philosophy on checking optimization.
I don't have time to check every input of every game...otherwise, the queue will be out of control. Instead, I watch the movie to see if anything looks obviously wrong. The first submission had issues, because I saw that Player 2 wasn't being position for a faster knock out. This was quickly fixed by LGR and thus satisfied my requirements for acceptance. On the other hand, the menuing didn't pop out at me, as it looked fine. Depending on how short a TAS is, menuing may become one of the more important optimizations...but certainly not a factor for killing a submission that is quite long and RNG dependent...due to landing on different frames.
This time, I checked and couldn't find one frame. So...shame on me, and congratulations on finding and cleaning this up.