Rayman Advance is a port of the original Rayman to the GBA. It consists of various platforming challenges, bosses, and powerups. In order to unlock the path to the last boss, you must break all the cages hidden throughout the game, 6 in each level.
The improvement here is mainly due to a death abuse strategy on one of the bosses that I saw in the RTA run while I was researching the game and resyncing the vba file. This strategy saves over a minute.
Another big time save is in the very last boss, where I found you can hit him much earlier than in the original run, this saves several seconds. Additionally, I saved some frames with better grappling hook movement.
This run is also console verified, as in the temp encode. Console verifying this run was quite challenging as it uses EEPROM for saving. Even though it only actually makes a save file at the start of the game and then never saves after that, you can still get desyncs on console all the way at the last boss if timing is off by only 100 cycles between write timing on emulator and console. Additionally, the expected timing on my particular cart was ~1000 cycles different than the setting I used for Donkey Kong Country, so it took quite some time to find the right value. Timing between attempts is also a bit variable, which also caused desyncs. It works about 50% of the time.
Apparently you can skip the last boss entirely if you start from an existing save file that already beat him in a previous run. This is used in RTA but not available when starting from clean saves.
Finally, I found (and fixed) a serious save state issue in GBAHawk while making this run, so working on this game was all around very productive.
feos: Claiming for judging.
