I would personally recommend writing some brute-forcing scripts if possible, and/or performing some deeper analysis of the game. I strongly suspect that the computer difficulty doesn't make this significant of a difference between easy and hard, particularly in a TASing environment. It may take a lot of work, but if
hahaPhD's work is anything to go by, I think you could shave at least 10 minutes off this run.
Mini-games are incredibly slow. While I noticed that you tried to manipulate the selection to minimize the time, avoiding mini-games altogether would be far faster. This is where scripting could be very helpful, but it's not absolutely required. Potentially you could use it across multiple turns although that's a much more complex challenge. In any case, identifying key locations in memory could offer some useful advantages too, such as immediately knowing the dice rolls, or any other logic related to RNG.
Instead, I'd suggest making more use of the orb'ed spaces around the board. Hammer-bros for example eat 5 coins each time. Piranha plants eat half of their current total, making them especially good during the first couple turns. If it's a red space, then they also lose 3 additional coins. You may even pickup orbs from the vending machine that you can strategically place on the board. That'd be a fairly complex maneuver but it could save a lot of time, and offers more routing flexibility. Using the pipe spaces may also prove useful to move the koopas to a better position. Similar to the piranha, Donkey Kong also takes half their coins, but will give coins if you land on him.
While vs-spaces effectively eat 15 total coins (while all koopas are alive), three piranhas against fresh koopas will eat 30 in
significantly less time than a single mini-game (30sec vs 46sec for the fire mini-game, or 55sec for a 2-round rock-paper-scissors).
Additionally, the orb vendor has a chance of giving you the paratroopa orb. Using it on yourself costs 10 coins, but allows you to take up to 25 coins
from each koopa in a single turn! That can easily wipe all of them out at once.
Edit: Forgot to add this. During the bowser fight at the end of the game, there are some improvements you could make here as well. As shown in hahaPhD's TAS, it's possible to pick up the robots and throw them while jumping, thus destroying multiple robots at once. It's a challenging task to track and route this many enemies but it's worth the effort.
I think I suggested this in Discord already but, during the next round with bowser there is one instance where bowser charges at you. With some different movement, it's definitely possible to eliminate this time loss.
I'm not 100% sure about how this works, but during the final round it's possible for bowser to throw 4 orbs back-to-back (instead of only 2) before breathing any fire. I think it's something to do with getting hit by one of the first two orbs, or possibly where you're standing when they're thrown. Minimizing the distance each orb is away from the edge of the field can also help minimize the time it takes to pick up each once they're activated.
