Man, re-read this thread and couldn't help but think about how long, slow, and dragged-out my run has been. Then, I realized that I really need to keep y'all informed.
First, good news. Previously I had talked about the King Stage bosses being some of the most annoying ever. I managed to plan for all of them and know all of their weaknesses completely. (Searched for their HP in memory and did testing.)
For starters, I was somewhat surprised that, contrary to what I understood (from a GameFAQs readme and maybe also from somebody else's continuation of my run) the Tank's three hit spots all have the same exact weaknesses. They each have 16 health, and they can only take 4 damage at most (from either the Ice Wall or the Lightning Bolt.) I've beaten this boss in my latest version and am quite pleased with the result.
The flying boss has 34 health and takes 4 damage from an unsplit Ground Drill. Now I can die happy because this boss is FINALLY easy.
King has exactly the same weaknesses whether or not he has his shield, interestingly, even though you can't beat King /w Shield before the Protoman cutscene. Why? Because he starts with 127 health when he has the shield and is set to 28 when it is broken. I even tried to kill him before Protoman appeared by locking the Lightning Bolt at max charge and I had no luck.
But, yeah, he's weak against Lightning Bolt, and this battle will mostly drain it, but at the beginning of the final stage (just before Cold Man) I can recharge it as much as I need. Yay!
The giant MECHAKING battle is simply a matter of using Burner Man which does 5 damage! That should be a quick battle.
That just leaves Wily (since all the boss refights are, more or less, no brainers now) and, yeah, 9 Mine shots for the first mode (plus 1 normal shot) and 9 Magic Card shots (plus 1 normal shot) for the final battle. It should be plenty easy to keep that much ammo till then. :)
So, now here's my latest run:
http://www.kraftfam.org/~erk/nesvideos/RnF.zip
I've defeated the Tank miniboss (took a hell of a lot of damage, but as you can see it worked really well.) I also defeated the Flying miniboss, but now that I've got a better idea how the drill does its damage I'm going to redo that battle (because I'm pretty sure I can hit the first shot earlier.)
Oh. And I exploited a glitch in that fight. This run will now include in its description "dies to save time." Have Fun. :)
Edit: Oh, and the informed part. This weekend might be too busy to work on it much. Saturday is my final final final exam, IE the last exam of the last class of the last semester, and afterwards I'M FREE!!!! FREEE!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *worked to death* Sunday is my graduation celebration with my friends and family. But, as G.I. Joe said, knowing is half the battle, and now that I know how to kill all these annoying bosses and have a plan from this point to the end of the game I'm pretty eager to finally get this done!
