TODO - develop this better, just wanted to get some important information documented

The two biggest factors in TAS routes are going to be manipulating enemies to spawn in optimal locations, and to pick up and drop gold in key places. There is no RNG in this game. Both of these events are tied to ram address 00x53 which acts as a spawn timer. It cycles through values 0-28 which corresponds to the Y tiles of the level. After 28, it wraps back to 0. When an enemy dies the value of this timer will be used to place the enemy respawn.

When an enemy picks up gold, this same value is used and and stored as the number of tiles the enemy will walk across before dropping the gold.

This timer isn't consistent, as most timers and values, the game "lags" and these values do not tick, or tick more than once per frame.

At max speed, this timer ticks very inconsistently and runs about 4 times a frame.

It was discovered that presing select and then immeidately pausing the game during the beginning screen scroll and can skip it. After digging into this, the key is pressing select for just 2 frames (or just 1 frame at max speeds) is all that it takes. Pausing only helps in cancelling out the select button (its easier to press select then start really quickly than to press and release select quickly). This leads to massive savings.

If you cancel which the player is scrolled off screen you can get glitched graphics but it is only visual. The players actual level coordinate ram addresses do not change, so it seems nothing can be abused with this.