Emulator used: BizHawk 2.8
This is a preliminary TAS to see how long a Zippy TAS could take. One thing I noticed is that only 10 levels out of 16 are needed to be played to reach the ending. The boss locations are also determined by the frame the title screen is cleared. This run does it on the first frame which leads the the tremendous problem of playing all of the very laggy Aqua Zone levels. There might be some optimizations per level but I think that the levels themselves are sync friendly.
The boss fights are influenced by player input so some of that will be needed in a more refined pass of this game. This is especially important since this affects how long each cycle takes between hits by about a range of 100-200 frames.