There are 8 frames from input press until the black screen for the screen transition off the main screen used for timing the start of runs (for runs with no input reader) and time stops on the final frame of movement/color change (not grayscale) of the final alien fight. It had been "on alien scream" but an audio cue is not a precise point to time from.

So, I "completed" a run of low% JP. There is a major snag in the theory in stage 5, the copper ammo between floors on the left side to the egg on the ship (timestamp 19:35) and the ammo at the beginning of electric room 1(timestamp 21:05). I unloaded all the shots into the wall so I had none of it (kind of like how Ninja Gaiden low% runs deal with oops candles). I only avoided the yellow ammo in the lower right corner of stage 4 where there's the huge walk around (timestamp 13:15 range), but I ended up having to pretty much pacifist% stage 6. I think it would be better to actually grab that ammo and take extra pot shots at eggs later than to skip any ammo drops. There is a 40 pack of yellow in stage 6, but it's inside the last building. I have it highlighted on my channel for now, but I kinda want to give that ammo a shot, and to see how possible it is to skip the ammo in electric room 1. I think that we should allow green ammo on compy's ONLY on stage 5 ship and 6 in the case of a continue, if only for the sake of not having a RIP run or having to pacifist% 95% of stage 6. It is incredibly difficult to make it through the ship in pacifist mode without 3 lives.

I have been looking into getting a rom-hack set up that would allow the starting character to be set (ideally this would be the only change that resulted from the hack) for hardware/flashcart runs. During the initial investigation phases, it was found that at a minimum, Bizhawk 2.8.0 was always Wolverine on hard reset, cyclops on soft reset, 2.9.1 was always Nightcrawler on either reset, and Mame 0.264 was always Beast. Retroarch and Gen-GX were random.

I was also curious if this kind of hack would be allowed for the single character/any % runs since the only goal is for it to reduce the amount of resets before a run could start (and also allow for other emulators to be used in runs as the initial testing has shown). If there has been any other research into this type of thing, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

I am planning on running this game some time next year, so I at least wanted to put feelers out for this kind of project or if I should just reset mash the cart.