Secret of Evermore Speedrun notes.

- What came to be known as the "banquet skip" is a trick in act 3 in Gothica right after the pig race your dog wins. When entering the room the banquet is supposed to be held in, you have about a second or two of player control before your character starts a dialog and switches control to the dog. During this time you can leave the room it's held in, causing the game to forget about loading the event altogether. This lets the boy leave the castle on to the hedge maze where when you reach the Footknight miniboss, your dog just casually strolls on screen through hedges and you begin the fight as normal. This has the comical side effect of making your hp and attack bars invisible until the boss as well.
What it looks like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG0QO3tWXtY#t=4860


- What amounts to "dog slingshotting" is where you inch towards a spot on the ground that starts a cutscene or dialog (for example, the villager blocking the exit to Fire Eyes' village) while controlling the dog, then switch control to the boy right before the dog reaches it. This manipulates the dog's idle animation to walk forward some while the game doesn't check if you're in a cutscene spot or not, letting you skip certain scenes and fights altogether. Originally this was used to skip the naming the dog cutscene (causing it to go by the name "The Dog" for the rest of the game) but was usable in act 2 after you got both Diamond Eyes from the pyramid and colossus where you're supposed to give them away to Evil Horace. At first glance this skips just a fight against some pirates but the game actually makes the check to take the eyes out of your inventory when it loads, skipping that lets you keep the eyes, which ends up being a huge time saver late in act 3 when you're gathering the materials for the flying machine in order to reach Omnitopia. This is also used late in Omnitopia with a room that is supposed to spawn 8 sentry bots that can be bypassed with this trick.
What it looks like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG0QO3tWXtY#t=4100

- The permanent atlas/wraparound glitch that lets you do 999 damage with every swipe has quite a fucking convoluted setup and is done in act 2 while waiting for the Nobilia market to close. I believe the order of effects you need to have active are:
[*]Get poisoned
[*]Use Fairy Dust which revives you when you go to 0 hp
[*]Cast Atlas or any other effects you want to make permanent
[*]Die as soon as possible and hope it's not from poison damage to trigger the fairy dust revive.
Somehow this causes the game to lower your attack value by the number of frames since you last took poison damage, which can be as high as 300 or so, causing it to go into the negatives that the game interprets as a value of over 65000.
What it looks like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m2e5qwS5X8#t=1020
A while ago this was used with the speed buff for accuracy, and barrier which makes you invincible when made permanent like atlas. This required being afflicted with plague, the only way to take damage while barrier's active. The barrier setup has been replaced with some new method of making permanent things like Horace's Aura call bead ability that I'm not keen on the details of yet since it's only a few days old or so. If I recall it involves casting like 4-5 buffs simultaneously which makes the game forget how long your first buff is supposed to last and just makes it permanent.

- After the neo atlas glitch decimated the game with an under 2 hour run, research was done on what can be streamlined in Prehistoria to take off more time since it's the only other place you have to play "fair". One of meta's viewers found a trick with squeezing through rocks as the dog that you normally have to cast levitate on to get past. It was consistent enough to work on every boulder up to Magmar, making acquiring the levitate spell totally unnecessary. This meant you never have to go to the swamp at all, or fight Salabog for the spell or have to care about getting any mud peppers in the game whatsoever.
What it looks like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFjnb-twwnI#t=880