LORD TOM:
"I've been looking into this strat of manipulating n-spade to appear on top of levels, allowing a level to be beaten by playing the n-spade:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nXSeS7onxw

After much testing it seems probably not useful for warpless, but could probably be used 2 or 3 times in a 100% run - if we decide it's legit to use for that goal.  The issue is the level does get "cleared" ie marked as complete, but we never actually enter it.  In my view it's not that different from levels where we glitch through the wall and skip the whole level, plus it's a cool new glitch, but I'd be interested to know your thoughts.

The glitch only occurs if you have an encounter (hammer, pipe, level) where you don't die 2 turns before completing the airship - then have a bonus game as the first encounter in the new world.  That last bit is the killer for warpless as no worlds start with an easily accessible bonus game (have to use hammer in world 3, cloud in world 6).  Hammers and clouds are much more expendable in the 100%.

Also...someone disassembled and commented the entire source code!  I don't know if you read assembly at all, I've done a bit for various projects and the code is huge but very well commented, so if there's any technical question you're burning for the answer to, I may be able to figure it out:

http://sonicepoch.com/sm3mix/disassembly.html

It's also extremely useful for finding mem addresses, mostly in SMB3.asm."

TOMPA:
"Yeah, I was thinking about that glitch and how it could be useful for 100%... And I'm not really sure if we should use it or not. As you mentioned, it does count the level as beaten afterall, but you don't even enter it. Which in my book would be similar to skipping it with a cloud I suppose. For a level like 7-1, while we skip the "actual" level, we do have to enter it in order to use the glitch to skip most of it.

I aksed K1rua, one of the SMB3 speedrunners,  and he said no to using it for 100%, though ok for warpless. I guess we could ask some fellow TASers about it as well. It would also be neat to show off the glitch in general, and especially nice if we could skip some boring autoscroller with it.

And talking about that... Which levels do you have in mind that could be faster with the glitch?

I have looked into some of the code for ALttP, though just for fun and not to get any of use it for TASing or such. Though it is nice to have if you get curious =)."

LORD TOM:
"The levels I was looking at most closely are 3-5 (obtained by beating the hammer right next to the rock you bust to take the big short-cut), 6-F2 and 6-8.

6-F2 is longer, so 6-8 wouldn't make sense.  And 3-5 I don't think is possible/practical for any type of run since you'd need a second hammer to get right to the bonus-spade to start world 3.  I don't think you can enter World 3 with a hammer since for the warpless it's used for the short-cut, and for the 100% it's needed to get to the hammer with the warp whistle...:(

So if we do decide to use it for the 100%, I think 6-F2 is the only real option, and it would save 10-15s.  I'd say it's worth seeing what the TAS community thinks; I can see the arguments either way.

One interesting tidbit is that the location the n-spade will go is stored independently for each player in a 2-player game.  I don't think a 2-player TAS could ever be faster due to transitions between players, duplicate map movements, and each player only getting half the items - but a play-around TAS which used 2 players could show off this glitch with more flexibility by having (say) Mario beat the airship and pass the score threshold, then Luigi start the next world and clear the way to the bonus game, with Mario perhaps wasting a turn or two dying in some interesting way or showing the Mario/Luigi duel game (the n-spade location doesn't update if you die on a level).
Oh, the reasons the other worlds won't work for the glitch:
W2:  have to do 2-1 before bonus game; no cloud available yet
W4:  need pipe to go anywhere (entering pipe updates bonus location)
W5:  need to do 5-1 and 5-2 before bonus game
W7:  need pipe to go anywhere
W8:  n-spade never appears"