Mega Man 5 - Beatless Notes

> Skipping Beat in Mega Man 5 has the potential to save roughly 36 seconds due to a number of factors:
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(Times are approximate)
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+ 9 seconds are saved from skipping the letters.
+ 16 seconds are saved from using a deathwarp in Crystal Man's stage.
- 5 seconds are lost from not having an M-Tank in Dark Man 3.
- 3 to 5 seconds are lost from having to fight Dark Man 2 and Dark Man 4 with Buster.
+ 2 seconds are saved due to a number of faster weapon menus.
+ 17 seconds are saved with a perfect 5-cycle Wily Capsule fight that never menus off of Mega Buster.

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> The Crystal Warp takes a death as early as possible and warps to the boss corridor by manipulating some values in memory.
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+ The Pukapucker (bobblehead enemies) in Crystal Man's stage are unique in that they're composed of two sprites. The body spawns first and the head is generated by the game creating a copy of the body and storing it in the first unused object ID slot in memory. There are 18 available object IDs for things that can appear onscreen (e.g. enemies, health, projectiles). We need a way to fill all of those object IDs just as the game is trying to do this 2-sprite enemy spawn....like, say, generating a bunch of orb sprites from taking a death.

+ Usually, if all those slots are filled from having a ton of stuff onscreen, any new object attempting to appear will be skipped. This is how you can despawn enemies or bullets sometimes during laggy sections. However, because of the way this 2-sprite enemy is created, the game wants to store the copy of the body to create the head somewhere even if all the object slots are full. So it puts it in the next section in memory, which is data about Mega Man's location. This means the body object's pixel position is written to Mega Man's current screen ID. Now the game thinks you're on screen 160 or so. That screen doesn't actually exist, but since you've just taken a death, the game goes "oh, where's the nearest checkpoint", which is the boss corridor.

+ A side effect from doing this trick is that the game reads some of our stored enemy information when it's writing the respawn timer into memory, so it puts the enemy's object ID (09) into that address, which is ordinarily given 01. This address is controlled by a second timer that takes 256 frames to count down, and it will do this until the first address reaches 00. So we're doing that 8 extra times, which means we're waiting ~38 seconds instead of ~4 for the screen to fade to black.

+ Long story short: We're stuffing this poor enemy's head into the machinery of the game, and the game eventually spits it back out at us, propelling us to the boss corridor.

Thanks to Polari for figuring most of this stuff out. You can find his detailed explanation here:
https://pastebin.com/t7Zqf5HX

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> The Wily Capsule fight is very random and can be done a number of different ways.
> You can find more detailed information here: https://pastebin.com/Qgqvpd7k
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+ Wily has 34 possible spawn locations of varying probability. You can see a distribution map weighted for both probability and positive outcomes here: https://i.imgur.com/WHi0Lpn.png

+ Wily has 28 health, and the fight opens with a free charged buster shot for 3 damage. He can be hit twice per appearance after this for a maximum of 6 damage, making him killable in 5 cycles minimum.

+ The fastest way to deal 6 damage is to use a movement buffer strat (either with 3 full jumps or a shot + 2 jumps) and release a fully charged buster just after the height of the last jump. This covers approximately 36% of spawn locations - all of the horizontal spawns on the bottom 4 rows except for the ones closest to the wall.

+ Gravity Hold can be used to see where the next spawn will appear, which raises the odds for that cycle to 50%, but menuing to Gravity and back costs about 3 seconds. Using it to hit 4 cycles eats up a large time advantage but roughly doubles your odds.

+ Bottom Line: The best possible fight has about 1% odds of appearing, but a 5-cycle with one 90-frame menu to Gyro Attack has 6% odds. The time advantage from the route disappears after 10 cycles with only Buster, or 8 cycles with Gravity Hold.

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Older Comparison Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWRlOiqSifQ
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(Doesn't include the pauseless 5-cycle comparison, which saves about 17 seconds)