MM4 skull man balloon animation skip setup

Video demonstration at https://youtu.be/TKYM7LCdmb8

1. Fight skull man. You could come up with something similar in other fights but skull is very convenient for this.

2. Do the beginning of the fight normally, and when skull man jumps into the middle of the room, get this pixel: https://www.dropbox.com/s/i8g34yimoqy8g31/skullpixel.png?dl=0

If you fail to get the pixel, either because of a bad subpixel or because you got amazing shield rng and didn't have enough time, abort mission and finish the fight normally.

(The way the setup works is the pixel you set up here is 2 pixels left from the magic pixel, damage knockback moves you 13.5 pixels, and mega man's walk speed of 1.296875 pixels per frame adds up to 12 frames of movement being 15.5625 pixels, which leaves you with a 4/64 chance of being on a subpixel where you got the initial setup but will miss magic pixel. Alternatives would be setting up 7 pixels to the right of magic pixel, taking damage and doing 5 right taps for a 1/64 fail chance or setting up 9 pixels to the left and tapping 7 times for a 5/64 fail chance, with no damage knockback involved. The second one would be ideal but I doubt you can get it without skull man just sitting on you.)

3. Tap right as many times as you can without running into Skull. This might depend on how exactly you do the start of the fight, in my case it's four times max.

4. When skull drops the shield, just shoot him, get knocked left, and finish the fight from there without moving.

5. IMMEDIATELY as skull man dies, switch to balloon. Most of the net time save comes from the lag reduction from having the death sound play while menuing instead of with all the explosion bubbles on screen.

6. Tap right 8 times minus however many times you already did in step 4 (so another 4 in my case). If you used a different starting pixel, tap as many times as it takes to get 4 taps away from the magic pixel (which is the minimum you need to move between placing the balloon and jumping on it).

7. Place the balloon without jumping

8. As quickly as possible tap right four more times, then jump straight up onto the balloon.

9. Get the balloon as low as you can, ideally keep doing one-frame A taps for as small jumps as possible and after landing wait for about 10 (?) frames as the balloon pushes down before jumping again.

10. On the last possible moment before all the explosion bubbles leave the screen and you lose control, do a full jump.

If you didn't jump too early and were at the lowest two pixels before the ground would despawn the balloon, you'll hit the magic pixel guaranteed at the apex of your jump. Further than that and you'll hit the magic pixel while falling faster than one pixel a frame and risk missing it, getting to 50/50 about five pixels away from the guaranteed window. Pushing the balloon low enough to despawn it IS possible, but it's really hard to do in real time so in practice you likely will be able to just push it as low as you can.

(Alternatively, you could place the balloon from a full jump at step 7, place a second, lower balloon to get onto the first one, and bonk the ceiling. It might be a bit more complicated in practice but a naïve subpixel analysis says you'll have 31/64 chance of getting the skip this way.)

(Alternatively, you could aim to place the balloon so that instead of jumping before the fanfare, the balloon would put you at the magic pixel height without jumping. Unfortunately that doesn't work, because for some reason while you're standing on a balloon you're locked to a constant falling speed of 2 pixels a frame. Thus when the balloon disappears it's as if you had already been falling for 8 frames and the nice window at the beginning of the fall where your fall speed is less than one pixel a frame and are guaranteed to touch every pixel on the way isn't there at all.)