This improves the published movie by 16 frames thanks to improved route, not counting various emulation differences. It also syncs on BizHawk 2.8. You can get my Lua script here.
Specifically, I used a better strategy to get the item pickaxe faster, and then I killed one extra enemy in order to manipulate the RNG engine for getting the last item drop faster.
From my previous submission: There are eight bytes containing pseudo-random generated values. The game uses only one of these byte at time, for determining if the relative item should be dropped, and it will use the following byte for each subsequent kill you perform, except when you kill an enemy that has a 0% or 100% drop rate... except that due to a bug, after the first loop the game doesn't get back to the first byte, but instead to the 6th, and then continues until getting 1 byte out of range, into the byte that contains the kill count... Which also has a bug. Long story short, after the first six kills, the game will enter a loop that makes the third kill guaranteed to give a drop, and the sixth kill instead is guaranteed to never give one.
Memory: Judging
Memory: Optimization looks good, no noticeable mistakes. Good job finding an improvement on the previous run!
Accepting.
EZGames69: Processing...