Now that the site's back up, I think I'll share some more discoveries about Battle Network 1.
It turns out that the "double-tapping" method of sending battle chips between the Folder and the Sack is faster than swapping one pair at a time, except of course for the last chip of the Folder/first chip of the Sack. Here's a demonstration, which I found to save 60 frames over how Zurreco did it:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/266391139/swapchip.vbm
I found that the chip trader can give you BassForte chips, but I already had that chip before it gave me any, so it may be fulfilling the rule about only getting Navi chips you already have. Does this rule also apply to LifeDreamAura, since you're supposed to win it from ForteBass after you get all the other chips? If someone can write a Lua script to retry the chip trader machines on different frames to see what comes out, we may be able to solve more mysteries about them. The annoying thing about the traders is that the chip you receive is determined before you choose the chips to put in, so you have to vary the frame on which you say Yes to using the machines in the first place and then mash A a dozen times per try.
When it comes to collecting random data crystals, the first two areas of the Internet work differently than the rest. In area 1, there are eight places where an item crystal
could be, but you will only find two items there each time you enter the Net. The game picks a random 2 places out of the 8 possible places to set the items when you use the portal in a PC, but the actual contents of the items aren't determined until you actually pick them up, so once you've luck-manipulated the desired positions, you don't need to do any more manipulation until you reach the crystal. Area 2 works the same way, except it always has 4 items placed in 4 out of 16 possible positions. So if you need some of the random items in the first two zones, try your best to get them into places that are along the path you're taking.
Then for all zones, luck-manipulate to get the chip you need out of the random chips possible in that area, or the highest amount of money! For example, Zurreco's run gets 200Z in a random crystal, but it could have been manipulated to give 1000Z. The rest of the sections of the Internet have 4 random items in the same 4 places every time, except for area 16, which has 8 random items. Yeah, powers of two are king! But what's really nice is that random item crystals are replenished every time you enter the Net from a PC, not just the one you jacked into, so you can make all the random items in all the zones reappear simply by popping in and out of an Access pad. This makes it easy to collect items repeatedly in the first few areas. Unfortunately, even though it would be nice to take some EarthQuake C and KnightSword C chips from area 16, I think it would waste too much time; in addition to the long detour, I recall there's a gate that requires you to win several battle chips in order to pass, and I don't think all those extra battles would be compensated for by shorter boss battles.
I think I may have stumbled onto how the virus machine in Dr. Hikari's computer works. I decided to fight a few hundred battles with it and write down all the enemies I saw. When I finished my list, I checked it against the enemy lists of other areas to see which ones they had in common. (I used
Mega Boy's Perfect Navigation Guide, which is a great resource with its tables pulled from the official Japanese guidebook, despite a few errors I spotted.) I noticed that my list was a union of enemies found in the five main "dungeons": oven, school, waterworks, traffic, and power plant. So I'm starting to think that the enemies available to the virus machine are based on which dungeons you've completed, or which enemies you fought in those dungeons. But for some reason, the virus machine gave me those "altered programs" that use ElecRingZapCircle very rarely, and I don't think I saw any of the red cannons at all, even though the guide said there were some in the main dungeons. So I'm not completely sure how it works, and I'll try to figure out more on my next playthrough. The virus machine probably won't be a major help unless those enemies in the main dungeons are too tough to fight at first and you want to save some for later.
I'm also going to chart out exactly what the improvements are from the Buster-PowerUps and SiteHub.bat. I've already found that having all the PowerUps decreases your "flinch" time slightly from having no PowerUps, but Hub.bat makes it so you don't flinch at all from a hit. Hub.bat also makes it so that you can shoot just as fast across five empty spaces as you do point-blank, but it didn't improve charge-up time over what it was when my Charge level was just 5 without it. I did a lot of this testing against ProtoBluesManV3, and I noticed that it's possible to shoot him successfully just as he finishes moving to a new space on the back column. Do it early enough, and he won't even put up his shield! I don't know if this has anything to do with the SkullMan attack glitch, but it's something to keep in mind. As I replay the game, I may also jot down other important facts, like what amount of damage makes each boss flinch. So please let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to try to find.
And if anyone cares, money maxes out at 999999Z, and time maxes out at 99:59. I really expected more digits than that...
