You're thinking of finding a cutscene to see if that stops the countdown? What about a Chozo hint statue? I know they sit down after you get whatever they're pointing to, but would any of them still be standing after going to Tourian? For all I know going there might set them all to sitting. I was thinking of whichever one points to the Wave Beam, or some other skippable powerup.
Simple, we go through the block that's supposed to keep you in the fight with mommy brain but doesn't always appear. I've been trying my darndest to get it to not appear, but it doesn't like me. The plan was if it didn't appear to kill MB and run to the Brinstar-Norfair Elevator and activate the cutscene there. I figured out how to go through Crateria, the only hindrance is that block and the game restarts (I have to pick up everything that I want to use in the game).
If you watched the video Maur posted in this thread, you'll see that he runs through a save room with perfectly normal doors during the countdown. That's why it would be of interest to find out if the saving function works.
No doors outside of the tourian escape grey out during the countdown. And no, you can not save. I've tried. If nothing else, notice how the save points in my vid don't do their normal animation.
I tried going to chozo statues before, but not one that was standing upright. I doubt it'll work if getting a new item didn't, but... yeah.
[edit]Tried upright chozo statue and varia suit. Both failed.
Here is a better movie of the escape, with a couple unnecessary shinesparks (the best kind) thrown in. I still messed up in a couple spots, but this is about the 10,00th try, so it'll do for now.
And I don't think it's possible to escape this way in less than 2 minutes, so it's easy mode only for now.
EDIT: Better run uploaded. The only obvious mistake is jumping onto the Tourian elevator. However, that is minor, and I'm pleased with how the rest of it turned out, so this will probably be it (unless nate says it isn't good enough to go on the site :P).
One more thing: There are slowdowns, and the sound gets desynced (due to the fact that my compy sucks). I have no idea how to fix this, and I assume nate does, so if he wants to use it he can try to fix it himself.
How about a boss fight during the countdown? The boss music takes presedence over the normal BGM, just like the escape music. Perhaps it, and other code, have presedence over the escape.
There is plenty of time to reach grown-up Imago. Also, if you get the long beam just before entering Tourian, will the giant sidehopper battle take place when coming back through?
Has anyone thought of using AR/Codebreaker to skip a cutscene completely, and then running your rear end off to the cutscene just to see if it'll stop the counter? Or how about hacking a rom to give you like, infinite time to see if there's anything in the game that'll end the cutscene other than getting off the planet?
The VBA always seems to slow down as you have more and more sprites on the screen. Turning off the sound, increasing the size of the window, the amount of frames you skip, power of your computer... So many factors seem to slow the VBA down. The ZSNES, however, never seems to slow down, no matter what. Nor does any other emulator for different systems. *Shrugs* Geuss the GBA/VBA is weird like that.
For maximum speed, keep the video at 1x and turn thye sound off. (I don't mean mute your computer, I mean off in the file section of the VBA.) and keep the frame skipping around 2 or so. You could always tape down the space bar, but that frame skip always seems to put the emulator around 500% for me; way too fast for me to react to anything.
I have no doubt that updating the program would not help. It runs at like 45-50% of normal speed-it's just not designed to run on the computer's processor. I could reccommend that he tries loosening up the settings though. The fact is though that he doesn't complain about it, which is weird.