HMC Watch for Rolling Rocks 0.5xA Faster Strat

I show a faster strat for collecting the star Watch for Rolling Rocks in HMC using 0.5x A presses, decreasing the total time for this star from 14.8 hours to 5.4 hours.

We had known for some time that when hyper speed walking, Mario's speed will decrease at a rate roughly proportional to the steepness of the slope he's on. Thus, hyper speed walking on a steeper slope allows Mario to achieve PU speed more quickly, even when factoring in that a steeper slope requires a higher initial syncing speed. We also knew that the island's slope was steeper than the usual hyper speed walking slope by the gate. However, we had believed it to be impossible to conserve speed onto the island using non-PU speed. But when we told Iwer Sonsch these details, he got to work and eventually found a way to pull it off:    • [TAS] SM64: HMC HSW on island slopes ...  . The fundamental issue is that when you turn to try to move your next intended position from outside the lake room to the island, it inevitably needs to pass through the open area between the walls of the lake room and the island. If Mario's intended next position ends up in this open area, then he'll end up moving there and miss the island. Iwer solved this by (1) narrowing the width of the open area to cover by using the high floor near the ! switch, and (2) using Dorrie as a stepping stone. The high floor allowed Mario's intended next position to be under the floor and thus out of bounds, causing his movement to be cancelled and so he wouldn't move. Dorrie allowed Mario's intended next position to be inside a ceiling hitbox (since the underside of Dorrie is a ceiling), causing Mario's movement to be cancelled and so he wouldn't move. And so thanks to Iwer, we had a working (albeit very precise) way of conserving speed onto the island. Thus, we could build up speed much more quickly than only using the hyper speed walking spot by the gate.

However, since we started in a different position, I had to adjust the triangle route to accommodate. Much to my surprise, the ynorms of the island triangle and a particular triangle up from the lake (T1) happened to be just right, so that we could move from the former to the latter using a speed that was virtually equal to T1's second syncing speed. Thus, that movement does 1 quarter step at the island triangle's first syncing speed (1 PU over) and then 3 quarter steps at T1's second syncing speed (6 PU over). If these two triangles' ynorms didn't align like that, then we couldn't do this maneuver, since then Mario would only move for one quarter step during that movement frame, and that would lead to a game crash.

Nevertheless, even if this ynorm coincidence didn't happen, I had created an alternative route that would work. Though, this alternative route requires 768k speed instead of 604k speed, and so it would require an additional 95 minutes to execute: 15 minutes to build up the extra speed, and 80 minutes to lose the extra speed. If you look at the pictures of my workspace, you'll see that I had started working on this alternative route before finding the faster one presented in this video.

Pictures of my workspace: https://imgur.com/a/4M4Ee
Picture of my desktop: https://imgur.com/a/wPC24
Unabridged version of this video:    • HMC Watch for Rolling Rocks 0.5xA Fas...  
Console verification of this route:    • Mario 64 - Watch for Rolling Rocks - ...  
Old route:    • HMC Watch for Rolling Rocks 0.5xA Con...