I remember DeSmuME used to give me some issues. Has it gotten more developments in the last 10 or so years?

I remember DeSmuME used to not be as capable, but I didn't have capable hardware to emulate DS all that well. I'll try it again, hahaha! And thanks! It wasn't great as I had a few poor mistakes, lol!

So, I have no ways to cleanly record from original hardware. I CAN record from emulators though. But melonDS has a random chance to lock up when going between dimensions, so it's not feasible for me right now. I always have to reset.

Any advice on correcting this? I REALLY want to get into this game's speedrunning community as I'm fairly good at the game. NOT like the existing runs, but I got a run of 1:12:4x recently for 100%.

It's possible. Though it's the only instance I can think of. I've been casually running the game for years and just got a personal time of 1h:13m. I wasn't recording though. Partially because the game has a tendency to lock up in MelonDS using my dumped copy of the cart. I'm trying to streamline my run to minimize backtracking before focusing on tightening up my movement. But that's cool about the Silvermane trick! Never knew about it, to my recollection, anyways...

What is the Early Silvermane trick? I'm aware of Early Electro that cuts 2/3 of backtracking and everything (I've done that for years hahaha!) But this is the first I've heard of this.