I was playing on the Genesis on RetroArc and I lost most of my lives on Mad Doctor's autoscroll section, and I got to the end of the area while falling into a pit

Edit: If you mistime the last platform jump, you actually get sent to the pillar early! That is what I saw

I recreated the trick on Kega Fusion

The version of the game I used was the European version

Yes, that level is coded so that if you die on 0 lives during the autoscroller, you get sent to the tower instead of having a game over. We already knew about this, but if I recall correctly, the time you save by skipping the autoscroller is less than the time it takes to lose all the extra lives.

Oh! Okay.