So I've been learning 100 egg (thanks to TOTO's guide), and my emulator/rom won't let me fight the Sorceress. I go in the fight, and after about 30 seconds, it warps be into the first hub, with no gems and no eggs. I've also experienced something where I die to Spike or Scorch, and after beating them, can no longer get a better Sparx than green or blue. I know Insomniac put anti-piracy things in the game, but I also see that people play this on emulator successfully. Is there a fix to this?

I'm also running the 1.0 version, not the greatest hits (1.1) version, if that matters..

I was playing around with the fodder in Crystal Glacier, and found you could get some good proxies off of them. After some messing around with it, I found what could be a new strat for getting into the talisman room:

As the video says, you do gain ~7-8 seconds, but you lose about 25 or 30 gems. Could the time save make up for the gem loss?