Mysterious demo pausing in Sonic 2 Final

While I was making my Sonic 2 hack, I noticed something. In Aquatic ruins zone, all of a sudden the demo would (what appeared to be at the time) crashed. Then I sent it to a friend and he said it also crashed, but then he pressed start and it unpaused. I looked into it a bit further and found out that the demo actually paused itself, and didn't crash. It crashes at 0:29 (you will need to extend the demo time to see this, I extended it to 30 seconds). And I also noticed, on a clean unedited ROM, it pauses just after the drowning timer starts. My theory for it was: The original demo time was 30 seconds, a nice number (unlike 27, not...rounded off I guess. ya know) but then the person who was recording the demos, was about to drown, and thought "oh no, the drowning timer started. That isn't supposed to happen in the demos". And maybe SOA were too lazy to record another demo, so they just took back the overall demo time to 27 seconds. Just before the drowning starts. My friend's theory was: Since they had a hard time fitting all the data into the cart, (as they had already taken out a few levels and stuff) they might have still had problems, so they took the demos back a couple of seconds on each one (totalling 12 seconds of demo taken out) so they could fit the game onto the cartridge. Sorry if this is old news, just thought I'd share it with all of you just incase Any other theories or solutions?

 

I have the ROM available for download now. For it to work, you just need to watch the demos until it gets to Aquatic Ruin and 0:29 seconds. When it pauses, press start again and it will unpause. It would have also paused a short time after the drowning music and timer starts.

Here is the link to the download here:

http://shonic.soniconthe.net/sonic2.bin