So I went to sleep at about 1 a.m. Woke up at around noon. I opened up my program I use to make Flying Hamburgers with. I was hoping something, some idea, would come to me. I looked at the code, and sure enough, some idea did come to me. What if I were to keep track of enemies hit and declare them unable to be on the screen right after they're hit instead of when they were already off screen and about to come on? Which, in hindsight, was what I should have done in the first place.

A half-hour of coding later and I think I've done it. Only two enemies on the screen when there's two enemies to shoot left for the boss and same for one. I played around with it and it seemed to be working good. I even got to level 2's boss with this (I reset the game after reaching level 1's boss in the emulator so I could try it again.) I played about half a dozen times and it worked each time. The next step, of course, is to test this on a real Game Gear.

And each time I got the chicken nugget, the sound effect for gaining a life played correctly, so that's good. It wasn't before. I don't know how I broke that.