An acquaintance of mine, that is very good at Dr Mario, maxed out the score without cheating on an unmodified Famicom. Those Twin Galaxies cheaters don't even come close. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfKfnOULeGw
The tricky part is that while you get more points the bigger combos you get, the game can not handle very large combos and may freeze if you kill too many viruses in one go. Seems like he figured out how it works and used it to his advantage.
He has also made a hack of the game I heard, so he probably has a lot of knowledge how it works under the hood.
Huge respect and congrats for having that sort of skill there for that game, this is all I can say
Can you please post a link to the hack? I'd love to check it out!
It was a very personal hack used to produce a physical copy as a birthday gift for another Dr Mario lover so I don't think it was made public. He had to learn a lot about 6502 assembly and Famicom hardware besides Dr Mario mechanics though, that's a lot of dedication for a birthday gift! But I guess he was interested of learning the workings of his favourite game anyway.
Just imagine 2-player mode with him as an opponent...
Game just shows the white flag when too much viruses dissappear; deleting additional viruses is unusual, fascinating behavior for me. He explains it (I only checked crucial video moments)? I didn't saw something like this in other match-3 game similar to Dr. Mario.