If you're not familiar, Hoffman is also a supremely talented musician as well (often inspired by and/or made on an Amiga).
His track "Eon" here is from a very famous and artistically beautiful demo. https://hoffman.bandcamp.com/album/the-cave-sessions
I can feel the passion. Great write up!
It seems like the game is “off loading” the enemy bullet to player collision detection to the HuC6280. This would have presented a very complicated challenge to would-be bootleggers back in the day
Having an invincible RoboCop would be a devious punishment for arcade operators bootlegging the game. One quarter would eat up a lot of time on the machine. It would be hard to make any money on it.