Flash is a weird beast. Things you expect to be fast are slow and vice versa. With this project I’m really pushing the limits performance wise. And also, running the game in a browser gives a good 10-30% decrease in fps.
It’s a real downer when you’ve got tons of ideas for cool effects you want to do, but there’s just not enough speed to do it.
But with AS3 right around the corner speed is coming, i mean, if you can do a C64 emulator you can do almost anything.

A really good resource for optimizing flash is http://flasm.sourceforge.net/