So I did some quick testing and on my hardware Dreamcast run, from selecting Andy's House to when "Press A" shows was 33 sec, including cutscene which I skipped as soon as possible. On Flycast, Dreamcast emulator, from selecting Andy's House to when "Press A" shows was 7 sec, once again skipping cutscene, saving 26 secs. Andy's Neighborhood was very similar. Additionally from selecting "exit the level" to the level select screen showing, on hardware it was 19.5 secs and on emulator it was ~9.5 secs. For Boss levels, from selecting Bombs Away for "Press A" showing was on hardware 15 secs and on emulator was 3.5 secs, saving 11.5 secs.

Most every load screen on hardware was very similar from previous testing I did so using these numbers from testing emulator I would average the time save to be 6.5 to 7 minutes of emulator vs hardware.

I don't really care if you allow emulator for Dreamcast as my DC run is not good and could be easily be beaten by way more than 7 mins as I already have a 1:16:47 that I accidently got Tarmac Light Puzzle Cutscene Skip so it wasn't allowed on the boards. Allowing emulator would allow for much greater accessibility to DC Toy Story 2 leading to maybe more runners other than myself. But 6.5-7 minutes on just loads is a lot, it is up to the mods to decided what they would like to allow.

Also the controls are the same as hardware, analog still does not work properly. And I noticed quite a few visual bugs with the environment when testing on the emulator.

Edit: Other Dreamcast Emulators like Demul and nullDC have very similar loads to Flycast so will most likely save the 6.5-7 minutes. Additionally GDEMU, which removes the disc drive and allows games to be run off a SD card, GDEMU saves close to the same as emulator but I don't own one so I can't test that at the moment.

To start out I have not tested it for Toy Story 2 so from my experience running other Dreamcast games I can say emulators will save a couple minutes just in loads. This might be even greater for Toy Story 2 because hardware loads are very long, roughly 25-30 secs each load screen. But I can do some testing later to see just how much it would save. I will also probably test the controls as on hardware the analog stick does not work properly.

It was set to never expire but idk what happened so I made another set to never expire, Try again and it should work

You can enter the secret path from the track but the other end doesn't connect and just ends. It was designed to have hidden powerups and it also contains one of the five warps in the game, Saturn 3 to Neptune 1 but since Neptune is by far the longest race it isn't useful for the run.. If you were going for highscores as a lot of games from that time period were intended for it makes sense but from the standpoint of speedruns it doesn't work well.

We believe we have found all possible warps through looking at the code for the game, there are 5 warps of which 3 are useful in any% speedruns. First warp is Venus 2 to Mars 1 then Mars 1 to Jupiter 1 and finally Uranus 4 to Pluto 1. These warps saves roughly 25-30 minutes. As for invisible pathways we have found them on all Saturn maps and no other planet so far, 7th believes there could be more but I have yet to find any after lots of searching. But the invisible pathways on Saturn are useless for the speedrun as they separate from the track and doesn't reconnect so all there is are powerups, even if you were able to go across the pathway and somehow reconnect to the other side there are hidden checkpoints on maps that might prevent that lap from counting.

In regards to full runs being disadvantaged on the individual disc boards, none of the current runners upload their full runs to individual discs. Blackdeathdoom literally told me he uploaded his full runs to individual discs take away my WR because he thought it would be funny to allow me to have it for a day before he takes it away. Currently on the boards there are 3 runs that are full game out of 10 runs on the boards and the last one that was was yours DT from 4+ years ago, not including bdd's "joke WR". And if full runs are allowed on individual discs then who ever has the full run WR automatically has all of disc WRs so what is the point of doing individual disc if full run automatic has WR, just do full runs if you want WR. Individual discs should be segmented so that we can truly push the limit of what this game can be, as long as you are following within the spirit and realm of the run.

You said by doing disc 1 chill run and getting bandits ring will take away all the RNG but I know you have run this game so you should know that 99% of the RNG that matters in this run is in the boss fights. Grinding to get a bandits ring AND a fast time disc 1 is ridiculous, my current bandits ring luck is 2 rings of 35 fights and the save file I used in my disc 2 doesn't even have bandits ring. As long as the save file used is in the spirit on the run, ie same level and usable items are almost identical. This should be easily verifiable by looking at the Doel fight and seeing those items and looking at the Mappi fight and seeing those items. I can't think of any loop holes outside of overleveling characters but that is very easy to notice and deny that run.

If you are able to verify character levels and items at the end of a disc and verify at the start of the next disc then I do not understand the hesitation to allow different save files.

Edit: To clarify when I say segmented I do not mean splitting disc into as many segments as you want. I still believe each disc should be single segment. But the disc 2,3, and 4 times should not be based on which save file you use but the best time you've gotten on that disc plus the best time you've gotten on the previous discs.

Yes and no, after some testing it appears JP is anywhere from 1 frame faster on certain text boxes or can be up to 1.5 secs faster on some text boxes. The no part comes from the aspect that the Sega Mark III does not have a RESET button which I know I use a lot in my runs, this means if you die you have to wait until the game brings you back to the Main Menu before you can load your save (It is about 15 secs from HP bar depleted to back in the game) unlike on the US version where I would hit the reset button (Same timing, dead to back in game, I got around 4 secs). So while the text is faster the no reset button might override that, or you could just get great RNG and then it doesn't matter. In more places like boss fights if all your stones of protections fail you'd have to retreat and get more which would lose massive amounts of time depending on the boss. It might be worth testing if on an Everdrive can play JP games on a US Master System and maybe you can circumvent the no reset button. I'll be doing a full playthrough on the JP version on emulator and see if there is any more differences between the versions but I don't think there is. But JP should still probably be its own category regardless on if it is faster or not but that is only my opinion.

Can we add an all boss and/or a 100% category. All bosses would just be all 8 bosses(Senpi 1,2,3/Hanj 1,2,3/Skeleton/Basailz) need to be killed before the final boss. 100% would be all bosses and all items would need to be obtained like the Mantle/Crystal/Helm/etc. and all chest opened.