Demonstration of the pop jump technique:

We ended up finally allowing emulators in Wave Race 64 last year. Part of the reasoning is that the Wii / Wii U / Switch ports are already using emulation, and in particular, the emulation they use is significantly worse than the best standalone emulators. I have never considered "easier to cheat" to be a disqualifier for emulator being allowed on a leaderboard, personally. You can cheat on any version of a game if you really wanted to. That's why we have moderation teams.

Another highly skilled player has found the community. Turns out Ricky is an asbolute beast and we should be using Ricky way more often :D

You can get a turbo start by pressing A immediately after the green light.

Been keeping this up-to-date. All of Ghillie's recent runs as well as Aster12587's new Hill Climb WR have been added.

For video submissions, please include the results screen that occurs after the run. For clarity, the results screen is the screen that shows the course leaderboard for times and the fastest lap (for non-Reverse courses).

PATWELLS is apparently a reference to a QA Tester for NOA who worked on Excitebike 64: https://www.mobygames.com/person/59394/pat-wells/

The IGN article with the code has this bit:

Use the name of Nintendo's Excitebike Master (Pat Wells) to make the game a lot harder: to do this, enter PATWELLS as a code.

I believe it makes the CPU difficulty another notch higher than Professional when enabled (presumably, this is the same effect the code "GAMEYARONI" has in the NTSC-J release of the game).

In the Japanese release, the codes are given to you when completing championship rounds. The Hi-Res mode setting in the Options menu is replaced with a Cheats option.

Codes for the Japanese release below:

・ KIDSRIDER (Beginner / Bronze) The rider's head gets bigger.
・ MIDNIGHT (Beginner / Silver) The course will be at night.
・ PINHEAD (Amateur / Bronze) The rider's head becomes smaller.
・ BIKEDAKE (Amateur / Silver) Only for motorcycles.
・ 10TENTORE (Amateur / Gold) Soccer will be 10 points first.
・ HENNAIRO (Pro / Bronze) The color of the course changes.
・ HYAAAAAAAA (Pro / Silver) Hill climb goes down.
・ TRICKSTER (Pro / Gold) You can use all stunt moves.
・ GAMEYARONI (Pro / Platinum) Computer becomes stronger.
・ MUTEKIDAZE (Pro / Match Race) The rider becomes invincible.

Challenge to the Past did a run with this code active as well as not using any boost.

Excitebike 64 NSO version releases in a few days. I've gone ahead and added the version to the supported categories.

Incredible discovery! I was never able to figure out any real differences between the versions. Very interesting that it affects both JP versions, as I'd thought one of those releases post-dated the USA version. Guess that might not be true based on the last modified dates for the files on disc.

All of Past's (as well as the other JP runner in this thread) runs have been added to the leaderboards in the last week or so. I think we've got a good set of all the best known times historically now. I did a lot of searching but never came up with anything else, though I'm sure there were some great times set in the early 2000s that probably never had video evidence.

WR64 really needs an OEM stick - others are usable but never ideal. Drake Lake 1'10" was set with a really old, "sloppy" stick - this can help to kind of maximize the ability to hit the small +/- X values in the joystick range for those very tiny, precise adjustments

Extremely difficult to determine from currently available evidence. It's certainly possible, but given how riddled those old mags were with cheated scores and times, I have quite a bit of doubt.

One possible way of (gently) corroborating short of actually getting in touch with William Lam somehow would be to check other submitted times for "impossible" or unrealistic times from the era. If there are multiple entries with seemingly legitimate times, it gives a bit of extra credence to the possibility that this SB time is authentic. Unfortunately, I didn't see any other of his submissions on that page - maybe he submitted some for another issue, haven't checked. Might be worth perusing some other issues of N64 UK for clues on that front.

Other things I briefly checked:

No mention of a William Lam on n64hs.speedrunwiki.com

No William Lam in the player database for mariokart64.com or fzerocentral.org or the-elite.net or dkr64.com

From Famimaga 64 (ファミマガ64) - Issue 7 8 - October 4th 18th 1996 https://imgur.com/a/sJyQEg0

Sources: https://twitter.com/GamingAlexandri/status/1671152590351138816 https://archive.org/details/famimaga-64-issue-7-8-october-4th-18th-1996

Requesting PS4 and PS5 be added as platforms for the game, as the game was released as a title for PS+ Premium on those platforms (and is a very good version of the game to boot): https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0700-CUSA33740_00-RIDGERACER200000

Also requesting to add fastest lap categories! Please and thank you!

OK this one is nuts