Just a question about the new collection. Will the new runs be added as new platforms. Will we get collection categories if major changes in gameplay speed/emulation or will they be filed under emu runs? I'm mostly looking forward to practicing on Switch.

Good question! Hopefully it's just going to run on a relatively standard emulator and we can handle it with the "emu" tag... otherwise we'd have no choice but to make it a separate category. Unless the differences are obvious we'll probably have to spot check the frame count on some easy-to-replicate sections -- ex. the falling bridge before Death since it's straightforward and also lags.

That was my guess. I'm hoping it's fairly straightforward emulation so I can get realistic practice on the go.

Good news, looks like we're getting both Famicom and NES (soon) in an update. That means both versions woo

I'm not entirely for or against the separation of emu runs, but the fact that you can filter them out is very helpful to see where you compare vs other people using the hardware. Sadly, it is difficult to get real hardware in some places (read as outside the US and Japan). It's fairly crummy how some games were never released in some regions, or were released in limited quantities making it harder to find. I still am hoping I can one day send a cart/console for PAL regions to my friend Kutsu (also on the boards) since he has no real options to get them himself due to availability/cost barriers. This problem will also slowly become more and more prevalent as hardware (both carts and consoles) break down over time. But i understand the arguments for/against using a separation between NES and EMU runs

Unfortunately there's not enough outright changes to necessitate what happened with the Mario/Luigi U games being revamped for Switch (adding characters, etc) to warrant Anniversary to have it's own leaderboard. The actual changes will, considering most of these games have very minimal players on speedrunning (and likely won't gain a ton of new runners) will probably only be 10-20 seconds at most in the end, considering that the top tier runners are currently very near perfect on many of the games included, so that extra amount of time won't likely be saved by anyone anytime soon (unless everyone who has ever run the games decides to run on the new hardware). I see both sides of the argument and honestly don't know if there's going to be much of any actual impact until we start seeing a ton of new runs in old games with the anniversary collection.