After some consideration, the moderation team has decided to unban the 1993 Famicom version for the Any% category.

The Famicom version plays very similarly to the US releases, with really only one known difference: the end-stage countdowns are a bit faster. Every leftover heart at the end of a level loses 8 frames on US, while it only loses 2 frames on FC. Even with 0 leftover hearts, the FC version still leads into the next level 6 frames faster. This means that throughout an Any% run, the FC version saves about half a second over US PRG1 (assuming no hearts collected), making it even faster than the quicker-loading US PRG0 (which saves 0.3s over US PRG1, at the cost of random crashing).

The change is effective immediately and will only apply to Any%. As far as Whip Only, Low% and 2-loop are concerned, there's not been enough discussion on them yet and could potentially get a different treatment, but those ongoing discussions shouldn't slow down the process for Any%.

The meat and potatoes of the discussion happened within the moderation team, the idea has been recently posted on the public discord as well though it didn't lead into an extensive discussion.

To quote Laxxus in the Discord server, "heart countdown makes such a huge difference in whip only/low%, especially with how easy you can collect additional hearts (like in fleaman alley...)" I think the logic here is this: avoiding the extra candle hearts and heart drops is part of the challenge in Whip/Low%, while in Any% you're just focusing on completing the game as fast as possible without any catches ^^

I just realized that it isn't even unbanned for 2-loop. That really makes no sense, it is literally the same as for any%, so I agree with Spriven.

As for low%/Whip only: I said that because the differences for these categories are much bigger than for any% since you have no way of getting rid of the hearts. any% optimally ends on 0 hearts anyway (and if not you still lose time over 0 hearts, just not as much). Of course you can still say "it's just faster, so why not use it?" but it makes sense to at least think more about it. even without grabbing any extra hearts it's around 3 seconds of timesave on the heart countdown over the run. In Komrade's Whip Only run for example it's a total of 51 hearts = 5 seconds difference. That is actually pretty big.

Like the post said, we're unbanning it for any% and still evaluating it for other categories.

Obviously 2-loop is the easiest to unban next, but it's a really small category and we focused our efforts on rolling out any% first.