Properly supporting (as in making sure they're able to compete fairly and have sets of rules that properly allow the mods to verify there's no issue on that front even if unintentional) emulator on your leaderboards even just for a separate category is a lot of work and a lot of complex knowledge required from the moderation staff as well as extra work for verification.

No restriction isn't exactly as solution, though obviously easy and very accessible there might be unforeseen consequence down the line when you discover something can only happen on one specific emulator, nothing more disheartening than seeing a leaderboard where the WR is almost untouchable unless you use the same shitty old version of that one emulator the WR holder used.

Limiting the board to one specific version of an emulator isn't a solution (at-least not for 5th gen and up, prior to that for most console you can consider emulation to be "solved" for the most part), you can't guarantee said emulator will work properly forever and when you have to change emulator it pretty much invalidates the board entirely.

One better solution I've seen is disallowing emulator (and / or specific configuration of certain emulators) if they provably load faster or have noticeably less slowdown than the fastest official release, but even just that is quite a bit of work as you have to research differences and not just one time as emulators can get new versions with significant changes or some other newer emulators can appear so you have to again take a look at them.

Also for a few more specific things For the PS2, the console uses non standard floating point calculation, which are not emulated properly (because it's impossibly slow to do so accurately), meaning that beyond load times some elements of the game can play out entirely differently than they would on an actual PS2 which as you might imagine might become a serious issue (RNG outcomes, hit detection, AI behaviors etc are things I know for a fact can be affected).

For 7th gen emulation and up (though OG XBOX emulation shares the issue too) there's a marked change in that the emulator stop caring about original system limitations as much, meaning that games will render as many frames as the internal limiter (as in internal to the game) will allow which is bad as many game still tie logic to framerate (meaning higher framerate = faster) and additionally said systems have started really becoming storage speed agnostic, meaning that they will try to load as fast as is allowed by the hardware (even on the actual consoles, just see what happens when you swap in a SSD in your PS3), coupled with NVMe / RAMdisk being a thing you can see how that might be an issue.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/321330/ENYO_Arcade

Fast paced 2d platformer with movement that's 90% very streamlined Super Metroid 10% rocket / recoil jumping, has glitches, has skips, has multiple viable routes, has extensive optimization potential both in the routing and movement execution.

Here's a mediocre attempt at speedrunning the second level.

Really as long as it doesn't stay private (especially if you make it clear you know something the rest of the community doesn't) for too long no one will really care, it's not like there aren't plenty of people doing offline routing / practice that have tricks / trick ideas that aren't public yet especially for less popular games and categories.

Is there a Speedrunning mechanic would you like to see more games have? Proper in-game timers that only count down while you're actually in control. No cutscene mode Debug mode / tools.

Do you personally find mechanics centered around RNG based Speedruns fun or frustrating to play? It really depends if said RNG is something you can react and adapt to.

What do you think about developers "hiding" certain mechanics to finish the game faster for the sake of Speedrunners? Pretty much has always been a thing that if there's a bug that isn't really negatively impacting the gameplay it won't usually get fixed if there's other bigger issues, leaving it in for speedrunners is just a newer reasoning for the same thing.

And lastly, what mechanic have you used for Speedruns you wish didn't exist for the sake of your own fun/sanity? Neutral inputs for movement, my brain just refuses to get it right.

To be honest I don't like the idea because it's much dependent on weapon drops. There's really no easy answer when it comes to accessible categories that are actually enjoyable to run and improve, well there's co-op with weapon limits but that's still limited. That said if someone was asking forr it to be added because he wants to submit a run he's done I wouldn't have any objection to adding it, even if I have no desire to run a NG category.

There is a runner of EDF4.1 who did AP999 Inferno as Ranger exclusively. The time was 10:45:53 in real time. Interesting, I didn't think it would be as short as that especially with the Ranger

I'm mostly mentioning grinding because I've seen it be an issue on the EDF 4.1 leaderboards, and while I don't mind personally it does lower accessibility for those categories, also while many NG+ category do require grinding for an usable save it usually does not involve spending anywhere near as much time on it as EDF5 does. Granted I don't see any rules against using a 3rd party save or an unlocker so unless either of those is an issue I think it can be worked around if a runner wishes to do so.

DLC might be an issue for a potentially new runner as it tends to be a common issue in most categories that require DLCs to be ran at a competitive level, it does not affect most of the current runners but I feel like it's still worth mentioning.

All mission Inferno with low armor limit would definitely be quite a daunting run, not necessarily uninteresting in it's own right though, I'll have to consider that if I ever get around to actually seriously attempting one on 4.1 first, I'm guessing it should be in 9-12hr ballpark at worse if properly routed.

I can think of a few issue with an Inferno low armor category People without the two mission pack aren't gonna be competitive at all. People are going to need a fairly grinded out save to have any chance of participating at all (at the very least DLC 1/2 + upper-tier inferno gear preferably maxed out). More often than not the run is gonna go safe over fast, although that can create an interesting paradigm where routing is centered around whether you can make Air Raider fast enough compared to others to make taking risks irrelevant. Missions 1 to 41 is pretty much half auto-scrolling sections (time wise) meaning it's gonna be much less attractive as a run, doubly so when dying near the end of a 5-14 minute autoscrolling section is a very real possibility.

so I would like recommendations on what to aim for and do in that regard. Please let me know. I'd say just do a regular run and start the timer as soon as you hit new game and end it on the last hit on the last enemy, afterwards we'll see if there's any obvious issue with doing it like that and go from there to make a basic ruleset, then if you need some subcategories latter on that can be easily arranged. So pretty much you get to have the biggest say in what's going in the rules for running the GBC version, because you're the only one running it.

Don't mind the Co-op subcategory, it's a limitation from how SR.COM handles values for subcategories and I could try to fix it but I'm not sure how to do that without wiping the boards.

This is a pretty interesting question. As far as I can tell most game community do not care or ask and there's most likely runners doing runs on repro / flashcarts

But theoretically For reproduction cart specifically as long as the chips on the cart are the same type (including special chips such as SA-1 SuperFX etc ) and the ROM flashed on it was a proper unmodified dump then it most likely does not really matter, different PCB layouts and EEPROM chips could in theory induce some difference, but not to any game changing degree, save RAM mods could have an effect on anything that tries to access it (Not to mention some of those require a modded game to work), the real issue is whether what's on the cart itself is the clean unadulterated game version you think it is, dunno specifically about multigame carts but would guess it has a higher chance of behaving differently from the original carts. For flashcart it's more complex, the flashcart itself has to emulate the behavior of an actual cart, and unfortunately cart aren't usually simple storage for the game , there's mappers, special chips, save SRAM (some games use it for more than saves, specifically RNG). For mappers it usually doesn't matter as any inaccuracy would translate into the game not being able to access parts of it's data and would most likely break things in the process, some mappers do have additional function within the games though and I'm not qualified enough to say whether inaccuracy in said mappers could translate into hidden speedrun impacting issues. For special chips, it's emulated (except that one SNES flashcart where you could cannibalize a DSP-1, maybe there others but I'm not aware of those), and iirc there's accuracy trade-offs as the FPGA present on flashcarts simply isn't good enough to do it accurately (might have changed, but that was true at the time where SuperFX and SA-1 support on SD2SNES was unofficial) not to mention that this emulation is based on current reverse engineering efforts and while they're extremely thorough and accurate there's definitely still the possibility for some inaccuracy to have slipped by. Potentially also and I think more so in flashcarts for more modern systems the flashcart could simply have faster (or slower) read speed compared to regular carts (I don't think they cache the ROM to SRAM like flashcarts for older system do)

tl;dr: repro shouldn't be an issue as long as you're sure the ROM is the right one but flashcarts can definitely deviate from the original game behavior although they won't in most cases.

PS: Obviously not accounting for people who would intentionally try to cheat in a way only a flashcart / repro could allow easily.

Yes you can.

Currently it is allowed and used by the two top runs.

It not affecting IGT is not very relevant as you cannot see IGT if you're playing fast in a regular Any% run.

There's one I can think of that isn't tracked on the leaderboards but has been ran at-least once, Digimon World 3 100%, it's around 86hr.

Honestly I didn't click I just wanted to see if someone actually tested these things Well if they did the rulesets I've seen show that they either didn't do it well enough, don't care about it to begin with or simply decided to just have an emu category with seemingly strict requirements (aka use the one emulator) to have something that's fair for those who which to compete on emulator with other emulator user (the latter being the most reasonable to me, even if there's still issues with the way it is done in some cases especially lacking basic requirements that are pretty much mandatory to ensure the competition is fair.) Although I get it, actually testing emulators is a long process and you have to make a lot of effort for each individual emulator you test (and it only gets worse once you have plugin based stuff to deal with which is the entirety of N64 emulation more or less) and any accurate emulator usually comes with really high PC requirements and I get that it's less work to tell off the few people that know about emulator complaining about PJ64 1.6 being a dumpster fire than having to deal with potentially every toaster user complaining about their craptop catching fire / the required emulator not running (or not running full speed) because they have a pre-2010 PC etc, and there's also the question of moderating those runs as you need to know where to look for suspicious things and there's a lot more ways one could cheat not even necessarily intentionally. There's also a very high amount of people in many speedrunning communities who "Used ZSNES / Nesticle / Genecyst / Gens / Ultra HLE / pSX etc once and it was awful, so emulators are automatically bad", leading to people simply not wanting to even address the issue on either side, especially for big legacy games.

It honestly wouldn't hurt having something similar to Gambatte-speedrun (meaning a fork of a decently accurate emulator with tools that make it easier for the competition to be fair and that make it easier to moderate emulator runs) for every platform, at-least 5th gen and down, 6th gen is hairy at-best and 7th gen+ is never gonna be a fair comparison to actual hardware due to fundamental design choices in how those are being emulated (aka they completely disregard any limitation the actual hardware has and as such always load faster and run much better than the OG hardware ever could given a powerful enough PC) so people can have at-least a clean baseline, maybe it would also be worthwhile to try and make a guide that covers a few basics of what to look for when dealing with moderating emulator runs and what are ideas you can implement in your ruleset and what they achieve, maybe even a generic ruleset that you can just copypaste for people who don't really want to think about it too hard.

But I'm getting too comfy fighting windmills, so I'm probably gonna stop here.

Long runs kinda depends on what is in the run, usually people think of JRPG runs but I have never ran any so my insights come from attempting runs in the following games / category (I say attempt because I haven't necessarily submitted a run for each of those, but I have at-least completed one run of each of those at some point and might have decided to not submit it for various reasons) https://www.speedrun.com/acecombat3#100_PALNTSC-U https://www.speedrun.com/alundra2 (this one is where I learned the importance of having your notes on hand) https://www.speedrun.com/aac#All_Androids_Campaign (this one is by far the most straining of all of them) https://www.speedrun.com/earth_defense_force_4.1_the_shadow_of_new_despair https://www.speedrun.com/edf5

You're most likely not gonna get hungry enough for it to be distracting unless it's over 8h , but you can always have a snack near you if you're that afraid you might , preferably something not messy, easy to eat with one / no hand and not sugar heavy, obviously take note of places in your run where you can be less focused and not lose too much time / take too much risks, if that's not a thing then you'll have to take the time loss unless the game has rules for mid run breaks. As for drinks water is a safe bet, energy drinks are definitely not a good idea, you'll feel pumped for a time and then you will crash.

Bathroom should again not be much of an issue with runs that aren't much longer than 8hr, take your precautions before and keep places where you can take a break in mind (if there is any, if there isn't just take the time loss), depending on your setup you could totally go full wireless and just continue playing while going to the bathroom, there's no rule against that that I know of, there's obviously some other options you can think of in a similar vein but I'm gonna leave you to figure those out on your own.

As for other things to think of, get a second device and have your notes on it (if it is in fact relevant to the game in question), make sure you're gonna be comfortable for the duration of the run, specifically for headphone avoid anything bass / treble heavy and turn the volume lower than you're used to if possible (and if at any point your ears start hurting / buzzing / ringing etc remove them immediately, same thing if the headphones themselves start hurting you due to a clamp that's too strong or something similar, ignoring that is a surefire way to get tinnitus or an ear infection), have a clean and dry towel near to wipe any sweat you might build up (again that's very relevant to headphone users) make sure you do not have a medical condition that you can make worse by sitting for that long or staring at a screen for that long (take any opportunity you can get to look around or outside a window / get up and walk around a bit regardless) , try to have some easy way to keep the lighting conditions of the room you're in good for the whole run.

How does it look? Fine, but there's is a slightly problem with filtering by difficulty, there are two "Any", one shows every single run, and the other only shows mine with multiple difficulty, just a matter of renaming the any to multiple in the variables.

And for the Online categories, do we need all players' videos? I don't think it's necessary, and from a quick check on other games none have implemented that requirement that I can find so I don't think it's very helpful either. Although that does leave the question of whether a video from someone that isn't the host can be used to submit a run as there's definitely the possibility of having every player recording the run in case the host has recording issue in the middle of the run.

I'd just like to point out that banning a specific version of a plugin based emulator, where every single aspect of the console has it's own set of plugins and where different plugins will interact with other plugins and/or other versions of PJ64 in wildly different ways seems strange, even more funny to me is that judging from the few leaderboards rules I've skimmed none seems to acknowledge that and just tell you to use X version of Y plugin based emulator, with no other precision. I'd also like to point out that the video comparison that was just posted has some glaring issues that put into question the accuracy of what it tries to demonstrate, just take a look at the Vi/s counter in the bottom right, to keep it short and simple this should be 60 or as close to it as possible as this is what it is on the real hardware (I'm fairly sure, older console tend to deviate a tiny bit either slightly under or slightly over that number and TASvideo's ressources on the matter are not verified for N64 http://tasvideos.org/PlatformFramerates.html ) , but in that video it jumps all over the place sometimes up to 78Vi/s which is definitely not how PJ64 2.0 behaves by default Not to mention the choice to compare it to WiiVC (however official it is it's still a very inaccurate emulator ) and not actual hardware, and with obviously very limited comparison points that don't actually show the full picture (specific example here is that the inventory opens faster, but from a quick check from existing runs, under the same conditions N64 opens the inventory faster than WiiVC, but WiiVC is in fact faster overall than N64 for OoT from my understanding)

• made difficulties sub-categories I'm not convinced this is a good idea, the routing between Easy/Normal/Hard is almost exactly the same but slower (with a few exceptions where it is faster), so this makes a lot of somewhat redundant runs (or a lot of empty leaderboards). Maybe it could be an idea to merge those 3 difficulties into one leaderboard (and maybe have them not obsolete each other) and leave only Hardest and Inferno as separate, but that feels extremely arbitrary Another would be to have any difficulty be the default category and have runs be submitted to both this and their respective difficulty category, would help having a well populated leaderboard at the forefront at-the very least.

Well I almost completely forgot about posting that until now.

Regarding my submission, I used the regular ePSXe 1.9 (I think... it's been so long) So you can use any emulator as long as it does not affect the gameplay and save states are forbidden. I kinda figured, not a big fan of ePSXe so I'll stick with Beetle PSX.

Superplanes are able to be used when unlocked (check my 100% guide) O.S.L. is allowed when unlocked So I can use everything except the hidden weapon select as long as I have met the requirements for unlocking them in my current run, guess that makes the route very simple then.

As it currently is no hit is extremely hard to moderate and way too hard to be reasonably ran in any real capacity outside of ILs, just as reminder the run is around 1h30 and done with 1.5x speed on and contains many levels that I doubt many people could claim any success rate above 10% if they ran those as no-hit ILs at normal gameplay speed.

One way this could be made more reasonable is having runners use a special save that has no levels done without damage and simply have the goal be getting a no-hit star next to each level, although then no-hit isn't really a literal no hit run since you merely need to finish a level with a full healthbar instead of not getting hit at all, but this seems a lot more reasonable to handle for everyone involved, but I still feel even with that the run is well above what people would actually want to run (as in more than once).

Hi, I've been experimenting quite a bit to see if there were any easy way to improve my current run, and it seems like changing the difficulty mid run is one of the things I can do for an easy improvement. Problem is, the run submission form doesn't allow for that unlike multiple classes, so I'd like to ask for that option to be added or be specifically denied as right now it's unclear whether you can do it or not.