Hey all, I've got a pretty prickly issue that I'm wanting to get off my chest for a while now. I've personally owned 2 Dreamcast consoles and have had the disc drive die on both (one pre-2010 and then I bought a one in 2020 with a faulty disc drive). I went to the Dreamcast modding community to see what I could do, I learned that with Dreamcasts there are 2 disc drives out there: -Superior japanese disc drive -Chinese prone to failure disc drive However many members there persuaded me that it wasn't worthwhile buying a japanese disc drive and instead to invest in GDEmu, personally I don't have a lot of income and was tired of doing my best to avoid emulation but facing greater and greater cost however I bit the bullet and got a GDEmu just purely to be able to get some use out of my Dreamcast. Even if I bought a working disc drive it's only a matter of time until it needs the laser tweaked and this is something I'm uncomfortable doing however the GDEmu replacement was a simple plug out, plug in and try not to break anything. When I first started speedrunning DotF I didn't realise that my load times were advantageous because I made the stupid mistake of comparing my GDEmu loads to my PS2 loads (I use a backwards compatible PAL PS3 for PS2 gaming). Only recently when I compared my loads against @halfbakedprophet did I notice the error in my ways, I guesstimated I was saving about 3.5 minutes over him. While I clearly make use of better strats and also cleaner gameplay to make my time a lot more distant from his, I still felt bad about such a timesave over loads. Now I want to make it right and the only way I see that is to manually time without loads, I'm gonna be doing this from the frame before loading screen art appears and end loading the frame after the loading bar completes (aka level image and loading bar disappear to full screen of black). This is pretty gross to do manually and a real pain, probably gonna add to verification time however with DotF having such a miniscule speedrun community I think the load of work will be acceptable. LUL The weird thing is that the variety in glitches across 3 regions of Dreamcast and PS2 are so great that load times seem way less important compared to glitch ability. I also had this idea of finding the difference between my loads and HBP's and then just adding this onto my RTA time as a penalty as a third option, I think some genesis boards do that to combat emulator speeds. However there is a part of me that thinks this might come across as a little selfish, so please let me know.
tl;dr i'm an idiot but i don't want to throw away my WR so gonna have move to time without loads
This actually brings up a bigger issue. Loading is faster with the GDEmu, but is there a difference b/w Chinese and Japanese load times? How about gameplay? My guess is it doesn't affect gameplay, but I'm not versed well enough in DC engineering to know how the laser interacts with other systems. I know not everything is loaded when the level is loaded, with parts of the level popping in and out to save on memory and improve performance, and this potentially could affect the speed of the game.
So...... if loading is different based on hardware, and perhaps the speed of the game itself, then maybe we should have different run categories based on hardware. Not only would this be possibly fairer, but I think it would allow more inclusion of possible future runners, as they wouldn't necessarily have to go and purchase additional hardware to get the fastest times for whatever they have. We could also allow an emulation category, though I think we'd have to have guidelines for emulation. Also, it would way less work and verification would be easier.
Other than having different categories, I think manually timing without loads would be best. To penalize the difference in load times, you'd still have to manually time the loads to find the difference anyways, and so seems to be an additional step.
Boards usually don’t seperate by hardware that’s the same console generation cause there’s an argument that if you care enough for the hobby then you’d buy the right equipment. Splits only really occur when there’s a game on a portable console and a home console. I wouldn’t wanna split emu until we have a Dreamcast emu run done so I can compare loads.
We now use Unload to remove the loads from runs! It's a tool created from a runner over at The Hobbit and it works great for DotF! Woop woop :)
