This is awesome! Glad to see someone finally taking the record. Honestly, I'd love to see even more people get into this game because I don't have the time to glitch hunt, but (to the best of my knowledge), the hub is always the same, so there may be a way to skip to different hubs. Alternatively, it's possible someone could find a clip into the boss door in the hub area, which might just trigger the change (so all you'd theoretically have to do is beat the three main bosses before Orgus, and then beat the man himself).

Emulators are absolutely allowed. But needless to say (and I hopefully don't need to worry about this at all), if anyone (not just you) should be found using things like save states or tools of that nature (basically, anything outside of just playing the game), that run will not be accepted, and the user will be banned from the leaderboards. But absolutely, whether it be physical hardware or emulators, the thing I want to get across as being most important is that I started running this game to get more people into it, so at least at the beginning (and I have no plan to change this later on unless forced in a position where I have to), emulators and physical hardware alike will be accepted. ^_^