Requesting promotion to super mod in https://www.speedrun.com/mmx2 as all the mods are regular mods currently.

I'd recommend watching some of the tutorials in the guides section first before reassessing whether you think your guides will be useful for speedrunners learning this game. For example, you don't have rolling shield during Spark Mandrill's stage to use on Thunder Slimer in any speedrun category of this game that allows you to use special weapons. And the Mole Borer in Armored Armadillo's stage can be bypassed entirely while using the boomerang to get the heart.

There's an autosplitter for DesMuME 0.9.9 and 0.9.11 that can be found here: https://github.com/ShootMe/LiveSplit.DeSmuME (instructions on how to set it up are on the page)

Here is my livesplit layout file which contains the memory addresses/values for Shanoa, any%(splitting on each boss kill): https://www.mediafire.com/file/4ha2of6wehnsvpx/shanoa_any%25.lsl/file

If you don't want to mess up your other layout settings and would rather input them manually, here's what it should look like.

Portrait of Ruin has been lacking in the moderation department for its entire history here on srcom, with SakuraFreak being the sole moderator and sometimes taking weeks to verify runs due to real-life obligations and PoR being a game that doesn't really get submissions all that often. I would have volunteered myself to mod when I started running the game, but seeing as even like Romscout wasn't modded, I assumed Sakura had things covered. Considering the timespan of your conversation, Sakura's inactivity, and your posting in the mod request thread, it seems Sakura felt he had to do something or the SRC admins would have added you anyway.

Regarding the addition of new categories, even if it's a misc category, I believe it should be: discussed publicly whether it should be added or not, a category that offers interesting gameplay that is unique from other categories on the boards, and have, at the bare minimum, 3 or more people who have either done more than one run of the category or at least have expressed interest in doing runs of it in the future(more if the game's more popular).

For example, these qualifications were all met when we were discussing whether or not to add 'Maxim, in-bounds' to CV:HoD, and what exactly the rules should be. I do not think that any one mod should have unilateral authority to add whichever category her or she wants to a leaderboard of a game with multiple runners, be it Sakura saying he would add it himself after you messaging him privately or you adding it yourself after becoming a mod. You did bring it up in the forums, but considering the only response was VB saying he doubted it would be added since it didn't have any interest, I think that was a pretty good indication that wasn't really any other interest to merit making the category.

Personally, I don't think NG+ is worth having even as a misc category in most Castlevania games, this one included. It doesn't really add any interesting gameplay to the run, and just takes away all of the difficulty of the game by letting you blaze past everything with overpowered skills and abilities. I'd much rather see something like jonathan/charlotte all bosses long before something like a NG+ category in this game. More people can discuss it either here or in the other thread if there actually is interest in adding the category(to misc at most, not main like it was before), but since I know that at least VB and myself are against it, and it hasn't garnered interest from anyone else in the past 3 months since you brought it up, it wouldn't say its chances are very likely.

Are there any launches that go through walls but stay in bounds on both sides and don’t cause major sequence breaks? If so, that seems to me like it would be more or less on par with the small vertical zips since some of those go through solid ceilings/floors.

It’s hard to tell what’s going on in the tas sometimes when the launches cause offscreen movement.

Which zips don't go out of bounds?

I’d rather see a ‘maxim, in-bounds’ category than glitchless, e.g. launches and damage glitches are ok as long as you don’t zip into any walls or do any wrong warps.

From the category rules:

"Please do no submit Legacy Collection PC version runs under the PC platform of these leaderboards; that is specifically for the original PC release from 1998. Alternatively, runs done on the Man X Legacy Collection version on any platform may be submitted on the Mega Man X Legacy Collection leaderboards: https://www.speedrun.com/mmxlc#X4 "

If somebody were to time out the loads of the various Legacy Collection platforms, they could be moved back to these leaderboards w/ time conversions like the 1998 PC version, but until then XLC runs will remain on the XLC leaderboards along with X1, X2, X3, & X8.

Probably not unless there's multiple people interested in it. The Mega Man X leaderboards have never tracked ILs even for the main games.

Sorry, I forgot about this for a while. Anyway, we decided to make XLC a separate game from the originals releases for X1-4 on mmrta, just like we did for X Collection, and will be doing the same over here on SRC as well(namely because they can't be compared to the original releases at all due to faster load times and next to no lag, and this just makes the leaderboards neater and better organized). I've put in a request for an XLC board on SRC, but it's still pending approval.

As for challenge mode, we'd need to figure out how to put that on the boards if anyone wants to run it since there are 3 difficulties. I'm thinking just making 1 misc category for Challenge Mode with difficulties as subcategories.

Run-ahead just rewinds the game X number of frames, puts your input on that frame, then fast forwards back to the appropriate frame. It's a simple concept, but much more taxing on your CPU.

As for capturing RetroArch, these are the rules for emulator submissions to megamanleaderboards.net: http://megamanleaderboards.net/index.php?page=emus

I added a link to the page in the rules here just now since apparently they weren't there before, but they only applies to top level times anyway.

Something like this state load message would suffice:

Although from what I can tell, RetroArch doesn't seem to let you save or load states while it's recording a movie, so it doesn't look like it's possible to make any sort of a tool-assisted movie with it anyway. In that case, if you wanted to be safe you would just have to prove you're playing on RetroArch somehow, such as by showing some sort of emulator message like state-load or framecount, or capturing the entire window.

RetroArch is fine. For the core, you would need to use bsnes, higan, or snes9x 1.50 or later.

RetroArch's run-ahead feature, however, is going to be banned for all mega man games since it uses savestates and fast forwarding mid-run.

Legacy Collection has been added now as a sub category for the existing X Collection categories. Select any% or 100% (XC) for category, XLC for version, and whatever system you're on(PC, Switch, Xbone, or PS4) for platform.

DSLite isn’t original hardware; the Gameboy Advance is. mGBA and VBA-next aren’t emulating the DSLite; they’re emulating the Gameboy Advance, and VBA-next is doing it more accurately.

I agree with standardizing mGBA since its inaccuracies are effectively equal with VC/DSLite, but the “mGBA is closer in accuracy to original hardware than VBA-next” statement should be removed from the rules since it’s not true.

Also, I think using the proper bios should just be required for any emulator submission. If people don’t know where to get it, we can just include it in resources.

I'm still confused as to what data is suggesting mGBA is closer to original hardware than VBA-next when Charleon's spreadsheet shows mGBA to have faster load times, which is consistent with VBA-next being more accurate to console than mGBA in literally every other game I've compared them in.

By the way, BizHawk 2.2.2 is supposed to be coming out soon which contains an update to the mGBA core(v0.6.1) which according to the changelog contains many accuracy fixes. I compared this core in the recent mGBA emulator version itself to VBA-next, and it's still nowhere near as accurate as VBA-next.

By more accurate, I mean more accurate to original hardware, as I am assuming all of these platforms have faster load times than original console since I know for a fact mGBA isn't console-accurate, and less accurate than VBA-next from other games I have TASed. Your tests are consistent with this since they show your VBA-next run to have 112 total load frames and the mGBA run to have 107.

I just don't think runs should be rejected under the premise that they might be using a more accurate emulator core if they forget to show it. I agree with the sentiment of simplifying the verification process, but there's no harm done if a run ends up on the leaderboards where somebody loses time because they neglected to read rules that say something like "mGBA is preferred since its accuracy is consistent with Wii-U VC and DSLite".

So basically the standard you are converting to is WiiU-VC and DSlite(whose load times appear to be the same)? And even though VBA-next is more accurate than mGBA, you want mGBA to be used since its accuracy is also comparable to those two platforms?

I think this is fine, but I don't think VBA-next should be banned since it is more accurate than mGBA, or that people should have to show which core they are using for verification since neither of them are less accurate than the platforms with w/ the proposed load time standard that other runs are being converted to. We can just say mGBA is preferred, and if someone happens to do a run on VBA-next it can just be converted down to mGBA/VC/DSlite; same thing if someone does a run on Wii-VC or the GBA console. It might seem more intuitive to convert everything to console's load times, but since hardly anyone runs on console I think it's fine to just convert console to mGBA/VC/DSlite to save time for whoever's doing the conversions.

I think if all bosses and all furniture are similar enough then there should only be one of them, but I wasn't really sure what to do with it since nobody's done an all furniture RTA run yet.

I generally like to keep it to fewer categories to consolidate competition and only add new ones if they're unique enough or if there's a lot of interest in it. I don't think you have to add a new category for anything one person's done a run of since then you could end up with 50 meme categories on your boards if someone decided to take advantage of it. Granted, all bosses is normally a pretty standard category for completionist metroidvania runs, but if all furniture is a better run then I'd rather have that instead if people are willing to run it.

That said, I don't have plans to run Juste any time soon, so I'll leave it up to the Juste runners/mods to decide what to do with his categories.

Devilsquirrel made an autosplitter for DeSmuME 0.9.9 and 0.9.11 which can be found here: https://github.com/ShootMe/LiveSplit.DeSmuME

Instructions on how to get it working are included in the readme.

These addresses/value changes work for Richter mode:

The boss address is the same for Jonathan/Charlotte, but you'll need to put a different value in for the Dracula kill for their runs(the reason I didn't do a generic value change for him is because the address changes when you kill Death in the first phase).

Most of the emulated runs on the nico leaderboards are likely on uosnes, which is comparable in accuracy to snes9x 1.43.