Hello,
I am a moderator in a small and quite new game speedrun community (Alundra 2) and we have discussed about downgrading the emulator we use (Duckstation) after the read speed option x4 started to bug out runs. We're currently on x3 but some of us propose to downgrade.
What do you think we should do? Do we downgrade and do our runs on a specific version of this emulator, or we stay on x3 and retime loading time on older runs?
Waiting for advice, thanks!
I'm neither familiar with the game nor the emulator. But it sounds like you're describing a bug in the emulator. If that is the case I guess first I'd contact the emulator devs that you guys experience bugs.
And I guess in this case you recommend a downgraded version of the emulator. Maybe put smth like "use Duckstation version >= 0.6" in the rules if that one is fine and give a warning what version is buggy, e.g. "Duckstation version 0.7 is not recommended due to bugs with high read speed options".
Competitive games don't allow read speed x4 or even x2 (Quad Speed) and require showing DuckStation settings. To avoid a time advantage over real console and other emulators. Check out the DuckStation rules for Tekken 1 and Crash Bandicoot. I think I've seen x2 allowed in one game to try to match PS2's Fast Disc Speed.
That has to be balanced against driving away a new runner in a game with, say, under 20 players by requiring them to use slower emulation settings in your game that other games don't care about. No one likes pages of rules either.
Here's a short as a possible ruleset I proposed for a less popular fighting game:
DuckStation 0.1-6280 or newer (matching Tekken series and Crash Bandicoot min version)
Settings -> Console
- Enable Clock Speed Control: Unchecked
- Async Readahead: 8 sectors (53KB/16ms) - or less/Disabled
- Read Speedup: None (Double Speed)
- Seek Speedup: None (Normal Speed)
Settings -> Emulation
- Runahead: Disabled
All these settings are the default values and showing Runahead as Disabled is also required for RetroArch.
Thanks!
We finally opted out for using a specific emulator version (Duckstation-0.1-6292) and staying in x4 in the eventual case the emulator has (again) poorer performance, and to not re-time everything already done. And since the developer don't accept issue request anymore, it's hard to predict the stability of future versions.
Our game (Alundra 2) have runs of 5h long on average so we wanted the fastest option to save a bit of time IRL because loading times can be very long sometimes. But, as runs become more and more shorter and maybe if more runner comes in, we may think about it again in the future.
Thanks again for your feedback on this topic!
