i want to get into super mario bros speedrunning but have no way to play it whats a good option for a free controller supported NES emulator?

Click the "View Rules" button on the leaderboard.

FCEUX, Nestopia, Bizhawk are the three legal pc emulators you can use to submit runs for this game. Also openemu for mac

Any of them work fine. And "controller supported" is going to be the case with any of them - if you have a controller you can connect to your pc.

Good luck.

Out of the three of them I'd recommend actually running the game on Nestopia as it seems to have the least amount of input delay, although doesn't have any TASing capabilities so you'll need to use one of the other two for that

I got some weird Japanese emulator for Christmas (one of those multi game things) that has SMB on it. So would I not be allowed to play on that?

Speedrun.com leaderboard for this game operates on a white list rather than black list... Or in other words, it's not whats illegal its what systems ARE legal.

Original NES, Famicom or FDS Original NES or Famicom with Everdrive or Powerpak Wii, Wii U, Switch and 3DS Virtual Console FCEUX, Nestopia, Bizhawk, OpenEMU, Mesen NES Classic Edition Analogue NT Mini

Those are the approved hardware according to the rules.

So unfortunately no - it wouldn't be accepted

However you can download an approved emulator and play fairly easily in a computer

Everything's better with keyboard (except sm64 lol)!