If it's not a speedrun, it doesn't belong on a leaderboard on this site. That doesn't change by what some other communities might or might not have done in the past. They're certainly not encouraged to abuse the system and neither should those cases be taken as precedent. That said, collecting highscores on a spreadsheet and organizing that in a forum post here is absolutely fine and encouraged. It's just that this particular category goes explicitly against the speedrun meta, because the fastest time has no chance at being the highest score at the same time.

The default settings are fine. In older versions, we concluded that changing v-sync settings altered the frame rate, so I'd suggest refraining from touching graphics settings that resemble something like that. For a more complete and up-to-date answer, I'd suggest contacting the developer of the program.

If you want some input, here's how we've been approaching other inaccurate official emulators - in this case the 3DSVC and the Kirby's Dream Collection on Wii(U) VC: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13_Le7b0KgGA1tT_x-ta2Yfv5PrLWViauZ26XbVzgKhY/edit#gid=0

You have to ask yourself what kind of leaderboard you want: one were versions/platforms compete with each other or one where you can actually compare the individual runs and runners - to put it very bluntly. The former has been a common approach in the old days of speedrunning (OoT was a prime example with N64 competing with WiiVC and iQue at some point). Sure, that's a way to list the technically fastest times on one board, but you lose the ability to compare one run to the other if they're using individual exploits unique to their respective platform. If you can't compare 2 things, should those 2 things compete with each other? Open question.

In the Game Boy community in particular, we've always aimed for comparability. The SGB conversion is a historical example of that aspect. With the only difference being the clock speed and lag supposedly being the same, it's an easy conversion, to be fair. When inaccurate emulators come into play, everything becomes a little bit more complicated. Therefore, inaccurate 3rd-party emulators are generally banned in all of GB speedrunning. We have the luxury of at least 2 very accurate emulators with Gambatte and BGB, which are allowed on the vast majority of boards, so banning the "bad" ones is a non-issue when it comes to accessibility. Most people will take issue with banning official releases, though, and I agree that it would feel inconsequential with the inclusive approach we've given the SGB and also the inclusion of the 2 aforementioned emulators. For that reason, I've been converting times for 3DSVC on the boards I moderate, purely based on framerate comparisons, that is. Load times are another common source of differences that are not too hard to account for in most cases. Lag is usually a different story because it tends to rely on execution and is therefore hard to quantify and put in a conversion factor - and also highly depends on the particular game. In the end, it's up to the particular communities to figure out the best approach. I'm merely pointing out that there has been a working one in the GB community for years now. You're the ones who know your games best and I'm sure you'll figure out a good way to deal with this. It might involve some research and effort, but that's not the worst thing in the world. Seeing that some people already made comparison recordings, there seems to be a good basis to build upon.

We tend to reject demos in game requests. It's not about the length of a run, but more about the uncertainty about the final state of the game. History has shown that demo boards can be hard to maintain and/or transform into the final game's board. So many things can change during development and so many boards in the past have ended up in unsightly states with different versions as categories or weird mixes of incomparable runs on one leaderboard, etc. To avoid that, it's best to wait for the actual release version before requesting the game. Saves everyone a lot of trouble. Nonetheless, we still look at every submission individually and check the update history and release roadmap if there is one to make a proper judgment, so in certain cases we'll allow games that are very close to release or are unlikely to change in content/balancing that's relevant for the speedrun.

[quote=zuweq]...or Highscore[/quote] speedrun.com

Aside from that, I think it's just too short a category to be worth tracking, since most runs would end up around or below 1 minute.

The easiest way to re-time a run is loading up the video file in a video editor (personally, I use Avidemux) and check the start and end frames. You can either cut the video at the start frame and read the length directly from the program when you go to the end frame or don't cut anything and just do some math. We use character control for this game, so the easiest way for an accurate timing is to select the very frame that first shows 399 on the timer in 1-1 and later add 0.686 seconds (=40 video frames at 60fps), since the actual control starts at the very end of the level transition already and can potentially be obscured by how the video is encoded, so just using the 399 timer frame is a sure-fire way to pinpoint the actual start. The last frame of the run is when you lose control over Mario after defeating Tatanga, which is the very frame when the latter explodes and which also causes all of Mario's projectiles on screen to disappear. You can also just leave all the retiming to me, but if you're curious yourself, those are the relevant frames.

As for questions about your OBS setup, feel free to contact me on Discord so I can try to help you out with that.

I don't have any advice on the technical aspect, BUT here's a general one: please don't let the timer distract you from the run! The timer is NOT relevant for your speedrun! It's a convenience tool that provides additional information to you and/or your audience, nothing more. No serious game moderator will ever rely on the timer for determining the length of an RTA run, autosplitter or not. I understand that it's a little annoying if there are timer issues during a run, but if it happens, just ignore it and re-time the run afterwards!

@SauceRainShinobi Apologies for the admittedly rude tone of the rejection message. We'll adhere to the series moderation's stance on the request.

Sorry if I ticked the wrong platform. Anyway, my recent 300k run was done on SGB2 and doesn't need a time conversion. Feel free to remove this thread after fixing the run. Thx.

This was my 3rd consecutive ESA and my experience this time around was very different from the prior years. I didn't have a run this time, so I felt like I had a lot more time and opportunity to take in impressions and reflect better on certain things. I'll try to keep it upbeat and constructive, even when critiquing things, so I hope nobody feels inconvenienced by anything I write. If anything needs clarification, feel free to message me on Discord and I'll edit if necessary.

I'll start with the cons if I may and also keep the main focus of this post on the parts that seem improvable.

#Negatives

• As soon as I entered the stream room, I was a little bewildered: both streams in one room. My first thought was that that was a terrible idea on several levels - and that initial assessment unfortunately proved to come true.

There are 2 perspectives for me on this topic, one entirely subjective and the other more practical.

Personally, I loved the cozy atmosphere in the separate stream 2 room at ESA2018. I kinda understand the idea behind opening up stream 2 to a broader on-site audience, but I don't think it was at all necessary. Of course, I wasn't there for all runs last year, but when I was, the audience situation always seemed appropriate for the respective run/community. So I don't see the need to either inflate or spread out the audience, respectively. For the Twitch audience it doesn't make a difference. Liva's opinion about this should count above all else, of course. I'm just an onlooker.

More objectively, and just as expected, the aural experience with 2 streams side by side was close to a disaster (and I'm not even talking about the Noise Boyz). Whenever I found myself watching a run in the audience (full spectrum from 3rd row to last row), I felt like the audio from the respective other stream was at least bleeding in, and sometimes simply drowning out what you were actually trying to listen to. In my opinion, that's a systematic miscalculation and I don't see this working out at this particular venue, ever.

• Piggybacking on the prior topic, the general sound mixing inside the stream room seemed rather suboptimal. Runners and commentators were usually very hard to understand because the on-site mixing just wasn't balanced well. Same for the short intermission exhibition reel. I haven't watched any VOD, but at the event, it sometimes seemed like audio was completely missing on those; that's how quiet they were. When asking tech about it, the short version of the answer was "We know, but it's fine on stream." I doubt that anyone involved saw that aspect as the solution to the problem.

• Many have mentioned the main venue AC set to too low temperatures and I want to echo that. Unfortunately, I caught ESAIDS this time around, so it became even more noticeable to me.

• Speaking of ESAIDS: of course, everyone is responsible for their own health first and foremost, but having sanitizers on site, especially in places with a high turnover rate (Arcade, ice cream/water/popcorn area, stream room) could at least help preventing a few people from catching something. Usually, the presence alone makes people more aware of what they touch how and when.

• My biggest critique point this year: the game selection. (I admit that I'm a little biased on this, but hear me out! I even went back in time and brought some pie charts back with me and filled them with contemporary numbers.) I understand that PC games have a bigger share on the European market in general than, e.g., in the US. That's not the point. I believe that a game selection committee should be interested in providing a wide variety of games on different platforms and give a variety of communities a home at ESA. In my opinion, ESA has gone in a different direction over the last couple of years. This year, e.g., game selection was very heavily biased towards PC games (of course, I understand, really) and NES (yes, the NES community is healthy in Sweden, but they're not the only one out there). Let me illustrate that with the aforementioned pie chart. Here's the distribution of all games in the event, on both streams, grouped by platform.

  

  Quick summary: 56% is PC, 12% is NES, everything else is <5%, several of which with only 2 or even a single run in the whole event. That's not how you invite communities to your event or provide a diverse selection for the viewers. To support my point, here's the same pie chart, but this time filled with data from SRC and grouped by the total amount of entries per system on the site. (This is not the most exact scientific approach, but the big numbers even out factors like mis-/multi-labeling and give the correct general idea.) The difference is quite obvious and you can clearly see that the distribution is much more homogeneous.

  

  Of course, you're dependent on what people submit, BUT, as I've said before, you set a certain tone with your decisions, which influences how smaller communities view the event. It's easy to get discouraged from submitting something yourself, if you never see any of your games featured, or if you can't hope to meet some of your friends from your own community there, because the overall incentive to attend is just diminished for everyone if you don't feel represented by the event. It would also help diversity if there weren't so many runners with several runs in the event. In 2017, I got 2 runs in myself. I'd have happily given one of those spots to someone else: I'm talking for myself here, but having to prepare for one run is usually already stressful enough. A one run per person rule could be something you might wanna look into. Exceptions could and should, of course, be possible for people coming over from overseas and/or particular cash cows for the sake of the charity. As long as everyone is open about it, drama potential should be minimal.

• Runner briefing and general rule phrasing. This kinda ties into game selection as well, since escalations caused or enabled by people with a history at the event are always also 50% the fault of the ones who give them the stage. That said, with the rules as vague as they are, it's hard to blame anyone for not knowing what they're allowed to say and what not. There are many good points about this approach, but if you know that someone is likely to have a different perspective than you on what's appropriate and what's not, please make it extra clear with them what you expect from them! This is a learning experience and I think the per-case approach is the right one. It just also has to be applied in obvious cases to avoid the annual drama.

• Schedule and setup. Before the actual event had even started, the schedule had already said goodbye - and it never came back. Sounds a bit harsh, but I can't put it any more nicely. If it hadn't been for stream 2 as the last resort, the event would have been a whole day behind. I don't know what the issues were. Runners poorly prepared? Tech poorly prepared? Hardware failures? I don't know what it was, probably a mix of all of those, nor how to prevent that. From my personal runner experience with setup in 2017 and 2018, I had the impression, that there was a lot of over-complication going on with (analogue) console setups (and some reviews above have voiced similar impressions for this year). You know beforehand what consoles will be used (and if you don't, you can ask), so there shouldn't be any surprises on stage. Let's be honest: there will always be surprises with this kind of thing, but I think a little flexibility can help the situation. I'm unsure about this year, but last year everything had to go through an OSSC and ideally (if not exclusively) already provide an RGB signal. I don't know why the specs were that strict. S-Video provides the same image sharpness, just the colors are not as clear/vibrant. I saw quite a few RetroTink2Xs at this event in practice areas and in the SpeedGaming room. That's one relatively uncomplicated alternative to the RGB/OSSC setup, the latter of which apparently can be very finicky. Disregard this if that was already implemented this year. Another suggestion: crowd source RGB-ready consoles from attendees, if you really have to rely on that kind of signal. I hardly know anyone who wouldn't be okay with having their console used for a run by someone else. It's just a different take on volunteer work and could be organized with a spreadsheet way before the event.

• Music selection. Sure, this is a matter of personal taste, but why is the selection what it is in the first place? I personally don't see much overlap between EDM and dubstep and the ESA target group. Game music/remixes work great as intermission music.

• Hotel room AC not working. There should at least be a note that they're not working. Hotel staff surely know about it, so it should be easy to coordinate a general announcement.

#Things I'm indifferent about:

• Noise Boyz. If you feel bothered by anyone in particular, just ask them to turn it down. Most attendees are mature enough to respect that. That said, having the initial setup in an already noise polluted environment wasn't the best idea. Learning experience, moving on.

• Elevators/staircases. Nothing that can be done about the elevators. In case of not working room cards for the staircases, it was possible to ask at the front desk and have your card replaced. (On the first few days, it was actually the sensor on the door itself that was malfunctioning, which got fixed when brought up to the hotel staff).

• Bar closing times. I don't see any demand for action there for the ESA organizers. If the hotel doesn't want to earn more money, it's their choice. Maybe there's an internal, binding regulation that we're not aware of. In the end, everyone's responsible for themselves when it comes to food/alcohol/smoking.

• Sponsor/charity plugging. I understand that it's a necessary thing to do to keep the event running in the future and have some doors opened for it. At least we didn't have to deal with manipulative tearjerker videos this year, so that's a plus for me.

• PC room. Whenever I was there, there was some free spot somewhere, or you could at least ask someone to make some space/move their laptop, etc., so I can't echo the complaints others have voiced. I do agree, though, that it's not helping if it is treated as a spare parts depot and removed devices are never brought back.

#The good stuff

I'll keep this one short.

• Hotel. Uncomplicated, inexpensive, accommodating.
• Arcade. So much fun! Special shout-out to Edenal for keeping the pinball machines working!
• Breakfast. Would be perfect if the scrambled eggs weren't so damn runny.
• City. Lots of food places and free time activities. Great public transport.
• Feasel. Incredible how professional someone can be while still helping out anyone who needs help. I echo everyone who asked for a team for him next year.
• Info desk. Always friendly and helpful.
• New lanyards. No scratchy neck anymore.
• Train ticket machine lottery. Funny idea by the city of Malmö to randomize whether or not the machine will accept your credit card. Still printing invalid tickets also seems like a fun idea that nobody I know could have come up with.
• The things I forgot to mention probably belong in this category, too.

Yeah, L0 start is affected the least. Here's a nice and possibly exhaustive list of version differences: https://tcrf.net/Tetris_(Game_Boy)

I know another thread on this topic already exists, but that one got off-topic so quickly and didn't reach the correct conclusion, so I decided to open the topic anew.

I feel really stupid for only realizing this now, but version 1.0 of the game has a few very relevant differences from the much more common version 1.1. First of all, you can tell the versions apart easily by checking which song is playing as A-Type: Minuet = 1.0, Korobeiniki = 1.1.

As mentioned in the other thread, but not to its full extent, v 1.0 allows for inputs during line clears. What wasn't stressed there is that that includes preloading DAS, which is of course relevant for DAS players. However, the advantages don't stop there: the level up progression is very different in v 1.0. Starting on level 9, your level progresses every 20 lines, i.e., level 10 at 20 lines, level 11 at 40 lines, etc. That, of course, also means that line clears are worth more earlier in the run, which is VERY relevant for the 300k category. Whereas in version 1.1 300k is equivalent to clearing 100 lines with only tetrises (ignoring pushdown), you have much more leeway in version 1.0 and can even realistically reach 300k before arriving at 100 lines (all tetrises would amount to 360k). Another small advantage is the speed increase that comes with the earlier level-ups, of course.

I didn't see any of the top runs making use of this, so I assume it's not really known or shared in the community so far. I'm baffled that I did never notice this myself before today.

I'm not sure how popular this would be. I'm indifferent myself and would just add it if demand is there. My idea would be...

• one open category where you choose whatever level and powerup you like to start with
• one category with the restrictions of Any% Glitchless since it's by far the most relevant category

Possible ruleset:

• Time starts when entering a level (1st frame when Mario raises his arm on the zone map)
• Time ends on the first frame of the fade-out after reaching the end of a level or defeating a boss
• It will be attempted to time runs down to the frame (hint: recording in 60fps is encouraged)
• Runs are restricted to the regular exits (exception: Macro 1 in the Any% Glitchless category)
• Invincibility stars from killing 100 enemies are not allowed (exception: Wario's castle in the Any% Glitchless category)
• Carry-over glitches are not allowed (pipe glitch, bubble glitch, bell glitch, star glitch)
• Zips may be exploited in the open category (not sure if this is even relevant)

Please let me know how you think about this and feel free to suggest amendments or changes to the restrictions. I admit that I haven't spent a lot of time to think this through. :-p

Yep, this is in line with how most GB communities handle SGB submissions. Good addition!

(Speaking of obscure platforms: until the end of 2014, it was possible to legally get Tetris for the 3DS virtual console. It has since been removed by Nintendo due to licensing issues, but in the event that someone acquired it back then or got it working via rom injection and wants to do runs on it, I want to point out that such runs should be retimed in a similar fashion as described above - with its respective coefficient. The timing was done by myself and I have asked Nudua to add a preset for the platform to the conversion webapp mentioned above. Since the 3DSVC - like every other Nintendo VC except the GBA VC for 3DS¹ - is an emulation software, and an inaccurate one at that, I won't recommend adding it as a platform for speedruns, but still want to present the possibilty to do so using a time conversion. If at all, virtual console runs should be the only exception to submissions on inaccurate emulators. The conversion factor is an approximation based on pure framerate comparisons and does not account for possible differences from loading times and lag emulation. Again, I don't recommend this, but still wanted to provide a suggestion for how to approach this platform that is consistent with how other communities handle it. So, should it ever be brought up, you can refer to this.

Edit: forgot that it had in fact been brought up already: https://www.speedrun.com/tetrisgb/thread/ru7qh

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance#Virtual_Console )

Concerning Hyperkin, I recommend reading up on how that company operates and treats licenses - or at least used to in the past: https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/hyperkin/

And on-topic: yes, it's emulation, that has always been Hyperkin's approach. And with how they used to obfuscate what they were using specifically, I'd at least have my doubts how you would reliably categorize a platform like that and compare it to others.

Thanks for everything, Kirk! I took a lot of inspiration from observing how you handled conflicts and I hope others will also be inspired by your parting words above. You may not see yourself as the best fit for all the community kerfuffle, but I think you did a great job not only as a site admin, but also as a moral compass for those invested in the project. Wish you all the best!

I'm not sure what exactly I want to do with this, so for now it'll just be a loose collection of documented "historical" milestones of SML2 speedrunning.

#SDA

[to do...]

#TSSB

###Episode 11

Any% in 3:42 by Mugg

###Episode 46

Glitchless in 27:44 by Mugg

###Episode 48

Glitchless in 27:27 (or 27:15?) by controllerhead

###Episode 49

Glitchless in 27:05 by controllerhead

###Episode 51

Glitchless in 26:50 by Mugg

###Episode 52

All Levels in 39:13 by Mugg

#On-site marathons

##AGDQ

Laplacier 2014

dadinfinitum (slashinfty) 2018

TASbot 2016

##ESA

Oh_DeeR 2017

LateLearner & Oh_DeeR 2018

#Online marathons

[to do...]

• number 1
• number 2
• number 3

FrankerZ

There's currently not enough demand for this (or anything speedrun-related for this hack) to justify preemptive creation of categories without runs. Feel free to run the category and we'll talk about this again.

@BambooShadow As you can see, tagging doesn't send a notification on the forums. ;-)

Yes, the screenwrap glitch (stage 2-3) is only possible on version 1.0.

Just adding my 2 cents here. Retroarch has been banned from many Game Boy boards for a while. We had tested it to lengths with different cores (e.g., the supposedly accurate Gambatte core), but we could not find any setting that produced satisfactory results - which resulted in the exclusion of the emulator. One major issue seemed to be vsync, as we could not find any setting that resulted in the correct frame rate - even in completely static sequences without any lag or loads. I have no idea if this applies to NES emulation in any shape or form so please just treat this as additional information for further research. Another setting THAT SHOULD VERY OBVIOUSLY ALWAYS BE TURNED OFF is the runahead feature. ( https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-7-2%E2%80%8A-%E2%80%8Aachieving-better-latency-than-original-hardware-through-new-runahead-method/ )

Edit: Testing had been done about 1 to 2 years ago and I have no knowledge about any updates since then.