Much trial and error taught me that. Yeah the USB ports on the Wii U aren't strong enough individually to power the SSD by themselves, so the Y cable basically allows you to draw power from both ports.

SSDs, like hard drives, generally need external cases in order to be used with a USB cable. When a hard drive is in your PC, it uses a SATA cable to connect to the motherboard. Wii U only has external USB ports though, so the case basically allows it to be compatible with USB.

Two of the Wii U's USB ports (since only one port wouldnt give enough power to the drive)

A SSD (solid state drive) is a type of faster hard drive with no moving parts. Wii U supports saving and booting digital copies of games on external drives. Using an SSD results in the fastest load times out of all methods (internal included).

You need a SSD, an external case for the SSD (plus a specific USB 'y cable' if your case does not have its own power source) and a digital copy of MK8. If you find a used SSD, total investment can be about $50.

Controversial, but it's allowed.

This has been discussed on the discord. Staff ended up keeping SSD and digital times on the boards, but made people start submitting the version they use with their runs (so runs could be displayed by version).

I did various WR runs in 200cc on SSD loads (digital copy is saved on an external solid state drive) because others were doing so with weak runs that were being accepted as the meta by outsiders (and not mentioning it in their run descriptions). If I had to buy all the materials to do it (a SSD, a case, and a specific type of usb cable), it would have been a $60 investment in addition to buying the digital version of MK8. Luckily I already owned a few of those things.

I made the choice to not to use SSD loads on 150cc runs because I was certain the existing runs were better skillwise than me. However it was only a matter of time before someone chose to do it. Seems Zakkk got the idea to bring it to 150.

Generally in speedgames, the fastest version is the one people do speedruns on (think that whole 'Chinese cheat-box' thing a few years ago with OoT). So I believe internal-digital should be allowed in general, as it's an official version of the game from nintendo. You're really just handicapping yourself if you choose disc over it. I would support the banning of SSD loads in runs, however, as it's a needless $60+ investment that needs to be made in order to grab a WR.

EDIT: Here is some info on total load times in a 48 track 200cc run via Quinn

SSD: ~7:17 Digital: 9:16 Disc(JPN): 9:48 Disc(PAL): 10:27

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bM7fzHdR5vafzPCWo6d7IL5MG0xG7D7XpdS58gIp03g/edit#gid=0

I could get a channel going in the /r/mariokart discord for this if anyone wants? It would probably be general-mariokart speedrunning related though- not just mk8. Or a unique server for mk8 only might be cool too.

Someone else did this - video from the mariokart subreddit.

How the hell did I miss that other thread?

Yeah, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it by any means (fastest hardware is standard in speedrun communities from what I have seen). I guess my main goal with this post was to cement it into people's minds more that this is a thing, since I was quite confused in my earlier runs.

Adding another variable to the charts would probably be unrealistic, spent more time thinking about it

So I just got the WRs in 200cc Itemless- both 32 track and 48 track.

Why the big cut from my previous 48 track PB of 1:33:30? When I got that old PB, it was 3rd place, which was 8 seconds faster that Bison in 4th (I wanted to beat all other times using internal memory before I experimented with this stuff). However, I noticed that my times were not nearly as fast as those above me, despite me using a lot more drift strats and shortcuts. I basically would have needed a god run to WR, and even then it may not have been possible.

I did some research and found this video comparing loading times on Wii U using various methods of loading the game...

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xw9533_peformance-comparison-of-wii-u-media_videogames

Basically in terms of speed, External SSD > Internal Memory > External HDD > Disc. If you don't know, SSD stands for solid state drive, which is basically a faster version of the hard drive that doesn't have moving parts.

So I tried it. I found a used 120gb SSD on amazon for about $30, then grabbed an external case for it as well as a USB 'Y' cable (you need one of these if your external case doesn't have its own power source- as I learned the hard way). It was about $45 USD total, and also worked as a solution to not having enough storage on the Wii U, so why not.

The result was a timesave of about two seconds per track purely from loading. Since my run was slightly weaker than my old pb in terms of gameplay, I estimate this method saved me in the neighborhood of 1:45 off using a digital copy on Wii U internal memory.

I'll do more timing later, but I believe the load times I now get match those Videowiz and burkhalter (who has removed his 200cc times) were getting.

So what we have here is the possibility of extra hardware helping with the speedrun. I consider this in the same category as OoT a few years ago, where players were buying Chinese N64's to save time.

Questions:

1. Burk and Vid- can you guys confirm that you were doing something like this to get your load times?

2. What do we think about runs that do this? Is it just another step up (like disc to digital) or is it unfair?

3. What do other Wii U communities do about this?

OPINION: I think it is silly that load times work like this and silly that I purchased this (I am silly). However, you probably can't really prevent something like this in a ruleset, as load times aren't always consistent anyway, and I'm not sure if the mods want to be timing loads anyway.

I propose a new variable on the charts- "Game Save Type" containing a drop down list with the options (Digital- External SSD, Digital- Internal Memory, Digital- External HDD, Disc). Would be weird, since the leaderboards are already pupulated with dozens of times however.

So yeah, that's about what I've been researching the past week or two. I will be submitting my run, but we'll see what this post says about all of this stuff.