Clockspeed differences on Dream Collection and 3DSVC
6 years ago
Germany

Hey there! I manage a few Game Boy game leaderboards on this site and recently have come across a few run submissions done on the 3DSVC. It quickly became clear that that platform was running the games too fast. Sadly, Nintendo doesn't seem to care too much about accuracy for their various emulators (=Virtual Consoles). In my opinion, speedrunning should be about comparing your skill at a game with others and not a race of arms of who uses the faster platform. This is a general statement and not meant to discredit anyone's efforts! E.g., the Game Boy community handles runs done on Super Game Boy according to that comparability approach and times are converted following this example: https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Super_Game_Boy_timing Out of my own interest and after talking to eBloodyCandy about the situation on the KDL leaderboard, I had a look at some data provided by swordsmankirby, where he compared clockspeed and load times between GBP, 3DSVC and the Dream Collection (on WiiU?). You can have a look at my findings here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13_Le7b0KgGA1tT_x-ta2Yfv5PrLWViauZ26XbVzgKhY/edit?usp=sharing

The speed differences on the 3DSVC are consistent with what I had previously encountered in submissions of Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2 so I'm confident that that data is correct. I'm not sure whether the Dream Collection footage was recorded from Wii or WiiU. A comparable recording from the missing platform would be nice. Data for the load times is a little slim and more and longer segments should be recorded to fill in the gaps. One last thing that I have not looked into yet (simply because it's so hard to quantify) is lag. Lag is a MASSIVE factor in KDL so a well-designed comparison could be interesting. All that said, I do not own any of the systems in question myself, so I can't collect any data. I just wanted to share my findings and let you, the KDL community, decide how to handle this. Cheers!

Edited by the author 6 years ago
crazeyawesome, Retrobot and 3 others like this
United States

Ah, just a small correction--my Dream Collection recordings were done on Wii, not Wii U, but I doubt there would be a difference anyways.

Germany

Thank you! Fixed it in the document.