dagger isn't necessary unless you are trying to get a single cycle on the Wood golem. I'll have to try the Japanese version some day to see how it runs. I've only played the US version so far.

you can skip dagger in the first shop, i get it to speed up the golem fight just a bit. Dagger can allow you to get a one cycle on him but is very difficult. Without picking up boomerang for Popful or fire for Gaw, the bosses would be really difficult. With you're default weapons, i think you only do one damage to a lot of the bosses past a certain point. But after beating the king penguin thing, you get the powerful weapons. I think I tried fighting fire golem without the boomerang and didn't like it.

This isn't the most optimal route, I just wanted to remove the gold grind. figured I could pick up health items and gold on the move if I eliminated getting armor. Maybe you can save time by not killing enemies for gold and skipping weapons, but would have to compare to the longer boss fights.

As for load times, I was going to do some timing and see how different things are. I don't have a copy of popful mail for the Sega Cd so I'll be using other games. I reached out to a few other people in the sega speedrun community and they basically don't adjust for load times on small leader boards. But make adjustment when the board fills up. I think in my initial timing, fusion actually came closer to the original hardware, and the everdrive was close to bizhawk. But fusion and original console were a bit slower on load times. So as much as I like my sub 2 hours, on original hardware it might not be a sub 2. But I don't really know until I can get some time to do some real time tests.

I'm looking to allow the Un-Working Designs version of Popful Mail to be used for speedruns. Being that it puts things back to the original Japanese settings for damage and item costs. It could be it's own category but I may include it as part of the Japanese leaderboards for now. At least until we have more runners or if we find there are other things that are different. I just wanted to open this up for discussion.

From what I researched, Bizhawk seems to be the emulator of choice for accuracy but I don't have a lot of info on it. I'm getting a Mega Everdrive to do Sega CD runs with so hopefully that is accurate. I never know if I'm really doing things right really. Thanks for getting back on this.

I want to run my Sega CD speedruns using my console, but I need to get it fixed. I'm curious, is there an emulator that is approved for Sega CD speedruns? I've read that Fusion might not be accurate and people recommend Bizhawk, but I haven't gotten it to work with Sega CD games yet.

Not sure how hard these are to make, but would it be possible to get one for Operation C on Gameboy? Would love an auto splitter for it.

Nice, I'm looking at running Lunar and would like to do it on the console if I can.

I still need to learn the waterfall routes but this ledge skip accidentally happened on my last stream. I know there are two already, but is this just a fluke?