The question of emulators was brought up in Discord.

Referencing some other SNES games on the site (particularly Super Mario World https://www.speedrun.com/smw/thread/8w7yc ), I think the following is a good start.

Suggested:

• bSNES Compatibility Core (Bizhawk, Higan, lsnes)
• SNES9x v1.5x and higher

Less preferred but probably acceptable:

• bSNES Performance Core (Bizhawk, Higan)

For this game, the big things to pay attention to for time accuracy are loading time between rooms, lag after midboss 1, and lag in the last part of stage 5.

I think emulating on another console such as an Xbox or a Wii introduces too many unknowns into the equation. In order to understand the legitimacy of a run or investigate nuances of the effects of the emulation, one would potentially need to fully recreate the hardware setup. Most people playing this game either have a PC or a SNES.

That's just my personal opinion. If other runners feel differently, please comment.

I don't run this game, just watch runs, but I follow Super Metroid quite closely. There have been many comparisons and tests of that game between multiple platforms and emulators; SM being a SNES game, I think some of it translates and I hope my intrusion won't be too bothersome.

RetroArch with bSNES core could be added as a suggested emulator, since it is one of the best emulators in terms of input latency and it uses bSNES core. In my opinion and experience playing SM, snes9x isn't reliable in terms of lag (has way less than it should) and the frame rate is not the same as SNES either (even versions higher than 1.5x have 59.94 compared to 60.09). I find it hard to suggest this one seeing there are so many better options nowadays. Another thing is that no difference was found in SM 100% TAS using bSNES core Performance vs. Accuracy, and performance is much better on CPU usage.

I don't mean to impose and obviously these are two different games, just adding some information I picked up after many emulator discussions in SM discord.