This isn't guaranteed to be a good idea necessarily, but I do think it's worth mentioning since the Master Collection is coming out soon. Although there is no peace walker yet for the collection (if there ever will be) I have has great success emulating this game on Xenia. It runs exactly like on Xbox, so if there are people that don't have an Xbox this is incredibly convenient.

I understand that it's entirely hardware dependant and not everyone will have the same smooth experience compared to me, but I would say it's a good addition simply for the fact it's plug and play basically.

Due to the process of emulating via xenia (and rpcs3) being highly CPU based, it currently is not fair to accept emulated full game runs side-by-side hardware runs due to high user end variance coupled with a lack of knowledge on the topic.

In addition, Xenia has shown that it currently is not accurate with respect to IGT for the purposes of Individual level timings, where as RPCS3 has accurately emulated IGT calculations and has had a few accepted submissions.

None of this applies to PPSSPP, the psp emulator, which, while inaccurate overall, does pose benefits to the end user for select ILs while being non-competitive at the macro full game level.

As closure, should we see a significant activity uptick in the running on emulator, the moderators will be happy to re-examine the issue. There is discussion of allowing emulators into a category extension or to separate out consoles into subcategories, but, as stated, these would require we see significant user investment to justify such a thing. Such investment may come from the release of Master Collection Vol. 2 should such a thing come to exist.

Going forward the rules regarding emulators will be updated, something long overdue, to reflect this accordingly.

That's quite fair. I imagine the PW in the MGS collection to be more generally stable then the versions on the emulators. I only bring this up since I have had great out-of-the-box success.

Also, out of curiosity, when you mention that the Xenia emulator is not accurate for IGT, did you do a direct comparison with console footage or were there other programs used to help with this?

Hey there! I did the IGT inspection with a simple test, just booting up the first IL that has a timer and see how quickly it ticks. Compared to RTA, the IGT ticks way faster or slower on Xenia. That's because xenia as an emulator has a big flaw that causes IGTs for games like MGS2, MGS3 and MGSPW to not run accurately: it can only update in full miliseconds. Meaning that the v-sync value that dictates the update rate can only be either 16ms or 17ms. However to accurately simulate a game at 60fps, the updates would need to come out at 16.6666667ms. That was my preliminary testing for PW and coming to the conclusion that we'd need more runs on the board. Xenia does load extremely fast and would dominate any of the console runs in RTA timing. So wether to allow Xenia or not depends on more runs being done and testing required. I'd still require the emulator to run at 16ms updates (which runs the game slightly faster than 60fps), then using a framelimiter like RTSS or the AMD or Nvidia driver tools to limit the program running at 60fps. That would match what MGS3 currently uses for its Emulator category. Other than that, if Xenia ever updates this flaw in their logic, review of that tickrate in the IGT can be redone and reverified. Until then, my personal suggestion towards the mods was that IGT ILs on Xenia just are a hastle, fullgame RTA timed runs Xenia would crush any console and that it's not in line with how RPCS3 does emulation. For the casual experience this may be irrelevant, but for the moderation purposes of this board I think Xenia is not up to standard yet. Seeing as the Master Collection Vol. 2 datamines already show us that PeaceWalker is coming in the future, I'd rather wait for Konami to announce that collection. We literally had that situation with MGS3 for emulation so people could finally have more access to the game, now we're sitting at a useless emulation category when MGS3 MC on PC and modern consoles is running beautifully and meets all requirements that led us to ask for an Emulation category in the first place. So yeah, that's my 10 cents on the matter. If the mods will do anything with it, that's up to them. Here's the video comparing different xenia v-sync setttings and how it impacts the IGT.

Alright. This info is really interesting. Thanks for clearing that up!