1st comparison is my DSiXL with a R4i Gold 3DS Plus vs an original DS with a normal cartridge. 2nd Comparison is with both normal cartridges.

As you can see, the flashcard has faster loads. Should this be allowed on the leaderboards? My shell cup wr uses a normal cart but my mushroom cup does not, and I think my 32 tracks run uses a flashcard as well.

Personally, I think flashcard/emulator should be disallowed for runs inside the top 5, to provide a level playing field at the very top. However, I think they are important to people to gain interest in the game so I would be against banning them outright. I would be willing to remove my mushroom cup run.

I'm aware the Wii U VC edition of the game also has faster loading times, but I'm more reserved about removing it since it is an official release of the game. It's a faster version but much harder to play on.

A solution I saw in some earlier threads was to just use IGT, but unfortunately that doesn't work well for 32 track or 16 track runs since VS mode does not track IGT.

I've been aware of this but for now had just been waiting to see the community respond to this matter. A possibility would be to allow between choosing platforms such as DS, DSlite, DSi, DSi XL, all those 4 + flashcard, emulator, 3DS, 3DS XL, New 3DS, New 3DS XL, maybe those with flashcard, Wii U, and maybe Wii U softmodded, but I've seen many people not even use the correct system being used even now, so I doubt that'd help it a lot.

For the cups I'd like to poll community reaction but switching to IGT for cups would mean a lot of scores that are currently without IGT or video will get lost, which is also a problem.

@Thanatoast01 It's a good idea, but what about the actual leaderboard. Should the runners, who already have a submitted time, redo a submission and add the precision between cartridge and flashcard ? And if a run is quite old (about 1-2 years) and does not have any video, what category should it go, if the runner doesn't remember ?

If we switch to IGT we can just keep the times with insufficient proof as RTA, which is fine because the load times of the RTA are automatically used as a penalty for not having proof.

Proof wasn't required for a long time and thus a lot of submissions only have a picture of livesplit or nothing at all. It'd be unfair to suddenly move these runs to the bottom of the list.

I know it is a fair old thread, but I think you can still enforce video submissions and the runs that doesn't have them would still be shown on the LBs

Also if loading times are significant for RTA, you can go the same route some games did and separate the lbs like console, console + flashcart, emu and VC (i don't know if softmodded vc is even faster)

It'd be because they wouldn't have a clear IGT, thus we can't simply guess one, thus it moves to the bottom.