Emulators still banned?
4 years ago
Hesse, Germany
Skipsy
He/Him, They/Them
4 years ago

Hey everyone! I'm curious as to if the rules given still apply since people have been working on emulators since forever and bizhawk/higan are still being developed and newer versions have been pushed out ever since. Is there still testing being done or is it just brushed off as "we want to keep our community small". I 100% understand that less laggy runs would hurt the integrity of the speedrun and it is still the case where we can compare video footages and see evidence then of course, i would in no way advocate a change.

California, USA

Personally, I haven't looked into emulated speedruns of SF1 as of late. I know that emulators are now quite close to the original hardware, but since the speedrun is so dependent on how the hardware handles the gamespeed/lag I would find it really hard to be 100% sure that they would play the same.

I'm open to seeing proof/examples that they would run the same but as of now, I haven't really been looking to include emulators for speedruns.

Skipsy likes this
Jönköping, Sweden

having done a few shmups as of late, inaccurate emulation specifically for this genré when it comes to not emulating lag correctly, makes a large difference competitively for a leaderboard. That being said: I see no reason to completely shutdown emulator users from running the game, just make a sub-category and allow them to compete against each other.

I know I used Snes9x 1.53 for Aladdin personally and it seems to be overall the universally allowed emulator for the system if you check other games like Contra Alien Wars as well. Either way, I understand this game in particular could be a special case resulting in not mixing emu/console runners on one board. But I see no reason to completely neglect potential emu runners either.

Edit: For reference https://www.speedrun.com/cv64 N64 emulation in general is much worse, yet people are allowed to speedrun on it separately for this game.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
ShinkenX likes this
New South Wales, Australia

I did my run on starfox from the eumlator snes9x one time but its too bad realty i can't submit my run on the leaderboards cause it still banned. At least i can do it on my super famicom console playing the actual starfox game from speedruning that's for sure.