Rule change regarding PS1 emulators
8 years ago
Victoria, Australia

In the past, these boards have had no rules regarding which PS1 emulators are acceptable and which aren't. Some recent discussions, along with some submissions on emulators known to be innacurate (namely pSX), have prompted a change to this policy.

From now on, ePSXe 1.7 and higher are allowed for PS1 games. All other emulators are banned.

We understand that with the existence of FDS and VFDS, almost every PS1 emulator is slower than the fastest official release. Loading times, however, are not the only factor. PSXfin and PCSX-r have known innacuracies in Spyro 3, and we simply don't have enough knowledge of other emulators to justify allowing them.

Feel free to respond to this thread if you have any issues with this ruling, we welcome any and all input from the community. -Dact

YW1, KjelstrupAndreas and 4 others like this
Portugal

1.7 is innacurate as hell, should be AT LEAST higher than 1.7.

Etelä-Pohjanmaa, Finland

In my opinion only ePSXe 1.9+ should be allowed as 1.7/1.8 still have many of the inaccuracies found in other less accurate emulators.

United States

I have issues with this.

I run all ps1 games on psx fin and I would prefer to continue doing spyro runs on that emu. I interpret the justification you have for allowing other emus a bit differently. While you say you cannot allow it because you are not sure of it's innacuracy, I would think there should instead be no ban on emus with no certainty that it is innaccurate. As for psx fin, I have used this emulator to run Spyro 1 120% in the past, and would like to continue using it. If emulator is not faster than console, then what is the point of banning it? Anybody who wants World Records in these games has to play it on PS2 because of the faster load times on it. psx fin is also one of the easiest emulators to download and makes it even easier for new runners to get into the series. Also the innaccuracies claimed to be had with these emulators are minor, and in almost all cases have no significant impact on gameplay. By banning more emus, all you are doing is preventing runners from using easy to download options like psx fin and you are preventing zero people from abusing inaccuracies in these emus to their advantage in rta runs.

United States

[quote=SkiCrazedTeddy]Anybody who wants World Records in these games has to play it on PS2 because of the faster load times on it.[/quote]

The record isn't the only time on the boards that has to be accurate. Also, psxfin does have accuracy problems that are certain. There can't just be exceptions to rules because they're not top tier times.

United States

i was merely trying to get the point across that no matter what, emulator is slower than ps2

Portugal

Why would you want to play a PS1 game on a program that doesn't act like a PS1? :/

United States

Tell me, do you think the burden of proof lies on me or other emulator users to show that the emulators we use are not innaccurate to the point where we can abuse any out-of-bounds or manipulate hitboxes or rng? Or do you think it lies on you, the moderators, to prove that you indeed can abuse any out-of-bounds or manipulate hitboxes or rng? Because I think this is the basic issue we disagree upon.

Victoria, Australia

The former, definitely. Official console releases are the gold standard in speedrunning, any non-official platform has to be shown to be accurate enough to those official releases before it can be allowed.

I personally was not aware of any issues with ePSXe 1.7/1.8, I'm glad that has been brought up. I would not be opposed to changing the list of approved emus to ePSXe 1.9x, XEBRA/ARBEX and Mednafen. Thoughts?

Ontario, Canada

Just gonna say that the goal of PS1 emus are to emulate the PS1, not PS2. FDS is a PS2 feature, therefore emu loads should be close to PS2 SDS or PS1 since that's what they are trying to be. If you want faster loads use a console. Using an inaccurate emulator to try to be equal when the emulator is so inaccurate that it's loads are nowhere near the console it's trying to be like is a terrible idea because if loads are bad, what else is?

I don't have experience with PSXfin, but I do have experience with a lot of PS1 emulators. Generally if they have fast loads they have a lot of other issues. Hell, even if the loads are slow they can still be inaccurate as crap. PCSX-R loads are generally slower than ePSXe but the hitboxes are super messed up and it makes some things easier. ePSXe is pretty much the standard emulator everybody (not just speedrunners) use so it's easier to just use that to standardize the runs. It's a good trade off between accuracy and performance.

The only emulator I've tried focused on actual accuracy is Mednafen, and while it does take a beeefyish PC to run and stream it at the same time, its loads and performance is essentially exactly how a PS1 runs.

YW1 and Kollin7 like this
Devon, England

I agree with Pat entirely.

Emulators should not be much faster than PS1, as they are a PS1 Emulator, if a emu was to operate at PS2 FDS and can run PS1 games would most likely be labelled as a PS2 emulator due to having the PS2 FDS ability.

As someone who has once used pSXfin, there was a lot of things wrong with it, in Spyro 1, pSXfin was mostly accurate except for a major input delay which could result in random flops off ledges and stupid movement errors. Spyro 2 seemed to be quite affected, with the start menu seemingly taking longer to load up fully and also load times seemed slow, and still there was a massive input delay. Spyro 3 could only run v1.0 and had many errors with it, it had a chance of a random crash here and there and when trying to start the game, would take around 17-20 seconds to load the first cutscene, or load a save file off a memory card.

Hope this makes some sort of sense, forum posts are hard when on 2 hours of sleep.

United States

It is also the fact that this isn't a rule being established it is a rule being changed, and for little reason. There have been no problems with any runner using any innaccuracies to help them run the game. And suppose the burden of proof doesn't lie on the moderators to prove emulators are innaccurate, it most certainly is their burden of proof whenever there is a rule change (compared to establishing these rules at the start). and you have no proof that innacuracies in psx fin can provide advantages during gameplay, only theiries. and so this rule change is absurd.

United States

Why should an emulator that has been proven to be inaccurate be allowed for people to possibly exploit when we can just remove the possibility entirely?

PatJK likes this
Scotland

Just ban every emu that isn't epsxe and be done with it

PatJK likes this
Denmark

It's always been a "goal" to establish what kind of emulators on what version etc. we would allow. We've only just now gotten around to finalizing it. What really brought it to my attention that this was an issue we had to take care of, was the fact that we allowed every single PSX emulator out on the market, without any proper knowledge on over half them. The only logical solution was to disallow everything but the emulator we have the most knowledge of, and only allow the community-favorite emulator, which was ePSXe.

Considering you're the only person who seems to complain about this (seeing as about everyone who runs on emulator runs ePSXe), and to my knowledge, are the only person running PSXfin. We're not going to allow an emulator for just one person. Seems quite silly to me.

I highly doubt it would be hard for you to change to ePSXe. Plus it's not like we've outright banned you to use this emulator. All that it does is that you won't be able to submit times on the leaderboards with PSXfin, which already has been stated by other people.

~KJ

Texas, USA

So will this rule change invalidate any runs that were previously done on an emulator that is now banned?

United States

No, previous runs will stay on the boards because the rules were changed after the runs were accepted to the boards.

I did some timing for Spyro 3 comparing epsxe versions. 1.9.25 and 2.0 are extremely similar in load times and both faster than 1.9.0 by a considerable margin.

http://i.imgur.com/SwqxPvo.png

epsxe1.9.25 and 2.0 save:

13.5s in any% 17.7s in 100 egg 24.1s in 117%

I don't know what the ruling on this should be, but 1.9.0 is closest to SDS for loads. If we're going to restrict emulators due to inaccuracies then there should be a single approved version of epsxe.

PatJK and jeremythompson like this