I'm interested in possibly learning MZM for the upcoming 12 hour challenge that Go1den is putting on (http://pastebin.com/8Dqc1U7W). But I know that gameboy advance emulation has a reputation for being very inaccurate. Are there any emulators that are preferred over others? And would the run I do be considered legitimate if I were to submit it here?

Edit: Also, is the beginner tutorial in the "Guides" section still up to date? I just noticed that it's 2 years old.

On emulator you would be stuck with IGT only due to EMU being faster than console, but VBA is valid, along with Bizhawk (which is my personal recommendation, though it is more resource intensive and more accurate but same restriction applies.) I'm sure someone who runs this a bit more frequently then myself can explain better, but to my knowledge that's correct

All of the widely used emulators are allowed on the leaderboard, but as Flipside says, we take out the real time from the runs. The differences between console and emu are still not understood perfectly, but basically we think emus load rooms too fast, so even though the gameplay is accurate the overall run is not. This was not a big deal when the game primarily used IGT, but when we switched over to real time (due to the in game timer being abusable) it became awkward. The clean solution would be to ban all emulators, but we feel this would be too big a deterrent to new players.

Bizhawk is considered more accurate than VBA and its various offshoots, however it is treated exactly the same because its accuracy is still not perfect.

tldr: we would prefer everyone to use console where possible, but emu is still legitimate and is a good way to get started.

The tutorial is still pretty much up to date (any% has been largely static for a long time). I recommend checking some recent good runs to see if there are alternative strats you want to try out though!

There's one emulator none of us have tested - Higan. Not sure if it'll be more accurate than BizHawk, but the problem is Higan uses a huge amount of CPU compared to BizHawk, and BizHawk actually manages to emulate a lot more closely to console with a similar amount of CPU usage compared to VBA. My laptop sucks, so I'm sticking with BizHawk for the time being.