Hey all. I'm interested in trying out speedrunning, and I have a number of games I'd be interested in. I was considering playing E.V.O. Search for Eden, but ran into the problem of acquiring the cart. The cart is like $200 on ebay, more than the console itself. On the other hand, one can purchase a repro cart on AliExpress for $15-25. Obviously spending less money is better. Is it allowed to play it on a repro, or is the original cart required if I want to play on console instead of emulator? Thanks,

• MikeDownCPA

Assuming the repro cart isn’t modified it should be fine. But it’s hard to say for certain because you never know what people might add or change in the repro.

I’d ask the mods of the game for a definitive answer.

As long as it can be demonstrated that the ROM that's actually being loaded by the system is the original it should be fine.

The first thing I'd question is if loading times are the same, given that a lot of repros use different chips and setups, for example saving on ram powered by battery, even tho in the GBA era there was already flash storage that held data while unpowered (example being Pokemon Fire Red and to an extent Ruby/Sapp/Emerald, which only have the battery for the realtime clock, which, upon failure, doesn't make the game unuseable). Second question would be if lag is accurate to real cartridges, which even some emulators I've played around with struggle with (even mGBA has its problems sadly). I'm sure there's more things to check, but all of that would have to be tested individually of course and it might not even matter in the end.