Hey folks, I wanted to discuss a little further about the decision to ban Xemu runs. I've seen previous posts about load times and comparing emulators. I wholeheartedly agree with the decision to get rid of load times (via frame count or autosplitter) to make for an even playing field across all platforms but I disagree with banning Xemu. We can see the issues that speedrunners encountered with CXBX here on the forum, for example, in Ambulung's any% - All Foals WR run there are constant graphical artifacts and weird particles occurring and overall worse performance. When reading other forum posts, I've seen people mention their CXBX emulator glitching, crashing, or both. Personally, I've experienced all of these problems when I've done runs with CXBX and it's extremely infuriating.
However, when using Xemu, I've experienced none of the previous issues I've had with CXBX. If we compare the original Xbox run by Cobra_X21 to CXBX and Xemu runs, it's clear that Xemu looks and plays smoother which makes sense because it is a low-level emulator. You can read more about this here: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/High/Low_level_emulation but TL;DR, High-level emulators like CXBX sacrifice accuracy and authenticity for better performance (which it failed to do so in this case) and easier installation (no BIOS required).
In my opinion, we should strive to be as close as possible to the original Xbox game version and Xemu is clearly a better choice for this. The game looks and runs better on it which makes speedrunning it a more enjoyable experience. Both emulators should be accepted, at least under separate categories (talked about in previous forum posts) because limiting users to use an inferior emulation software is a little silly. Thank you for taking time out of your day to hear me out and consider my proposition. I look forward to hearing your responses! ~Swushwoi
Some random glitch appearing can be distracting sometimes. Hope they allowed XEMU in the future.
For posterity's sake, I will mention here that upon viewing my testing in , we have decided to un-ban Xemu from 11/28/21 onwards, as long as load times are not calculated in the run's final time.
