Hello fellow Speedrunners, i have a good news for you tonight, i've worked several hours to bring you a complete separation between Original Hardware and Emulations/Virtual console releases.

The Runs done on Steam SEGA collection got updated to PC. Please be sure to verify if your runs are still on the board and if the changes have been made, if not, feel free to message me on the site (Messages are available now on the top right of your screen) so i can change it.

Good luck for the next runs.

This was already done and it was reversed. Stop separating the runs. Change it back.

If you want to implement something big like this, why don't you run it by the community first to see what they think. Personally, I think this is the worst.

I don't think that console and emulator should be separated for several reasons:

1. It is difficult to see who the overall leaders are and how different runners compare with each other, toggling back and forth between console and emulator to see the best times is really annoying

2. All of the sonic games list console and emulator together. This seems to be the standard way to do it for Genesis

3. Separating emulator runs does not make it fair for emulator runners - because some emulators are faster than others (see next post below)

4. It discourages runners by making emulator runs seem less legitimate. It also makes it less fun to run on Genesis console because you don't have visible competition. You can still toggle back and forth to emulator and compare, but this is really annoying

Overall, it makes far more sense the way it was before. The way the leaderboard was before, you could still easily see who is running on console versus emulator and make your own judgments accordingly.

If you are really interested in run fidelity, emulator players should have to specify which emulator they are running. Even then, it would make sense just to have that information listed on the full leaderboard,, not make different leaderboard categories (Console, Steam, Genesis Plus GX, Fusion, etc). This waters down the whole leaderboard and makes it less competitive and fun

See the complexity of the difference between different emulators below, from the speedrun.com Sonic Forums: They are comparing the Sonic 1 Demo on multiple different emulators as well as console.

S1 Demo playlist on many platforms: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZxm5GLYbrJfntOEN-FP2NX7O1CE5Zrh8 It gets really complicated, however from casual viewing:

• Model 2 appears to be the same as Model 1
• Fusion is quite a bit faster than console.
• Retroarch is somewhere in between the two.
• Higan is fastest and Exodus are somewhere between Fusion and Retroarch
• Bizhawk is slightly faster than Retroarch (which is odd a they both use the same core).
• BlastEm! appears to be on par with the Genesis, even with the console gaining a slight advantage over it as well. I've started creating a spreadsheet of the timings from the S1 demos, which has the key bits filled in currently (Console, Fusion and Retroarch). Based on these readings - but need to do demos from S2 & S3K as well to get a proper gauge, I would suggest multiplying the time in Fusion by 1.00441, and in RetroArch by 1.0027 I don't know if the special stage in S1 uses a different video mode, but all emulators appear to be quicker than console (except for BlastEm!). If we take the Special Stage demo out of the equation and those multiplications into account, we get very similar times to console. Again ,need the other data to make sure. We also need to take note that the refresh the console uses does not translate 100% into 60 fps video - hence why there are two different times for SY. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vuKFn9RqW8Hi8Bn71Q-c2Q-cNyfgmyregZVGNk74pKg/edit?usp=sharing The calculation isn't meant to be perfect but hopefully bring the times more in line with console. 🙂

Personally, I would like to see the old layout come back. We don’t have many console runners, and the main person running console being Anthopants, he is not complaining about the old layout. A change like this should stem from a problem such as console runners being unhappy with their runs being compared with EMU runs. The old layout is easier on the eye, and it was in working order. The community should be able to vote on things like this to make sure everyone is happy with the decision.

I like that @MedTechSpurs make some points instead of just crying out loud for no reasons. I do have to say some of your points are valid, there's no right or wrong in both side, it's just complex and stupid at the same time. I'll explain this :

1. That's just being lazy. It's pretty simple to read, don't even try to say that when the game already allow pretty bullshit stuff with xx categories.

2. There's more than one genesis game and communities have different rules according to the game, Sonic community is far from being perfect and console players have long left the boards out of rage from the new rules cause you need to be on emulator to get the best times now with the new tricks, not adding the fact that they time their game differently too, it's a pair of dramas that's still up now and piss of most of the old sonic players. It's good to point one side but i can also point to leaderboards that are genesis and have also separated Console without problems.

I know the emulators runs all differently, and there's more tests that has been done with more emulators, steam is the fastest too, the mega SG also run faster despite being insanely close to the genesis models. Taking notes of that i've been thinking about doing something as well, however following boards like Sonic i'd be forced to ban emulators, restricting people with specific rules. The problem here is, this is really something that will annoy people, there's more emulator runners and the 3/4 of the runs need to be deleted applying those Sonic rules for example. This is a massive change that i recall not wanting to do, not counting the fact that Mania and Veasy are still cheat code being used, people cranking life up too, this is pretty much one of the only game that allow this kind of practices. The other thing too is that there's a little community here, despite some of you saying SOR2 is huge, the playthroughs are indeed massive on the board and people barely understand what the heck they're doing, they just record their game, learn nothing, call it a day and even doesn't read the rules according to the timing method. Imagine now these guys being forced to do all the emulator rule practices. They won't bother posting runs anymore.

3. Not separating emu from OG hardwares does not make it fair for console players.

4. Competition isn't a problem, you can have competition about everything, how you want and have fun either way, there's people doing boards on other websites, you don't need to stick your run on a category to compete and have fun either you can even create your own bullshit category and have fun no one will break this. Having the console player that is on top saying he doesn't give a fuck about equality on behalf of others doesn't mean all console players think like that. It was already being done by one who cared about this too (Galedog) but it was met as a "cheating process" so the mod left this board out of exhaustion just to let this burn. Now it's an emulator player trying to do that and it's met like a "fun breaker" how comes ? The reason there's no console players is simple, SOR2 board is bad, console players are rare and this little % of players doesn't want to run on this board... they're serious people and you could also point the fact that it's a bad speedrun but that's something else. You gotta think that too, why they won't run here ?

The thing is, Genesis hardwares won't last eternally and in the near future all of that gonna be only emulator. So even if only a few players actually speedrun this game out of all the runs, there will be someone that will beat the console time and the console players will never have the chance to get back to this. This is my concern about this. Something has to be done, i don't want to let the console rot.

I also want to reinforce the emulation rules but trying to find a good moral ground to not severely impact the whole leaderboard. Sometime you need a kick in the nest to wake everyone up. So i'm curious to ear what's your solution for that. Reverse the process like it was before won't help it'll just be back to garbage point. I want something done for rules and i want consoles to be out of this mess.

You make some good points on why console should be separated. My take on this issue is: what does the community want. Correct me if I am wrong, but everything done on speedrun.com is community based. Each game on the site is different depending on what moderators / runners of the game desire. Therefore a decision like this should be supported by the majority to become final.

As for console runners not wanting to run the game, do these people exist? I am genuinely curious about this because, if a decent number of people are refusing to run SoR2 because of these issues, then changing the site actually makes sense to me.

I think we should put it to a vote.

Don't care what happens between console and emulator. Just want to say thank you to the mods for being willing to deal with this stuff and care enough to keep things going

I would suggest the split be reversed. My reasoning is because there are other better rules that could be implemented.

Short list of points

1. Only accept ONE or TWO accurate emulators for WR submissions if they use emulator.
2. Find timing differences and use an adjusted time. Or have two columns for console time and emulator time explicitly showing the adjusted time.
3. Start enforcing new rules once it is set in place.
4. No need to ban emulators.
5. The board is now so broken up it's annoying when you have all these categories with NO RUNS at all.

Points with more details

1. Only accept accurate emulators for WR. You could even limit it to ONE emulator. Some emulator cores are just bad if you are trying to get accurate emulation. Banning gens would be a good start since it is too fast. Bizhawk core seems good. I would recommend using an accurate emulator with playback tools since creating a comparison would be more simple. Maybe I can ask some guys that know better than me about accurate emulators.

Most likely the time differences are during loading and rarely a couple frames here and there for lag. At least that has been my experience as a TASer that has converted movies from one emulator to another. Also the time differences between consoles and emulators are typically overblown unless in hyper competition. This is no sonic, mortal kombat, or mario. A brief click through should prove my point obvious when there are sometimes over a minute difference inbetween first and second.

2. Find timing differences and display difference or a single adjusted time. In each leaderboard have two columns for console time and emulator time explicitly showing the adjusted time. Then just sort by console time ascending. or just Adjust and use that time adjusted time.

3. Start enforcing new rules once it is set in place. Trying to do stuff retroactively does not seem fun.

4. No need to ban emulators. That would be a death sentence for SOR2 on SRC pretty much. I have completely given up years ago on consoles after going through 3 consoles and 5 sega cd modules. I do not think I am the only one.

5. Board is now so broken up it looks bare with many sections having no runs.

So in by doing something like that there can be actual comparisons which will serve runners for the better.

From the sounds of it, we need console runners to speak out if they are truly discontent about being compared to runs done on emu as I think we all want the old layout of the leaderboard back as it looks much cleaner. If there is discontent, then there needs to be a compromise that actually puts emu runs in line with console runs and put this whole drama to rest. So here's what I think could be done currently...

To the mods, I think Tako/Tenebrae's setup for emulator rules makes sense and is plenty fair and not really strict at all. Since I'm a mod now I will go forward and make this change to the ruleset.

To those in the community that are heavily in favor of going back to the old layout, if it is necessary maybe take some initiative here. Maybe do some hard emulator research (for any emulators that are generally accepted), come up with some hard numbers and calculations and maybe that might bring emulator runs in line just like how people came up with a hard calculation to bring Mega SG in line with console and write that shit down in a google doc/pastebin or something. I see one of you in here has gotten off to a headstart on that. That's what I like to see.

Edit: Ok I was wrong about the discord thing, thank you Anthopants for passing me Brawlers Ave link.

I do agree that this decision should've been discussed to the community prior to going through with it. For now though, the split should remain since it has already been done and if we have to revert it, it can still easily be done. We need more discussion on this clearly though.

I don’t understand why we need new rules for comparing EMU to Console, when the console runners had no issue with the leaderboard settings before.

It's quite simple to me, once there is a problem then we fix that problem. The SoR2 community is small and It might always be this way. If our community grows larger, and console runners do wish for the split of Console and EMU, then we must make the change because it's something that the community wants. Those people don't seem to exist right now therefore the changes are not necessary.

This issue has also been discussed on the Brawlers Avenue Discord, where many runners of SoR2 have expressed that they want the changes to be reversed.

I see every reason for this to be reversed until further notice.

At this point, we need to figure something out before changing the rules again. The fact that isn't the first time the SoR2 boards have gone through this change. Last year, the boards went from the times being a split format to combining them and now we're back to this split.

If we want to bring back the combined format, we should establish some rules so that this kind of matter doesn't happen again if there's a majority for bring back the way things were. Rushing back wouldn't solve this and we could see this same problem again in the future.

Without console users expressing discontent about the matter, then there is no issue to be fixed, and the change should simply not have happened in the first place. Let's start with a problem first then run it past the community. The only problem right now is that this change was done without asking the community first. There isn't enough support to keep it as it is, and theres no issue with the previous layout until console runners speak up on this forum or in Brawlers Avenue. I do think that showing which emulator you play on could be useful, this is why I write in the description that I play on Retroarch. So being able to say EMU-Retroarch for example would be nice for that emulator, and all other emulators to be on there in a similar way. But I said it before and I say it again, we should be making changes to the site when there is a demand for it. I haven't heard people complain about Console Vs EMU in this community, nor have I heard complaints about time differences on different emulators.

After taking some time to think about the situation, the leaderboard will be reverted back to the old layout. However, that does not mean the discussion about a possible leaderboard split is over though. It just means we will start up the discussion from the beginning (once everything has been changed back) and see where everyone in the community stands on the issue before deciding what should be done. It's how the whole thing should have been handled from the beginning.

The hostility over this (moreso in Brawler Ave discord than here) was more than I anticipated and I feel at the very least some folks in the community need to cool their heads off a bit before we continue this discussion. Reverting it back should at least bring the situation into a calmer state so that is what I will do.

I urge that no one else other than me do this as it was ultimately my decision and mine alone to do this. I also urge that no more mods are to be appointed without going through me first given the tension of the current situation and what has been brought forward to me privately. I took on the role of a mod here as an individual that takes a neutral standpoint on the current issue at hand and I feel that is what this community needs right now more than anything else.

Please be patient with me. Please have faith in me. There will also be some updating to the rules as well that I think is necessary. Nothing super strict or anything.

I'm going to lock this thread now. When the changes have been made I will open a new thread confirming it has been done and to stay transparent state whatever changes have been made in the ruleset and see if the community is ok with them. From there, we can start this discussion over again in a more calm and civilized manner.