It's not about cheating.
A very big part of speedrunning this game revolves around the player's ability to manipulate the framerate by killing enemies ASAP, or just outright avoiding onscreen objects that slow things down. This is to keep the framerate as high as possible at all times so that the autoscroll moves as fast as possible, because the rate at which the autoscroll moves at is directly tied to the framerate. Emulators still don't ¤¤perfectly¤¤ replicate the speed/performance characteristics of this game as seen on the real hardware.
Star Fox is just so ridiculously sensitive to the game framerate that it doesn't make sense to put runs achieved on the real hardware next to runs achieved on an emulator. It would be kind of unfair.
Lag is not accurately replicated in this game through emulation, to the point it saves time over all the official releases of this game. Until an emulator is able to handle this, there will be no emulated runs accepted.
I know this is an old thread, but I'm interested -- why not allow emulator runs, but have them in a separate subcategory, possibly with very strict rules?
Some of the most popular games on this site do this, such as Mario 64, ALttP, and Mario Sunshine -- restricting the emulators that can be used, and putting strict requirements on how they must be used. If PC Emulator runners all had to use the same emulator, they would all be on even ground with each other. Virtual Console and SNES Classic runs could be on even ground with each other.
Any chance of this happening?
