I'm personally all for allowing emulator runs to improve the accessibility of the run- the majority of Rune Factory games permit emulator runs on the same board as console runs, (and DeSmuME isn't really that accurate.) Tricks that are exclusive to emulator are simply banned for use in runs. DS Capture cards are expensive and hard to get, and the same goes for JP copies of the games (although somewhat lesser in price). But it's really a rather small (read: nonexistent) community overall, so this just kinda works for us.
Making a separate board is a valid approach, but I think it's not often taken in part due to all the extra work, and general piracy concerns. I'm no expert on this though, I'm sure someone else can give a better insight into it.
From what I've noticed it seems like a lot of Gamecube games seem to ban emulators, which is really strange to me because most games work perfectly fine in Dolphin.
@Sness i dont play those games this is just what i heard from the outside. Dolphin is basically a TAS tool. which is extremely hard to detect. because of that emulators are banned.
Probably cause those games don't work well with emulators. Having said that you could always separate emu from console on the leaderboard. Lastly, fuck em, speedrun on emulator anyways. Create your own leaderboard with blackjack and hookers.
Dolphin emulates excellently these days, but yeah, it's very hard to detect if it's a TAS or not. It's not impossible, but the signs are very minor apparently.
I have to wonder if there's other viable emulators that don't have this issue, but as far as I know, Dolphin kinda owns the Wii/GCN scene.
I'm curious what people mean by "TAS detectable". I imagine that would matter more depending on game, yeah? I know with NES games you could splice together full runs in emu all day.
Right, I just meant Dolphin runs well in general, not that it's particularly accurate- I could've been more specific with that.
It's a bit unfortunate we don't have an accuracy focused emulator like BSNES for every console, but more than understandable. The work that goes into making emulators hardware accurate is immense.
As for "TAS detectable", I'd imagine it's probably a per-game affair. I wouldn't really know though.
Yeah every game is different, for sure. Still, I'd say run that game regardless if emulator is all you have. You could get leaderboard made up for it if you show that there is interest in emulator runs. Or you could, like I said before, just run it anyways and make your own leaderboard.
Properly supporting (as in making sure they're able to compete fairly and have sets of rules that properly allow the mods to verify there's no issue on that front even if unintentional) emulator on your leaderboards even just for a separate category is a lot of work and a lot of complex knowledge required from the moderation staff as well as extra work for verification.
No restriction isn't exactly as solution, though obviously easy and very accessible there might be unforeseen consequence down the line when you discover something can only happen on one specific emulator, nothing more disheartening than seeing a leaderboard where the WR is almost untouchable unless you use the same shitty old version of that one emulator the WR holder used.
Limiting the board to one specific version of an emulator isn't a solution (at-least not for 5th gen and up, prior to that for most console you can consider emulation to be "solved" for the most part), you can't guarantee said emulator will work properly forever and when you have to change emulator it pretty much invalidates the board entirely.
One better solution I've seen is disallowing emulator (and / or specific configuration of certain emulators) if they provably load faster or have noticeably less slowdown than the fastest official release, but even just that is quite a bit of work as you have to research differences and not just one time as emulators can get new versions with significant changes or some other newer emulators can appear so you have to again take a look at them.
Also for a few more specific things For the PS2, the console uses non standard floating point calculation, which are not emulated properly (because it's impossibly slow to do so accurately), meaning that beyond load times some elements of the game can play out entirely differently than they would on an actual PS2 which as you might imagine might become a serious issue (RNG outcomes, hit detection, AI behaviors etc are things I know for a fact can be affected).
For 7th gen emulation and up (though OG XBOX emulation shares the issue too) there's a marked change in that the emulator stop caring about original system limitations as much, meaning that games will render as many frames as the internal limiter (as in internal to the game) will allow which is bad as many game still tie logic to framerate (meaning higher framerate = faster) and additionally said systems have started really becoming storage speed agnostic, meaning that they will try to load as fast as is allowed by the hardware (even on the actual consoles, just see what happens when you swap in a SSD in your PS3), coupled with NVMe / RAMdisk being a thing you can see how that might be an issue.
@Komrade you'd be surprised how opposed people are to making emu runs despite popular interest (just look at MKWii for an example)
I guess what @TransparentBlue is saying is fair after reading it through, its just a bit unfortunate.
Got some more points in this thread: https://www.speedrun.com/speedrunning/thread/xso97/1#mkbzz