Yo, I had a friend go looking into the IGT to actually figure out how it worked and the results are as follows

• pauses on menus
• doesn't pause on loads (but this isn't as significant as you might think since the door scenes are fixed length and account for almost all of the loading anyway)
• does pause on the final cutscene
• doesn't always pause on unskippable cutscenes, sometimes does, depends on the cutscene, very fun.
• randomly tacks a couple of seconds on after the final cutscene???
• actually starts about 4 seconds before you gain control but way after most people start their timers, convenience thing I guess.

the kicker is the following:

• always runs at 30fps regardless of the game speed, so when your game lags, you lose time.

this gives emulator a distinct wildly unfair advantage from the jump because PSXJin is literally a lagless TAS'ing emulator and this game runs kinda like shit on an actual console. this comes as basically zero surprise to me but hey it might be news to some of y'all. This causes a discrepancy even outside of normal gameplay, because cutscenes lag and some of them count time lol. this is why emulator times consistently seem to have IGTs greater than RTA and console times the reverse, it's a lag thing.

i don't think IGT should even be used or PSXJin but since that's probably asking too much at this point, an emu/console split should suffice.

Aight cool thanks.

He is sadly, not a runner and probably doesn't even have an account? Just quite literally a technically inclined friend of mine. I mean hell, I did the same testing, you just find the memory address in the relevant emulator, it's not rocket science to test, man. Just apparently nobody else bothered to do it before I showed up. When I ask how the timer works and all I get is a shrug, that's not really a good sign, is it?

even without that, PSXJin is a ridiculous point of comparison compared to actual hardware. That emulator hasn't been supported for fucking years, what on /earth/ is it doing mingling with console runs? We're only having this conversation because I'm like the only new console runner in literally a year and I happen to give a shit.

And it's not really a matter of debate, I am telling you the state of things and you can either hold the board ransom because you found my tweets annoying and I can keep nagging you about it or do the sensible compromise that I have presented and we can both move on with our lives. I'm snippy and tweet about this a lot because I've had to have this same conversation with like twelve different communities over my time in this hobby, it gets insanely tiring constantly re-explaining the same shit to people who aren't receptive to it.

Like, the actual correct thing to do would be to erase the board and start from scratch, but since that's obviously not reasonable and would be more effort than its worth, the sensible thing to do would be to just split the two. Pretty much every Resident Evil game besides this one and a handful of the other spinoffs do this, I don't really know why Survivor feels the need to be wrong about this.

Let's be honest as well, pal, if this premise were reversed, if I showed up and console was immediately, obviously faster than emulator, you'd split the two without thinking. It's only because I have a casual disregard of emulator that you're being defensive, which is fair, you can feel that way, it just shouldn't factor into the decision.

and no I don't see why the idea would be silly from that picture showing a few runners. the number of runners has nothing to do with technical accuracy, it's a completely irrelevant consideration. Honestly, five is more than I thought this game had anyway lol

it takes like two seconds to split it and then you never have to think about it ever again.