Hey everyone, I think its time that we make a decision as a community. Now, as you may know, ps2 emulators do not accurately emulate loading times, and are faster than the original console. The reason that I'm bringing this up is that a run that is one second short of wr was posted today by ThinksTheClown (very impressive btw) on ps2 emulator.

On his run, the first loading screen stopped as early as 14 seconds, which is faster than any of the consoles. For comparison, here is what I have seen from the other consoles:

Ps2: control at 22 seconds (source: experience) GameCube: control at 20 seconds (source: experience) Xbox: control at 16 seconds (source: Spidybawlz) Ps2 emulator: control at ~14 seconds (source: Thinkstheclown's run)

Now, there are a few ways we can go about this issue:

1. Ban Ps2 emulators. The pro would be that this would erase the issue of the unrealistically fast loading times on the emulator, but at the cost of accessibility.

2. Start time after the first loading screen. This would even the playing field for all consoles, and is quite easy to do with livesplit. The downside is that the existing runs would have to be re-timed (I could do this manually for each run and edit it if we choose this option)

3. allow ps2 emulators as they are. This would leave ps2 emulators as the fastest option by a few seconds, which I'm personally not a fan of.

I would personally prefer option 1, as ps2 emulators are a big can of worms to open, and dolphin emulator is accurate and available.

At any rate, I'm going to verify Thinks' run for now.

Everyone, please leave your thoughts below and we can come to a consensus!

I haven't submitted any runs of this game, but I can input ideas from the Mega Man Legends community. For that game, the N64 emulator is inaccurate and outright banned. PS2 emulator runs the game quite well with no outstanding advantages and is accepted alongside console runs. I would suggest separating emulator runs from console runs if there isn't support for banning it altogether.

Just my two cents.

the idea of a separate category for emulator runs actually makes a lot of sense to me. I'd be fine with that idea.

I'm going to say that if no one objects, we'll move the emulator runs to their own category.

I like the emulator category idea. But is Dolphin emulator really accurate? Which category would that go in? I would just switch over to that and replace my run if it counted as a console.

I'm not sure how accurate dolphin is, but i know its more accurate than ps2 emulators. For now I'll say it counts as an emulator for the category.

I went ahead and made the separate category. Thank you for the input everyone!