They're ingame races with a timer. I think they deserve to be tracked here.

I wanna bring this here in a central place where people will notice, because the information is scattered and partly new:

1. swimming Holding down+right while touching the ground after swimming makes you deaccelerate slower than if you hold right. Works the same way as holding nothing while on the ground, but when you continue swimming again you start accelerating immediately.

2. walljump On a backwards walljump, holding down+right will prevent you from facing right again, if you don't jump on the first frame.

3. keep facing left I sometimes found this useful in Lost Levels SNES when I jumped to the top of the flagpole already facing left (because I dodged a Goomba on the stairs or whatever).

4. bullet bill glitch If you do darbian's method, you can start holding down and then down+right to get the jump to the next block without risk of pressing right too early and turning around.

5. precise jumps from standing In 1-2 of Super Mario Forever I found I can jump into a 1 block gap with 100% consistency, if I hold down, then down+right and do a full jump.

6. fast acceleration after grabbing a power-up If you grab it so that you don't land on the block while facing left (like when you clip into it from the right side), you can hold down+right to prevent Mario form turning around and gain the faster acceleration from facing left.

7. shooting while landing When you want to shoot a fireball just as you touch the ground after a jump, you should let go off right or hold down+right to prevent the instant reduction to walking speed that comes when you hold right but not B on the frame you touchdown on the ground. There is not really an advantage of down+right here except maybe finding it subjectively more convenient to hold down than to let go off right.

I think this would be a good addition, if it's not to much trouble to program. What is the shortest/longest speedrun? or What is a game between x and y minutes? are really frequent questions.

Can it be added?

Does anyone want more categories for this game? Imho I can't think of any one missing that would deserve to be a main category or even a misc. category as it stands now. Maybe move the misc. ones to main and use misc. for more arbitrary ones?

One I've seen requested often is Second Quest, although I personally see no point in this category as it is almost identical to any%. Warpless Second Quest may be different enough. Or Both Quests Any%/Warpless All-Stars as it is a continuous playthrough where you get to keep your power-ups and a slightly different ending, similiar to Lost Levels D-4 runs. But as it stands now, nobody has run these or expressed interest in running them.

Then darbian wants small only warpless. I'm not opposed to this as long as it stays misc.

I wouldn't be against adding glitchless or 1 warp and would personally run them, but I won't demand them, if others are against them.

Then the only other categories with some activity on SRL/PBTracker are All Coin Heavens, 500 Coins and partial categories like beat 4-4 warpless. I don't see a point in tracking these.

And to make it clear: I'm not pushing for any change, I set up the categories the way they are now. I'm asking what other runners think.

I just had a look at all the Bowser patterns from 4:57.01 to 4.57.39 (waiting 2 framerules on the title screen - equivalent to 4:57.36 to 4:57.74 waiting 1 framerule) and I found only 3 that kill you, if you jump close to his head:

• at 4:57.02
• at 4:57.04 very hard to avoid the hammers, but probably don't need to worry about these
• at 4:57.11 the hammer bro will throw a hammer and Bowser's fireball will be high, no other time in this range besides 4:57.02 will have this behavior So if you do see the hammer bro throwing a hammer and Bowser's fireball being at the highest possible position, prepare to do either of those jumps that are both very tricky: Yes, it's over his head again, but it's really really close.

Every other time (when you are in the 4:57.01 to 4:57.39 range) you will always be safe either running under him or jumping slightly over his head. It seems the current common method jumps too high and is an unnecessary risk. Maybe people who actually savestate practice 8-4 today will be able to confirm this?

I was really looking at something else that turned out to not be really relevant in this instance: The bubbles that come from Mario's mouth in the underwater section are on a global timer. By looking at where the bubbles are when the screen transitions to the final screen and also looking at the hammer bro and fireball, you have a lot of information and can pretty much predict exactly what Bowser will do, but now that information is pretty useless unless you are <4:57.06. Maybe for higher PBs or warpless looking at bubbles can become useful, if someone wants to look into it.

Since I see many people not know how to retime their runs or do ridiculous stuff like rewatching a 2 hour run in real-time with Livesplit running next to it, here's how I time recordings:

What you need:

• youtube-dl https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html despite its name it can download from many places including Twitch
• VirtualDub https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdub/files/virtualdub-win/1.10.4.35491/VirtualDub-1.10.4.zip/download for the actual timing
• K-Lite Codec Pack http://www.codecguide.com/download_k-lite_codec_pack_basic.htm to decode the video
• Avisynth https://sourceforge.net/projects/avisynth2/ to load the video into VirtualDub
• FFmpeg (only for downloading from Twitch) http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ After downloading it go into its "bin" folder, copy "ffmpeg.exe" and drop it into the same folder as "youtube-dl.exe".

How to time the length of a recorded run: I will time TheTycon's Super Mario Land run as an example:

1. Go to the folder that holds the "youtube-dl.exe" you downloaded, hold Shift and right click it. Then select "open command prompt here".
2. Enter "youtube-dl " and paste the link to the vod and press the Return key
3. Open the editor and create a new file with the ending ".avs" that contains just this line: DirectShowSource("path to the video")
4. Drag the avs-file and drop it on VirtualDub.exe
5. Go to the starting frame and press the End and the Delete key to remove all previous frames.
6. Go to the ending frame and read the time And that's it: 12:36.857

This doesn't mean the time is 100% accurate. You have to take into account that many games are 60fps while recordings are often just 30fps. A lot of Youtube uploads have interlacing or other encoding issues that may mess with the timing. In these cases you can take a section of constant known length and compare it with the run or compare with what the onscreen timer says, if there is one, to see if the general timing fits. Twitch highlights are often more reliable because them being live ensures that at least the timing isn't screwed up afterwards.

time without loads You can go through the movie and use the selection keys (Pos1 and End or the right-most buttons at the bottom of the window) to select and delete all loading sections to read off the time without loads the same way.

when youtube-dl doesn't work If you want to download from some obscure site that isn't supported, the following method may or may not work:

1. Start Firefox press Ctrl+Shift+K to open the console.
2. Select the Network Monitor tab at the top of the console.
3. Go to the site with the video you want to download and let it start playing.
4. The Network Monitor should be filling up with files now. Sort by size and the file you search should be near the top of the list.
5. Right click the video file and download it.

Is that something that should be tracked? The site can now sort by descending order so you could just put the ingame time as milliseconds until a better implementation happens sometime in the future. (by real time would be a nightmare to moderate since frames would matter and you can't time that accurately in many cases) Imho it would be nice to have for some hard levels like 8-4 with 316 remaining and of course it would be added to Lost Levels too, which has many challenging ILs. Some rule details (savestate at start, warp exits, starting big/fire mario, PAL, all-stars, ... allowed/seperate category/banned?) would have to be worked out, but right now I wonder if it's wanted or unwanted.

SMB1

1. Should Wii VC, Wii U VC, 3DS VC and GBA times be converted, if it's possible?

SMB2j

1. Should Wii VC times for SNES be converted?
2. How should runs that use a savestate for faster resets be treated? Pedantically it's against the rules, but there are several relevant SNES runs that use it on the leaderboards right now. Should we remove them and disregard their current WR status or do a grandfather clause and reject future runs that do it or allow it?

General questions

1. Should emulator times at 60fps (or 59.94fps for snes9x) be converted to the correct framerate?
2. Should versions other than the original release (Famicom cartridge for SMB1, Famicom disk for SMB2j, Super Famicom for All-Stars categories) become a seperate category, if they turn out to be faster and not convertable? (e.g. a 3DS-only glitch being found that makes it faster than the original release)
3. Should there be cutoff points for how much proof is required? Right now all runs are pretty much judged the same, the only exception being the rejected 4:57.58 run that would probably have been accepted had it been a minute slower. We could say that a video is only required from like 5:20 down and from sub5 down it's required to stream attempts (and similiar cutoffs for other categories).

Depending on the decisions, we need to know the relevant differences for Wii U VC, 3DS VC and GBA versions. I would really appreciate if someone recorded a few loops of the title screen autoplay and a playthrough of any of these versions (preferably uploaded at the original framerate of the recording), so we can check stuff like the framerate and lag.

So my run got accepted and it's now #1 by a pretty large margin. I actually think this is kind of silly and that there can be meaningful Solitaire competition and categories, but defining rules can be tricky.

Here's a list of all the tricky subjects I can think of: glitches: The XP version's Ctrl+A is extremely broken and allows for stuff like moving a card that is not at the top of the stack to the stacks in the top-right corner of the field. This would make it by far the fastest version, if they hadn't added this from Vista on: hints: Just spamming T and Enter repeatedly will let you "solve" the game and the only skill is how fast you can mash and cheating via scripts would be easy and undetectable. It seems to be just slightly slower than the best XP run with glitches at http://www.solitaire-ranking.org/. doubleclicking: The established leaderboard at http://www.solitaire-ranking.org/ allows you to rebind your mouse keys to other effects, this includes making your rightclick behave as a doubleclick, which many players used to increase the speed of going through the stack while holding Ctrl+A saving them seconds. 99% of speedrunners would probably call this a light form of scripting, but it would not be fair to brush off the rules of a long-standing community as cheating. manipulating the seed: The game you get is based on the system clock and so you can have multiple goes at the same memorized board by just setting your system time to the desired value (at least up to XP, Vista and later versions may be different). http://www.solitaire-ranking.org/ actually acknowledges this as cheating, but at the same time their rules state that it cannot be detected. That several of the top times are achieved on the same board makes me sceptical that this rule was actually followed.

My personal opinion is that there should be two categories: One where you can do all of the things I just listed, that is just silly, but deserves to exist to show off the fastest way to beat it without invalidating old runs. And one, where all of them are banned, that is close to how it was meant to be played (this one maybe seperated into Draw 1 and Draw 3, although I think a variable suffices). From my (few, inconclusive) tests it seems as though the Windows 7 version at least is not as easily manipulatable. It has to be determined which versions have good RNG generation and only they should be allowed (for this category).

EDIT: Any why are there regions and why does real-time start at a different instant than ingame time and why should there even be two timings?

What is the philosophy of this site? To get all the times or only the submitted ones? Right now only moderators can add runs by other people, right? What about giving everyone the possibility to do it? Since runs need to be verified anyway I don't see much potential for abuse.