Hey guys!

After some discussion on the Yoshi discord server, mt decided to make me mod.

We talked for a long time about the state of this game. Despite it not being as popular as the SNES version, I wanted to clean it up, so I can moderate runs in a timely fashion.

Here are some changes:

• Emulators are not allowed anymore - After some investigation, we came to the conclusion that GBA emulators are inherently inaccurate and will not be allowed anymore. chris has done some great comparisons, and you can see that the current WR run saves a few frames or maybe even seconds in every transition. So to make it not a competition who can find the least accurate emulator, we decided to ban it alltogether. If a better emulator gets developed in the future, emulator runs might be allowed again.
• Timing changes - Of course every other official release is gonna be allowed. The issue is just that different consoles run on different framerates. To make it more fair, we decided that converting the times would be the best option. The baseline timing will be the framerate from the original GBA release Here is an overview to all the relevant framerates. When submitting a run, make your to convert your time accordingly, when not run on GBA. And note it in the submission notes. Here is a useful website for easy converting.
• Game Boy Player and Game Boy Interface will be added.

So here is what I'll do now:

1. I will reject all emulator runs. Here is a spreadsheet of all the old emulator runs
2. I will be retiming all the times to GBA timing
3. Add GBP and GBI

With all this, I hope to make competing for top times in this game more fun.

If you have any other questions, feel free to DM me here or on Discord.

Any chance of adding Low% IL's to the board since this version of the game does make lowest scores possible?

Would it be possible to allow emulator runs if they're put in a separate tab on the leaderboard like with SM64?

no emulator runs, because they're all inaccurate. it would be a race to find the fastest emulator

Low% has been added to the boards on zewing's request.

There's a few levels where a score of 0 is not possible. You still need to get the lowest score possible tho. If a strat is found where you can get an even lower score, all old runs will be rejected.

@Volpey Maybe only one emulator (e.g. Bizhawk) could be allowed to prevent that issue?

No. All emulators are inaccurate. Different people would have different loading times.

The Switch version is really accessible, I would just recommend using that.

I'm sorry but you sound like a dictator, I didn't want to say it but that's it. Community wants at least one Emu allowed and you say no but one person ask for a Low% (something very few people would even try) and you just say yes. Communities are build by everyone not just you.

We had a lengthy discussion on the Yoshi Discord with a bunch of testing and retiming with a lot of people and 2 people who ran the game.

Feel free to join the server and read through it. You'd probably come to the same conclusion.

Speedrunning has to be fair for everyone. If an inaccurate emulator is allowed, which gives everyone different loading times, there would be no fair competition.

@Mingura666 I talked to Chris on discord and apparently SMA3 running in Bizhawk has inconsistent loading times on different PCs (standalone mGBA was no different).

The "sounding like a dictator" comment was a bit unnecessary imo, the yoshi mods try their hardest to keep everything fair for everyone and I figured if emu was being banned outright there was a good reason for it. It really doesn't make much sense to allow emu with the inconsistencies, even if the leaderboard is split. Not much point in having a leaderboard at all if the runs themselves aren't directly comparable lol.

Anyway, despite it not being allowed for submissions, I can still run the game on Bizhawk and that's probably what I'll do for the time being, at least until I find a better solution.

Then ban SwitchVC, it doesn't have the same framerate as GBA, in the end SwitchVC is also an emulator and emulators are banned.

Are you even listening to what we are saying?

Emulators have different loading times depending on your PC setup.

All official releases have a consistent (although higher) framerate. This is easily fixed by converting the framerate (60fps on Switch) to the original GBA framerate to make it a fair competition.

If you don't have anything useful to say, just shut up.

i feel the main issue with emulation is inaccuracy so why only allow a specific version and emulator that is deemed the most accurate among the bunch and restrict use to that one and have rules showing emulator version similarly to what Pokemon Speedruns already do. and have a rule where you have to capture the entire window while showing emulation version for verification purposes and provide a link to get that said version. i know it'd be a ton of work to sift through a bunch of emulators.

of course they are always gonna be incomparable to console. and also have a separate board/subcategory that allows emulator with that specific version of and the emulator of choice decided by the community mods. i'm just nearly making a suggestion. i feel allowing only console is best till we come across a proper and true evaluation of which emulator and version to use. i totally assume this was done already but just in case i figured i'd put my input in just in case. sadly going down this emulator rabbit hole would be a pain and understand if this isn't worth doing. just figured i'd say my input on the whole discourse.

I agree with @Volpey in disallowing it since having to sift through a bunch of emulator and testing a bunch of garbage only to get lead into nothing useful to go out into a ton of research. plus older builds of things tend to be trash builds anyway.

SwitchVC is emulator and emulators are banned. Please reject your own run @Volpey Don't use your mod power to give yourself top places on the board when you know switch is emu and emus are banned.

Not sure if you are trolling or just plain stupid.

Anyway, this thread was only meant as an overview for the changes.

Because Mingura is being annoying, I will now lock this thread.

For any other questions, feel free to open a new thread.