I see there are 7 versions, are there any differences in speed? Or anything else along those lines. Just curious...

NTSC NES is the "standard version", it's what every high ranked run uses and as far as I know the fastest. American, Japanese and the multi-carts are identical for speedrunning (except longer resets on the multi-carts). PAL NES (European) is significantly slower. FDS is almost identical to NTSC NES, but there's no reason to use it, if you don't do Minus World Ending, as it has a longer bootup time and more expensive hardware and no benefits. WiiVC and WiiUVC are identical to NES (A European Wii will have a PAL rom, but I guess that you can hack it and load a NTSC one on it?) except for the framerate, which is slower. I asked if VC times should be converted to be competitive a while ago, but there were no strong opinions either way. GBA and 3DSVC I don't really know.

SNES is its own category. Japanese is fastest. Again the Wii version of the SNES version is slower due to the framerate.

Does VC make so much of a big difference? I switched to it for convenience, but if I lose many seconds to that I'll most likely switch back (NES controller is much better anyway).

Wii VC (FPS=59.824) loses 1.37-1.38 seconds or so every 5 minutes, and Wii U VC (59.94) loses about 0.79 seconds every 5 minutes over NES.

So is NES [emu] like your run on the leaderboards (i_o_i) identical in speed to real nes hardware?

For any% and minus world ending they are definitely identical (fceux/bizhawk at least), all the timings and mechanics are the same to the frame. In warpless or the SNES categories there could be slight lag differences: I don't see any differences to a real NES/SNES, but you can't test every single possible event.

EDIT: I should add that snes9x and snesgt run at 60 fps and higan runs at 60 fps by default too although it can be adjusted. The only good snes emu that runs at the correct framerate by default is bizhawk.

Does anyone have any information on the GBA version? It's the exact same game, right?

Also, SMB-DX has a separate leaderboard, but is it the same game, if I wanted to use it to practice?

GBA is as far as I know an emulation of the original, but I don't know how accurately it treats stuff like lag and loading times and the framerate is lower. SMB DX handles completely differently.

Thanks, you two!

@i_o_l, so you're saying that the framerate definitely is lower? Do you think that would make a noticeable difference if I practiced solely with the GBA version but did runs with the NES version?

If you practice with GBA you should be fine... I always thought there was a slight difference in physics between the two versions, but an NES TAS that was ported to GBA actually plays back perfectly, so there's no difference aside from framerate. The framerate difference is barely noticeable even to a trained eye, so you'll have no problems switching between the two

Cool, thank you

Just to add on to what nickj said, the only difference is that L+R does not work on the GBA version. The NES TAS that was ported was the RTA rules tas by happylee. The movie for which you can view here:

http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/394752880/RTA%20rules%20by%20happylee.bk2