EnglandIt will never cease to amaze me how much people care about this specific issue.
Honestly the biggest indicator of emulator play in most cases is the video quality. The vast majority of cases of speedrunners using capture devices for console play will see poor video quality, whereas an emulator window captured at native resolution will look incredibly crisp.
Assuming the emulation is accurate enough it's one of the reasons that I never insist that people use original hardware for the games I moderate. If the game is going to be the same for all intents and purposes, I'm totally happy for people to play in a format that is more visually pleasing.
Depends entirely what sort of games you enjoy. The first thing I think of with longer runs is JRPGs, but many people don't like how those types of games play.
Because moderators have the power to verify all submitted runs, including their own.
Opinions differ on this practice, I personally think it's an extremely bad habit and that moderators should not do it if they can avoid it.
^ Depends, I think. If the run is at the start of the VOD, I'm happy to accept it even if there's extra content at the end. I will reject for the VOD containing lots of unrelated material before the run starts however, because I expect the runner to provide a video where a spectator can click play and just see the run immediately.
What is with this recent spat of moderators asking people who don't even run the game whether glitches in their games should be allowed?
We don't know. We're not specialists in the game. You are. You make the decision.
We're leaning more in the direction of not allowing any mods whatsoever that aren't Keepalive, and I would also argue that the fact that Seraphim is colour-deficient and is one of the top runners would suggest that this would not be a hard necessity in the first place. If there are others who feel that piece detection is something they consistently struggle with for this reason then I would like to hear it from them, though everything I've heard from people on this topic thus far hasn't suggested that they feel unable to compete.
You could just run those games without the difficult tricks, you know.
Nobody's expecting you to get a top time right away, nor is anyone expecting you to use every trick in the book with a high degree of proficiency right away. All the top runners have spent an incredible amount of time getting to where they are, and being experienced in 'easier' games first won't magically make you learn your games of choice at a faster pace later.
It's easier than ever in BizHawk thanks to TAStudio, which has a graph for each frame since Power On and which inputs are active on each frame.
From there it's just a LOT of work. Good TAS runs don't appear out of thin air, and the ones you see published on TASvideos typically take months, sometimes years, to construct.
It's accessible from the sitebar up top, under More.
If you're the moderator, that decision falls to you.
The general objective of determining which emulators are acceptable is to only allow the most accurate ones. If you're not able to determine that then maybe it would be more appropriate to have someone with more technical expertise in charge of the moderation.
Reminder that when we restructured the Sonic Adventure 2 leaderboards and accidentally broke some values, we had to manually repair the entries for hundreds of runs, with a large community panicking about why stuff wasn't working properly.
Sometimes being a moderator requires you to actually do some hard graft.
