There has been increased interest in emulator submissions for THE DOG Island recently; however, rules regarding emulator runs have long gone unestablished because it's a contentious issue with few easy answers. We are overdue to fix this, so I'd like to gather the community's opinions.

I've set up a poll for this purpose: https://www.strawpoll.me/45897738

The results of this poll won't necessarily determine the rules we go with right away, but they will be very helpful toward coming to an informed decision that the community can be satisfied with.

To further elaborate on the situation, here is a response I gave in the Discord recently when asked whether or not emulators were allowed:

"Prefacing this with an apology that I've been swamped at work and haven't had the time to answer questions like this (or, uh, run the game for close to a year) - Presently, we don't have a policy in place regarding emulator runs, though Auaora and I did discuss it a while back. I was initially opposed to emulator runs because emulation introduces a lot of room for both intentional manipulation and unintentional advantages over console play; these are more-or-less solved for regarding older consoles (fifth-gen and below) as emulators for those consoles approach 100% accuracy, but emulators for newer consoles are not quite there yet. Many Wii and PS2 leaderboards disallow emulators for that reason, and I sympathize with that. But Auaora rightfully pointed out that emulation greatly expands accessibility to the game (as well as to the most speedrun-viable versions of the game), and as someone who personally values game preservation and accessibility very highly, I can't disagree with that. What we are specifically trying to avoid is emulator runs having consistently faster load times (or other advantages) than are attainable on console, as that would unevenly skew the playing field. If an emulator run has demonstrably similar load times to its console counterparts, I don't have much of an issue with it, but the potential for abuse remains, which gives me pause. Checking every run against equivalent console runs for load time consistency would, of course, be very labor-intensive, and load times differ even among identical versions of the game. There was talk of potentially having a separate category for emulator runs, though we did not commit one way or the other. One thing we agreed upon, though, is that loading the game from flash media (USB, SD, etc.) on modded consoles should be disallowed, because legitimately disc-loaded retail versions of the game would be categorically unable to compete with flash media load times. tl;dr it's a tricky issue and we haven't yet come to a consensus on it; we welcome everybody's opinions as always."

EDIT: I tried to vote in the strawpoll and it didn't show. I've had issues with strawpoll not accepting votes in recent times, so while it might not be showing for me, if the vote still shows 0 votes in anything in a while we can probably assume there's a problem. (And for clarity, I tried voting for shown emulator runs on the main board)

My biggest opinion at the moment is that if we include emulator runs, they should not be hidden by default. The other 3 options are all fine by me.

The reason I say this is because hidden runs is how we used to handle emulator runs in Petz Catz/Dogz 2 and it only seemed to cause confusion - at least one person who submitted the run on emulator erroneously thought themselves to be the first one, and I seem to recall being asked if emulators were allowed once or twice (and although that may be a lack of clarity in the rules showing through, the lack of visible emulator runs hadn't helped). Emulator runs are always going to be marked as emulator runs when you look at them, and we can always change the rules later if something huge comes up.

In addition, we don't know exactly how precise emulator runs are, but for now I'll see them as valid runs with valid effort. The introduction of emulators didn't ever overshadow disc copies in DogzCatz 2 (although the situation here is slightly different than that game where JPN and US are equal, because here we know the Japanese version is fastest, meaning Americans will find it a bit less accessible with disc copies. Not to condone making like El Dorado and sailing the seven seas, no sir, not me)

Finally, while options for abuse are possible and I'd like to hope they don't happen, I think having that slight amount of accessibility might be more important right now. We could introduce a rule to show your settings/main window before the run to make sure theyre at their most accurate and the runner doesn't have any advantages (I believe Pokémon does this). I would also understand completely if people decide Emulators shouldn't be included.

I apologize that the poll doesn't seem to have worked as I hoped.

Considering the opinions that have been raised here and on the Discord, the increased interest in emulator runs, and the (way too long - sorry!) time elapsed considering the issue, I'm going to take the initiative to allow emulator runs as long as they do not contain distinct advantages unattainable on console. The addition to the rules will read:

"Emulator runs must not make use of any features enabling distinct advantages over console runs (cheats, memory logging, faster loading, etc.) subject to moderator discretion. Please include the name and version of the emulator you are using with the submission, and display the main emulator window prior to the run. Loading the game from USB / SD / etc. backups on console is not allowed."

I feel confident that this compromise accommodates the general feelings of the community as well as those who are looking to get into the game. But should anybody feel otherwise, or have any other questions or concerns, by all means, let us know!