hello, i am spriven and i have been working with a few people in the community to run some tests on some emulators to see if they run this game properly. these are my findings:

so for these tests i had 3 people record 3 different instances of the game's demo running on hardware to see how they ran.

Hardware: https://imgur.com/1AO6JQG

Teleo:

Seige:

Nester:

these are the hardware recording's if anyone would like to check them out and run their own tests.

here's the demo recording's from bizhawk

SNES9X 1.56: https://imgur.com/AKEFm5J

i will also note that i tried two other versions of snes9x, 1.53 and 1.60.
1.53 was about the same as 1.56 and 1.60 was 3 seconds slower than both...so yea

here's the demo's

and finally BSNES V115: https://imgur.com/mosfFOP

BSNES Demo's:

at this point i pretty much stop running tests on SNES9x and we decided to do some lag comparison's on the hydra fight between hardware and BSNES to see how well BSNES and Bizhawk handled it. i came out pretty much what it should be: https://imgur.com/c8mDVAx

BSNES vs Hardware:

Bizhawk hydra lag test:

with these findings i and others in the community feel that with these tests it proves that BSNES and Bizhawk are capable of running the game properly and accurately. therefor should be accepted on the leaderboard for SNES runs.

if anybody has any questions, opinions, thoughts etc.. please post them here and we can address them.

Thats a lot of great documentation! I would support adding BSNES/Higan/Bizhawk to the allowed list for speedruns, they pretty clearly don't give an advantage over hardware (obviously without the use of emulator only tools i.e. slow-mo, run-ahead) and even a slight disadvantage especially in the case of recent SNES9x builds. I might suggest requiring input display for emulators or framecount for the sake of transparency, but I'm all for getting more access to this game as it is killer and I haven't had a run to verify in quite some time! Would like to see more input from the rest of the community. This has been discussed several times in the discord but we never came to a final conclusion in the past. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting and documenting your findings!

After the evidence gathered in the past week, I would be all in for allowing BSNES and anything that uses a recent BSNES core, as it has proven that even under heavy lag scenarios, BSNES handles King of Dragons very well and is quite close enough to hardware, and since King of Dragons is not a game that would be drastically impacted from the little difference there is between hardware and BSNES, and sub-28 times are very hard to achieve, I do not see how not allowing this emulator would negatively affect the leaderboards or the legitimacy of runs.

Naturally, I would like to say that I think emulator runs need to be clearly identified, and I'd personally prefer the whole window of the emu to be displayed, should this become a reality in the future.

Well, I have to agree with the above and say that with the new evidence, I would be comfortable with allowing BSNES/Higan/Bizhawk as it is pretty clear here that the systems are emulating with accuracy to the console. I also agree that input display or whole window capture of the emulator would be appreciated to ensure legitimacy. This is not the first time we have discussed this, but we were always unable to move forward due to lack of sufficient evidence of the accuracy of Emulators compared to the console. Thank you Spriven for gathering this information and crunching the numbers and thank you to the community for helping him out. I would still like to hear more of the community voice their thoughts here as this rule was standing long before I joined the discussion. Hoping to come to a conclusion this time.

although i am not particularly a fan of enforcing having to show the window of the emu i would be in favor of it being an option to do so. totally fine with showing inputs, i use a input display all the time =P

A bit late in but I also agree with the above letting this be ran on the aforementioned emulators. There's always a risk of cheating of course, but like with anything some due diligence goes a long way. Would make it easier to start from the desired seed to, if the community opted to allow that route.

Don't really mind the whole thing. Always iffy though on some emulators and the new bunch of sd card reader cards that who knows if they are actually better or not. It just leaves all the guess work out if its only used on the real consoles and real cart but alienates the people who can't or don't want to spend the money on those mentioned things.

In relation to emulation, for SNES runs I always use Snes9x v.1.58 for some attempts (a lighter emulator working fine for me since I don't have a great notebook), and sometimes using Fightcade 2 that uses Snes9x v.1.60, even though I have never played this game for Super Nintendo port, except for Arcade (Mame, Winkawaks, Fightcade FC 1 and 2). It would be great to enable emulation for future runs, I am not so good at this game but fun to play with 2 Players and/or 3 Players.

We are putting the addition of emulators to a community vote in the discord channel, we will leave it open for about a week for people to vote and add any input that may have been missed before. We can investigate adding additional emulators once someone has done more thorough testing. Once we have reached consensus we will amend the rules on SRC and have a celebratory community race with anyone who wants to be involved, EMU or console

i got some more testing done for other games. figured i'd go ahead and link it here just incase there were any doubts.

Super Castlevania 4: https://www.speedrun.com/scv4/thread/cj33v

MKI: https://www.speedrun.com/mk1/thread/6g5uu

MKII: https://www.speedrun.com/mkii/thread/jrc20

MKIII: https://www.speedrun.com/mk3/thread/neia4/1#b73oa

UMKIII: https://www.speedrun.com/umk3/thread/54xsc/1#0832b