I think setting a better mandatory emulator for runs would be a good thing for this game, such as psxjin or BIZHAWK.
Both of these have VSYNC counters which essentially act as an IGT. An emulated VSYNC represents a unit of game time way better than RTA, especially for emulation.
I wouldn't like to discount the current times set in place, but I think this would benefit future competition, so as to avoid having to use certain plugins that produce better RTAs (especially slight differences in FPS).
BIZHAWK is pretty slow for scoring times, and I hear some people have trouble running it at a good framerate. psxjin runs pretty fast at the cost of emulation accuracy. The current TAS uses it anyway.
Note this also means using the vsync counter to time runs more IGT-like; ((endframe - startframe) / 60) to get the seconds. A livesplit script could automate the frames to real-time conversion. Livesplit wouldn't be required, we can just playback the video and find the frame of hitting "New Game" and the last hit on final boss.
What do you think ?
The current times won't be removed, but future runs would have to use the specified emulator.
I can't finalize my vote yet but if i had to, my vote is only because I prefer speed, so psxjin is what I prefer, unless suddenly there's another emulator that loads even faster. Bizhawk is good but this game so far is over an hour long, the loading screens can be a killer waste of time and a turn off if you were the one watching it. If it were some other game that only took 10 minutes like Super mario bros for example, I would choose bizhawk for that accuracy.
Psxjin is remarkable for speed but suffers from sound issues, which might interfere with the player speedrunning.
I will need to try out both emulators first to see it for myself.
Whatever emu that works for the majority and a livesplit script to simulate that kind of "IGT" sounds good.
