Should Emulators be Banned in Speedrunning? 

I remember a guy who was speedrunning on emulator - then his cat ran across his keyboard and loaded an earlier save file, ending the run

Q: Should X be banned in Speedrunning? A: No, never ban anything, make it its own category. You're welcome.

Honestly loading times shouldn't be included in speedruns

i still find it hilarious how, "the game plays better so the experience is ruined" is such a big reason.

Two categories: 1. Speedruns using emulators 2. Speedruns using actual hardware Problem solved.

Shouldnt be banned. Makes the speedrunning cheaper and thus more available for people which is good. Separate them into another category tho if it bothers

Eventually emulators will be the only way to play older games. There are only so many NES systems still around for example and eventually they will all die. We have seen his happen to older consoles(atari) where you can basically only use emulators. As far as illegally obtaining roms copyright laws need to change. Many older games aren't available in digital downloads and often times it is nearly impossible to obtain a physical copy of the game or even the necessary hardware to play it.(ET on atari for example) Older games for which obtaining consoles is difficult should be put into a category in copyright law where downloading roms is perfectly legal as long as they are for personal use and no profits are made. This wouldn't stop the IP owners from making a profit if they wanted to continue to support a game which I feel most wont.

0:21 Ah yes. Speedrunning Bubsy 3d on an xbox one x with a gamecube controller. That is the way to speedrun.

I say that as long as they're in separate categories, it's fine.

My opinion: Not banned But maybe separate cartridge from emulated.

My favorite arguments on these videos are "Emulation can have faster load times." Yet don't people pick the region a console is from for that, faster dialogue skipping, skipping X. Speed Running is canceled now. Everything has an advantage.

The souljagame is fine though

to be fair, I already owned the Atari from my childhood

Glad I bought a whole new console for a $100 just so I can beat this video game ten seconds faster. : )

i dont see why you can't just have a second bracket for emulator speed runs ?

Whole speedrunning community: should we ban emulators This comment section: Separate times by creating new category Easy solution to stupid questions

at a certain point, obtaining legitimate hardware will be physically and financially impossible. I doubt that every retro console will last forever.

0:40 "limited edition black smudge on it" Could not stop laughing xD

I love how in the thumbnail, the 'Console' version is still emulator. You can tell this by looking at the outlines of the numbers in both of them.

Why not just make separated categories for console and emulator and avoid all this trouble :/

I think they should just remove load times and other things that impact speed runs artificially from the record. Would take a lot more work to record times, but would level the playing field significantly.

If i had a penny for every time someone explained what a TAS is

you guys have glitchless, any%, 100%, etc....why not emulator, console, and anyform categories?

As a speedrunner, both a player and a moderator for various games, I can safely and comfortably say that arguments against emulator usage is nothing more than elitism from people who have all the required hardeware already. Any game that bans emulator use isn't worth your time running. It just shows that the community is toxic, has preferential favoritism (usually in favor of the mods and their personal friends, and wants special "exclusivity" to prevent new people from joining in. Avoid those communities at all costs.

If Emulators are Banned, its only a matter of time, until Speedrunning for ANY console dies. That‘s why i am against banning emulators. There should be another category instead.

at some point in 20 years none of this hardware is going to work anymore and we're all going to be stuck on emulator anyways. hopefully we've got accurate emulators by that time.

This was very interesting! Didn't know about those floating point errors - would make an interesting video just collecting different examples of that!

Using save states can be an amazing way to practice speedrunning, specially if you struggle with an specific part of the game, with save states you can practice that one super hard part of the run over and over again until you got it right

So wait. The Pokemon community made their OWN EMULATOR for speedruns? If that could be done for other games, wouldn't that solve a lot of problems?

Active websites that only recognise runs on true hardware will be forced to accept emulators, as the original hardware will degrade and there will eventually be none left. But to be fair, most communities accept emulation, even if it’s in its own category.

you make some lulzy conclusions. "emulator devs dont care about accuracy"; that is the priority of many of the well respected emulators. Look at Higan or Messen.

Imagine timing Usain Bolt based on how fast he can run and adding how long he takes to get ready from the locker room to the track to the overall time.

it still boggles my mind that it is illegal to download a copy of a game that is no longer being sold by the company who made it, but legal to profit from selling used cartridges for way more than the MSRP.

obviously it should not be banned, but emulation should be its own category, wich it already is in most lists.... but i guess you covered this in the video, wich i will watch now :P

They shouldnt be Speedrun.com already seperates console/VC from emulators. (Basically seperate category)

Soooo, who's guaranteeing that people don't use modded consoles for faster clock speed to get faster loading times/higher fps/less lag to get better records? Or modded roms on their cardridges? if cheating or getting an advantage is a problem with emulators, who's to say people desperate for a world record won't mod their console or use a modded repro card?

They should be a separate category, but not completely banned.

Personally, I believe most speedrunning communities should do what Pokemon community did, and make their own forks of 100% accurate emulators that are designed ONLY for speedrunning that don't allow savestates, speed options or recording/loading inputs, ram viewing, and would check hash value of its EXE on startup to eliminate possibility of modding. Then require a controller webcam on TOP of that. However, we can go even further. If we wanted to be extreme, perhaps emulator would be designed to produce a 'verification file" after each run, which would be an encrypted file containing the full list and timing (both in frames and in real time, to ensure lag is correct) of inputs in a run, hash value of the used ROM file, and a hash value of the EXE file of the emulator itself. The file would be encrypted with a key that isn't publicly known - known only to the creator of the emulator, and people who validate the runs. Perhaps one could create an 'emulator generator' - a program that takes the base code of said speedrun-viable emulator, and generates a unique version of it, that will encrypt verification file with a different key, and as its code will change, it's EXE will have a different hash value - and people could share that EXE within a specific community. Community for each specific game could create an UNIQUE emulator that would be legal ONLY for that one game (but would share 99% of its code with versions from other communities that play games on the same console). Since each encryption key would only work for one game/community, it would make extremely hard to learn it and modify the files, ESPECIALLY for outsiders/newcomers/kids who would be most likely to cheat. I know it's a lot of work, but that's the only feasible solution I could think of to COMPLETELY eliminate the possibility of cheating when using emulators, at all.

Ok here's my idea: 1. Ban all officially released versions of the game 2. Only allow one specific emulator for a game 3. If emulation for the game has evolved enough, standardize the platform that the game is emulated on, that way you can just spend 100-200 dollars on a mini computer instead of spending all kinds of money on the specific version of the game, the console, the optimal controller, etc... (Also games on the same console would preferably try to share the hardware that they use to make purchasing a new console less important.) 4. Permanently affix a 360° orb camera on the top of the runners head so you can *always* know what they are up to 5. Require various probes and indicators be inserted into the runners hardware and visible at all times so that the exact voltage of the board components can be read. 6. Have the runner submit their computer harddrive for analysis 7. Require that the runner must be hooked up to a lie detector and interrogated about the legitimacy of their run in order for it to get submitted to the leaderboards (again, preferably the interrogation techniques would be standardized between games of similar genre to help new runners be more comfortable.) 8. Require all runners to cough up vouchers from atleast two friends (cannot also be speedrunners) saying that they did not, nor have they ever, cheated in anything in their entire life, ever.

I still don't understand why we can't make seperate categories. That's the solution for most of these "yes or no in speedrunning" problems.

Not to mention, with a little trickery, you can use TAS on hardware, too. All you need is a cheap Raspberry or Arduino, either plugged or soldered to controller pins, even if not emulating the controller itself. Have fun.

Is there a speedrun category for the Atari 2600 emulator built in minecraft?

"Now, it's only ten dollars. There really isn't any excuse to not being able to afford it." Speedrunners that aren't above 18 and can't get jobs (me):

I can only do this on emulator since it's too costly for me , even 10$ is too costly i.e I'm indian we are too poor 😭

Its not just speedrunners that help out emulator development. They're a big slice, yes. But the loudest voices will be the ones demanding accuracy, which is what emulator developers strive for. Banning them within speedrunning is sort of like kicking the ones that show the most care for data preservation and allowing gamers and speedrunners alike to enjoy console games longer...in the teeth. Hardware only lasts so long. If you have an emulation accuracy issue, report it, they'll listen. After all, the speedrunner is a big slice of the reason they still exist. They are the most capable of noticing...and accurately reporting inaccurate emulation, and therefore hold the most potential to provide proper data needed for bugfixes.

Personally I just don't get why people cheat on speedruns. You put your record up as something you're proud of and worked hard at. What satisfaction is there in cheating? You feel witty that you suckered a bunch of people that trusted you? I just couldn't live with myself

0:21 Console: Xbox Controller: Nintendo Gamecube Game: Playstation *seems legit*

I just found out my Grandmother still has most of my old game systems. Almost everything from SNES to PlayStation 2 but they're nothing but, "Gameboys" and "Game Machines" to her.

As someone who did emulator speedruns of SMB1 I have some ideas on this. It really depends on how the emulator is timed compared to its console counterpart. For SMB1 the emulators we use do play at the same exact framerate as the console so they can be compared in the same level and do not require a separate category. For something like N64 the emulators unfortunately do have some advantage and for those I agree do require seperate categories. But there certainly is no blanket statement for all speedruns and should be done case by case within their respective communities.

Not banned, just given separate categories. Easy. Next question.

8 days exploiting a glitch. Not a speedun. I's a slowrun

Thank you for this great documentary! I love watching speedruns, especially on events like AGDQ and SGDQ and I had always wondered a little about the vast mix of platforms - partially being VC or emulators, or real consoles - and I wondered how well they actually faired against one another in terms of accuracy. Again, thanks for this great video!

I think one the problem of this issue is that people tend to forget that the point of an emulator is to actually imitate the original hardware. Dismissing them completely is for me an error. This ability vary a lot with the concerned console. For example, nowhere near leaderboards should Dolphin or PCSX2 be (or at the very least in separate categories), whereas NES and Game Boy emulators are both able to perfectly emulate their respective consoles. And this is without taking account that the emulation can vary even by games. I think that if the generated input file works on the originals console and game, then it is legitimate. Also, emulation caused most cheating techniques to appear, but it could also be the way to counter them : by imposing an emulator that have been verified by the community, you could monitor everything the runner is doing. You could for example have that emulator needing to be connected to a server while emulating, ensuring people are using the official software to do the run. This would also be way more efficient than showing the emulator used on the video stream, which is blatantly amateurish.

"how dare you not spend hundreds of dollars to do a challenge. For shame!"

Anyone who thinks that emulation should be banned in speedrunning hasn’t ever considered that old gen consoles aren’t being produced anymore

Another issue with timing accuracy from console vs emulators has to do with the way some consoles actually tried to keep their timing. The SNES used a synthetic quartz timer to my knowledge. After all these years those oscillators have become less and less consistent on the original hardware. Because of the aging of the console, the oscillators have become less accurate causing long pauses in some cases. This is why some TAS runs have the TAS pause much longer than necessary.

The thing people don't get is that anything you can do to "cheat" on an emulator you can pretty much do with a modded console. And unless the run verfiers are gonna fly out and physically check the consoles not modded then there's no way to check. I honestly say let dishonest people be dishonest and stop trying to regulate them with more rules that only end up hurting the honest people. Eventually the dishonest persons gonna get caught, rules only apply to the people who choose to follow them in the first place.

Why not just only record the actual gameplay and exclude the loading times?

I had no idea the PlayStation 2 has settings like that.

Well, I have some input for the float rounding mode emulation on PC. It is very very possible to emulate the exact float rounding mode used on console with little to no performance impact on modern CPUs. Even something like converting a float to a double, using the higher precision to perform the arithmetic, and then truncating back to single precision float using the desired rounding mode. With extensions like SSE3 and AVX this can be performed with minimal performance impact, because although more instructions are required, they can be parallelised (assuming someone wants to get their hands dirty and write some x64 assembly.)

Official releases of the game, including official re-releases for other devices, should at most be subcategorized imo. If emulators are both popular and accurate, they also fit well into a subcategory. Examples where this works include Super Mario 64 and Plants vs. Zombies 2, and I don't know of a case where a subcategory doesn't work

Well, that first trick (Groovy Boss Kill) is no different on console and emulator, other than the 60.09 vs. 59.94 fps difference. We have no issues allowing emulator for Super Mario World speedruns, provided no advantage is gained that can't be achieved on console and the emulator is accurate enough.

This is straight-up journalism right here. I hope you can leverage this work someday, great job!

Happy two year anniversary to this video for everyone that had just this recommended to them now!

I'm just now getting into speedrunning the game 'Gimmick!' and I would definitely buy a famicom, controller, and game to play it- except the game costs about $450 used and unboxed, and a LOT more if it comes with the box or is in good condition.

I don't even speed run games, yet I watch every one of ezscapes videos all the way through. Always quality content here, I appreciate that. Thank you for making good videos, RU-vid nowadays needs this.

OMG... Spyro speedruns are my favorite, and what I'm always hoping to see! I have a 14 talisman speedrun on my channel with a PS1 emulator (:

"Who still has an original Atari....?"

Banning emulators is an elitist attitude if you ask me. I vehemently disagree with RWhiteGoose on his views of emulation and I think it's a bad position to have. I still like the guy and sub to his stuff, but god do I hate when he talks about emulation. For most classic consoles, emulation is close enough to perfect emulation on at least one of the various emulators available. Exceptions do exist. Anytime no accurate enough emulator exists, that's when you split leaderboards. If a particular game is not emulated properly on an otherwise accurate emulator, that's when you split leaderboards. However in most cases, there's no reason to split emulation and actual hardware until you can see a huge disparity in the runs submitted. If emulation is consistently holding the top 10 places in a leaderboard with hundreds of submissions, then maybe split that leaderboard. On newer consoles like PS2 or GameCube and newer then I can see reasons to automatically split all leaderboards. There is usually only one viable emulator for newer systems anyhow and those emulators are usually still works in progress and focused more on getting things working than optimizing accuracy. tl;dr: Each community can and should ban *certain* emulators, but to blanket ban them is stupid and elitist. Splitting the leaderboards is the better solution and even then only if reasonable evidence can be provided that there is a significant impact on submitted times.

Emulators 'can't' be banned from speedrunning, they're too widely accessible to be stopped and are an excellent entry point for runners. However, they should always be categorised differently to console runs. Easier to manipulate and cheat with, run games in states that are impossible to match with official release, etc. Speedrunning is a hobby so if you're looking to just beat a game as fast as possible under whatever criteria you want then more power to you, do your thing. Competitive speedrunning with curated leaderboards, however, is a different realm and if you want your name up there, you have to jump through the hoops laid out.

When the original hardware stops working, then what? You'll pretty much have to switch over to an emulator then as I don't think anybody could rebuild the consoles spec-perfect from the ground up, and the game companies won't just remake the consoles.

So where do FPGA consoles fit in here? (AVS, Analogue, etc.) Would be great to discuss in a future followup video.

Should you alienate 90% of your casual speedrunners? No.

I never understood why most communities don't separate Console, Emulator, and VC, it's like they want to ruin the leaderboards.

I've just found this channel and already love it

Good video. You handled a complicated and interesting topic of debate very well.

Another very nice and informative video on speedrunning. Well done.

It seems like in speedrun communities, whenever someone makes a WR they start banning methods/glitches/emulators that that person used.

It really amazes me that load times are included at all in the total time, especially with consoles using optical media, since different revisions of the same console can have different drives which can be faster or slower than another revision, which on its own can skew total run times.

Didn't realize this was an old video until the random RWhiteGoose shoutout. It's like seeing old TV make a positive reference to Bill Cosby

Retro collecting bloat is still a thing, though it's finally going down a bit. Let's say if you want to speedrun Earthbound. Yeah, good luck getting that game for a reasonable price.. Or as someone living outside of the US, let's say if the US version is the best version of that game for some reason and u need to import. That's even more money and you might need to fork out for a Power Step Down Voltage Converter depending on the console. You made this point but I think it's the biggest point in favor for emulators.

I think the answer to all of these questions is let the community of people that have expansive knowledge about the game decide

Nice videos and series. You my good sir just earned a sub. Thank you and good day

I am interested in speedrunning some games, but I have no idea what kind of equipment I should get to record a speedrun. I am thinking perhaps connecting a console to a destop PC and try recording footage that way would be the way to go, but: - I don't know how its done or where to start - how to make sure to proof I play legimately, but retain a good video quality and frame rate - get the parts for a reasonable price I would also like to use that PC for programming or video editing. I haven't had a destop PC for over a decade.

One question I'm wondering about is, since certain versions of the PS3 does have PS2 hardware, does that count as emulation?

If you want to play (or speedrun) Snatcher, you'd have to pay $500~ for the game, a Sega Genesis & CD, Capture Device, a good-running PC that can handle streaming it all... Or, just get it on emulator for free... Piracy is sounding a hell of a lot better. Like I'd ever pay $1,000 for a video game that was once $50, to hell with rarity and collection. I just want to play the damn game. lol

I feel like the speed running community tends to be pretty closed minded. If something is different just make it a different category instead of banning it.

The questions are: 1. What do I need to Speedrun Mario Land 2? 2. Should I use the recommended Emulator (Not VBA but another)? 3. Can I upload a speedrun which isn't very good?

Thanks; this was interesting. I knew about the differences between consoles and emulators, but I had no idea about the small timing differences between different console revisions. That's pretty nuts that people feel like they have to shell out hundreds of dollars just to shave off a second or whatever. The fact that those differences exist even in the hardware world certainly suggests that emulators should be allowed, though. Maybe someone could come up with a method of cryptographically signing a run in such a way that it'd prove that it wasn't spliced together, pause wasn't used, etc.

Something you didn't cover is using Modded Hardware. This day in age, almost every classic console can be soft modded to play a burned ISO to a DVDR or CDR, or a ROM played off an SDCard/USB/Internal/External Hard Drive. This is something I've done recently. I tested on Emulator first to make sure my YuGiOh Forbidden Memories modded ISO worked, and did a full play through, but then converted it to the PSP format to play on my modded PSP and also put it on my PS2 hard drive which has FreeMcBoot on it to play PS2 and PS1 ISO files off the hard drive. My PS3 has the modded ISO on it as well since its Jailbroken. Even my Galaxy S7 can play it via emulation. Point being, there's a lot of modding communities out there, and a lot of smart people. Even on-console runs can be faked via modified ROMs/ISO Images if you don't physically see the game before the run starts and just assume its a legit copy on a non-modified console. When it comes to Sega Dreamcast, there's public tutorials on how to slightly overclock the CPU. Even a slight overclock lowers load times on games meaning over the course of a 2 hour speed run (for example), you could save 30 seconds or something just to load screens being faster and lag being less. MLG players have gotten their entire teams banned from tournaments in the past as well by hiring hackers to modify Mouse and Keyboard firmwares to inject modded code to games during tournaments! All in all, the honor system still is there, its just not fool proof. There will always be a way.

99% of emulators are open source, why not just get an emulator and remove anything that could cause unfair advantage whilst adding a watermark to prove that emu build was used on the run. Upload this emulator to the relevant communities and make it a rule that this build of emulator must be used in all emu class speed runs, any runs that are missing the watermark will be automatically disqualified from the leader boards. I know this probably isn't a perfect solution but it would make it a lot more difficult to cheat using an unauthorised version of the emulator - ie the runner would have to watermark each and every frame individually in order to pass his run off as genuine.

NO, TAG YOU RUN WITH "EMULATED" AND THATS IT

EZScape, this made me think of when people use different versions of the same game. For example, if the Japanese release of a game is slightly different than a US release, how does that apply to the rules? Are there different categories based on what version you have?

"limited edition black smudge" Haha. I like it.

So, for the TAS thing, depending on the emulator we might not actually have that built-in. PCSX2 doesn't have a TAS feature so I'd need a 3rd party program for that-if it even exists (I've never made a TAS before and don't actually know how) so any run I make with it would have to be done live-if someone was somehow unable to tell by my shaky controls (Seriously, I can't walk in a straight line half the time) I'm not sure if this is a thing so if someone could tell me I'd appreciate it, does TAS show your button inputs or would it be like there's none at all? If it doesn't show the inputs then that'd be a very good way of catching people out, although I'd then have to redesign my layout to fit that in (Cuz chat, live split, rules for the run and a PB / goal notice isn't taking up enough space XD) and it'd probably throw a lot of other people out of whack so that'd be fun~

I'm not even close to good enough at speed-running to get to leader-board level. I can do what I feel is an impressive speed-run for the first two Mega Drive Sonic games (using the PS3 release), doing the first game in 34 minutes (without glitches), provable as I have the trophy on PSN which requires a speed-run in under 40 mins. The second game I can do in 49 minutes though I have no proof for that as I wasn't signed in to my PSN at the time sadly, will need to redo it for the trophy some day. Lastly, I managed a sub 1 hour run of Shovel Knight on my PS Vita, finishing in 58 minutes. Got the Platinum trophy back in January and it's my proudest trophy on PSN so far. Working on a few more games at the moment, not sure what my next speed-run challenge will be. Beat and earned the Platinum in Celeste but that didn't have a speed-run trophy or any speed-run challenge in place so I took it relatively slowly. It will have to be something I really love, like with Sonic and Shovel Knight for me to go for a speedrun on it. Was considering trying to go for one on Axiom Verge, also on Vita; I'd need to practice it a lot more though... Like I say I'm not leader-board material, but I do enjoy trying to master certain platformers (it's my chosen genre). There are some games I where I look on with amazement though; like Super Meat Boy. I've managed to beat the game. Got the trophy titled "The End", that'll do me. It's just beyond my skill sadly; great game though. Honestly, once you're competing at the level where shaving seconds or even frames off the run makes a difference; frankly I can't relate. You're basically machines at that point. It's brilliant, but I don't have the time or skill to ever learn a game that completely and I'm OK with that.

As someone that started speedrunning punch-out on emulator recently I must say you shouldn't ban emulators, the only thing that will accomplish is to lower the player base. I live in the middle of South America, how the hell do you expect me to get a functioning NES, a functioning punch-out cartridge, a controller, a CRT and, if I wanna be fancy, a capture card? I'm a college freshman, I have no money on me and I can't work while studying because my college schedule is all over the damn place. And no, I don't have a 3DS or anything with virtual console, I have no consoles in my house because we don't have that much money to spare

It'd be nice to have links to the first two parts of this series in the video description.

As long as emulators (including official emulation such as Nintendo's virtual console stuff) are in a seperate category from the physical hardware it should be fine. I would like to note that the Super Mario Kart leaderboards only allow the original hardware or Wii Virtual Console, but don't allow the 3DS / WiiU / SNES Mini versions of the game due to the fact the latter 3 have save states. I actually have all of them, but my original game has a dead battery - and the emulated versions just don't "feel" right.