We would like to announce that VC and EMU subcategories are now active on the Stage RTA leaderboards (under "Levels"). Stage RTA involves collecting all the stars in a given stage including the 100 coin star. Timing starts on star select and ends upon collecting the final star. You are allowed to use certain gameshark codes (check the category rules), but it is strongly recommended to use the usamune preset ("STGRTA") or use a vanilla rom. If you previously submitted to Stage RTA on an unsupported platform, your run will be added to the appropriate category assuming it was otherwise verifiable.

We would like to make everyone aware that one of our video requirements is that dynamic HUD elements should not be covered or obscured. These HUD elements, especially coin count, life count and star count can be useful for verifying the integrity of a run. If your layout includes an object (like an image) entirely covering one of these HUD elements it will be rejected. Partially or temporarily obscuring one of these HUD elements may result in your run being marked 'verified: no'. In general, you should avoid placing alerts or objects over these parts of the game feed.

General Info

The SM64 league is a team-based community event where players can earn points for their teams by improving their pbs in any of the main categories (120, 70, 16, 1, 0). All official platforms (and emulator) are welcome. Everyone that joins before May 29th is guaranteed a spot, afterwards it's first come first served until we have enough players to balance the teams.

We will hold a draft on June 2nd to determine the teams. The league will then run from immediately following the draft until July 31st at 11:59pm EDT.

Points

We use a bot to check the leaderboards and automatically calculate the points based on recently submitted runs. So you must have some way to record your runs in a way that is verifiable on the leaderboards in order to get points. Our point system will be such that you can gain points in three ways that will all roughly be weighted the same:

1. Improvement-Based - You earn a certain number of points per second shaved off your pb under certain thresholds. This is done in tiered manner so that you get more points per second as your times get better.

2. Time-Based - For each main category a player can claim a fixed amount of points by getting ANY pb in that category. This can only be claimed once per category, the amount varies in a tiered manner and only depends on the final PB time (regardless of initial time).

3. Rank-Based - For 120, 70, 16 and 0/1 (combined) you get points based on your PBs relative rank compared to the PBs gotten by other entrants. Only PBs gotten during the league will count for this.

Requirements

1. Have a speedrun.com account
2. Be able to submit runs that are verifiable on the main leaderboards
3. Be 13 years or older
4. Join the discord, this is where teams will interact.
5. Fill out the signup form (linked in the discord)

This is meant to be a fun, low pressure event where people can play at their own pace. So feel free to join if you have any time to play in June or July. If you are interested in joining/observing or have any questions, join the discord.

We are updating the emulator rules to explicitly ban the ‘Limit FPS’ setting from being unchecked. Normally, this setting is easily detectable (PJ64 would run at an absurd FPS), and it was commonly accepted that this wasn't allowed. It has since been discovered that with multiple different audio plugins (Shunyuan HLE Audio, or azimer 0.70 with prevent buffer overruns enabled are two known examples) and having the 'Limit FPS' setting unchecked, the game runs at a normal frame rate EXCEPT for during the loading zones, where it wasn’t operating under the FPS cap.

As a result of these circumstances, some runners were artificially gaining time on every loading zone, which over the course of a run adds up to quite an unfair advantage. It is important to understand that this setting could be enabled by complete accident through the F4 hotkey, and the game would be seemingly running normally everywhere that wasn't a loading zone. We want to make this distinction clear, as we don't want anyone to think we are accusing them of intentionally breaking the rules. Here is an example video that visualizes this issue/provides proof of the advantage (1:05 shows the direct comparison):

Going forward, we have decided that the only fair course of action is to remove any runs from the leaderboards that have been found to have this loading advantage from the FPS being uncapped. Our reasoning for this is the following:

-it is essentially overclocking the emulator during loads, which conceptually would not be allowed if discovered on any platform, regardless of the previous verification status -it is 100% conclusively and consistently detectable in any run, as it provides the same advantages every time when compared to normal loads, and is enough of a difference on each load that it simply cannot be argued as a recording related issue

Since there is several thousand emulator runs currently on the leaderboards, in the interest of getting this announcement out there, we have only checked runs that have either been noticed by us, or are below certain threshold times: 0 Star and 1 Star sub 9:xx, 16 Star sub 17:xx, 70 Star sub 52:xx, and 120 Star sub 1:55:xx. If you come across a verified run that you believe to have this issue, feel free to contact one of the moderators and we will look into it. Additionally, we will be checking every newly submitted emulator run for this issue, and have updated the emulator setup guide to provide specific warnings/discourage the use of the affected plugins.

ENTRY IS NOW CLOSED AS OF 5/27!

The SM64 league is a team-based community event where players can earn points for their teams by getting and/or improving their pbs in any of the main categories (120, 70, 16, 1, 0). All platforms are welcome (you don't need an N64) and everyone that joins is guaranteed a spot. The number of teams and players per team will be determined by how many people sign up.

We will hold a draft on May 31st to determine the teams. The league will then run from immediately following the draft until July 31st at 11:59pm EDT.

Points

We use a bot to check the leaderboards and automatically calculate the points based on recently submitted runs. So you must have some way to record your runs in a way that is verifiable on the leaderboards in order to get points. You can earn points two ways:

1. For each main category a player can claim a lump sum by getting ANY pb in that category, regardless of the time. This can only be claimed once per category.

2. You earn a certain number of points per second shaved off your pb under certain thresholds. This is done in tiered manner so that you get more points per second as your times get better.

Requirements

1. Have a speedrun.com account
2. Be able to submit runs that are verifiable on the main leaderboards
3. Be 13 years or older
4. Join the discord, this is where teams will interact.
5. Fill out the signup form (linked in the discord)

This is meant to be a fun, low pressure event where people can play at their own pace. So feel free to join if you have any time to play in June or July. If you are interested in joining/observing or have any questions, join the discord.

Going forward, we're going to ask emulator runners using Project64 to use Counter Factor 1 on their ROM settings. This has been the de facto standard for as long as people have been speedrunning the game on emulator and won't require any change for the vast majority of people.

Counter Factor 2 emulates N64 lag (poorly), thus putting you at a disadvantage to other runners on the same leaderboard. It also causes unnecessary issues for moderators determining whether someone is using a legal, properly configured emulator.

If you are unsure how to set up Counter Factor 1, please consult the EMU setup guide (you should do this anyways): https://wermi.neocities.org/emuguide/basic_config/