Good idea! I will do this as soon as I have extra time, tonight for sure. Also, if anyone would like to be a mod I am willing to hand it over to them as I'm not running this game at the moment. Thanks!
This has been completed. Going forward make sure to include milliseconds ⏱
(Edited to remove faulty info and add new info) We don't have to be super specific as long as we do something consistent. So I'll add in milliseconds for all past runs. Taking Marble Madness as a precedent, some runners lower down choose to add the ms in but most are just marked by a second barrier. It's only in the 2:55- category that all runs are retimed.
Radioactive_Man, when you retime SMS runs for boards you mod, are you just using a video frame counter such as yua, or do you take emu frame count and divide? I've been using n/60 for a long time in games I run, whereas I find info that the SMS frame rate is 59.922751013551. That's a small difference but I would be curious to hear what your experience is so I know whether I should look at migrating to a more correct use. I know many NES and GB communities use absolutely different divisors so this is more a curiosity than anything.
NB on millisecond runs: when you fill in an MS column you must fill it in to 3 decimal places or the site will mistakenly add a 0 in the leading column. I believe then that Sacrieon's run should be filled in as '120' in ms as it currently shows as '012'.
I just looked at the negative split also. I read that timing starts from the frame batman is loaded. When I pressed 1 on frame 1000, Batman appeared at frame 1325 though, and that would correspond to 5.43/4 seconds. Do you have the original source info for the use of 5.51? I figure if we're taking care of the board we can wrap this up all in one go and avoid any future confusion. I also timed out the final hit from penguin (marking the first frame where explosion animation appears on ducky) to loss of control as 223 frames in case this helps anyone for future.
Yes I use Yua to retime them. Although I have not done that to any runs on this board. I'm ok with any method you choose, like you said we need consistency. I took obiiwan's time at face value so it may need to be retimed for accuracy based on the timing method chosen.
Edited Sacrieon's time based on site adding a leading 0 to milliseconds
The -5.51 is also based on Yua frame counting from button press at stage select screen to first frame Batman moves.
I appear to have found a reason for the negative split inconsistency: if I repeatedly press pause on the route select screen it speeds the game loading up. So for clarity's sake we can advise the use of -5.51 still but always time from the first frame the screen fades in. This should not be the first frame Batman moves as it is common for players to deliberately wait until they see/hear the screen for timing purposes. Similarly, any movement or weapon use after killing Penguin can lag the game. So it makes sense to keep the final frame as being loss of control. Since you haven't retimed any runs I propose we use the true vsync so that console runners are not disadvantaged. That is, an emulator run's limits are now defined as: (First frame of screen fade in to Loss of control) / 59.922751013551. For this to work we will need to specify that captures should be 60fps raw where possible. Other communities I am in have at times requested raw video files to be emailed to a mod for this same reason- Youtube outputs only at 30fps so retiming runs from there as the source will be a tad inaccurate and should be avoided in the future, though I propose we retime all existing and obsolete runs to this precision now to be consistent. I'd be happy to do that with your approval. I'm lucky I've encountered precisely this sort of stuff before.
This post was edited to remove faulty information