After watching Thebpg13 finish his first console run with NTSC, we learned that NTSC is roughly 10 minutes faster than PAL (Stock Car all races).

Since my best so far, with lots of effort, is 59min flat and Thebpg13 managed 50:15 with a casual run without much effort.

Just putting this in here so people are aware :P

Watched part of thebpg13's run today. I'm assuming it's being ran on the PS2? Either way, the load times are 2x as fast compared to emu and native PS1, which alone is a significant time-saver. There's also less variation in the framerate when lots of collisions are happening (see: the start of BSV in later divisions.)

My PB on emu is 54-something. Tomorrow I'll do a few runs on real hardware and see where the times come out at in comparison.

Actually, the load times are the same between NTSC and PAL. What NTSC has the advantage over however is the game speed.

(Naturally PS1 is slower thanks to PS2 having FDS but who tf would use a PS1 for speedrunning?)

It's worth noting that FDS benefits vary across PS2 models, and although I haven't been able to find any good documentation on the best models, I do believe there's some late-model "slims" that outperform earlier systems by a wide margin. Regardless, my "fat" console with FDS enabled loads slower than what I see in the run, but it's not that big of a deal - my bigger question was how faithful the PS2 is with handling more CPU/GPU-heavy moments, e.g., large crashes, etc.

My fat PAL PS2 has problems with loading as well. After loading into the menu after a race, I cannot navigate the menu for about a second.

Completely non-scientific test. I have no editing software atm so I'm not able to line these runs up perfectly. I'm convinced there are some performance differences between PS2 models but won't say that's a factor in these runs until I'm able to get a PS2 that loads as fast as the one referenced to do my own tests on.

In terms of what I used, originally I used ePSXe V1.9.0 with the SCPH1001 BIOS when I ran on emulator. However when I moved to console and did my PB run I ran on a NTSC PS2 Slim (Model SCPH-90001) with FDS and the NTSC version of the game, hope this helps :)

so confirmed PS1 speedrunning is a hardware mess. Console vs emulator, PS1 vs PS2, PS2 vs PS2 Slim. Great :D . And mednafen is on the slow train, as well as several ePSX versions.

There was no option other than PS1 in the submission form. Other platforms are now available and assuming I got that right, I changed thebpg13s current run to PS2.

For sake of transparency, HoJlno and I used psxfin with scph5501 bios, which has freakishly fast loading times(at least as fast a real PS2), but has some input lag.

I'm done with emulators personally, probably won't run this game until I move to real hardware.

I'd love to switch over to real hardware too, but PAL just blows.. need to get NTSC hardware then.

Yeah, this game is one of the worst cases of "NTSC is faster than PAL". The difference is pretty insane. You're probably 10 minutes faster on NTSC than PAL on average.

I know PAL sucks but since it's my native region I'll stay true to it no matter what :)

Thanks for updating the console section. In my runs I used whatever the latest bizhawk is. I was planning on using a PSOne but the video went out on it, so future runs will be on a PS2.

I figured it was a 90k! When I feel like dropping $100 I'll pick one up on eBay :)

Beetle PSX has a disc speed option that defaults to 2x - it's likely 4x would be close to the 90k, but I didn't have time to test it. Beetle is just an updated port of Mednafen, I believe.

I agree that hardware should be the target for these runs. What's the go-to capture method? I'm outputting component video, not composite.