I am considering practicing ILs and potentially full game runs in the future, which means I'd like to submit them if I get any good runs.

I recently acquired a Wii U as GameCube is tough to come by, and is an overall more interesting system to use than the Wii given that I don't care much about motion controlled games.

I noticed that in some threads here, it is mentioned that Nintendont is banned (it is the only way of playing GameCube on a Wii U...), but the rules only seem to forbid it for runs faster than a threshold time. No mercy for ILs though.

While I could also acquire a Wii or GameCube alongside the game disc to qualify, do I need to use any specific controller? I am considering getting a third-party GameCube controller, is it fine if it has turbo if I don't use it?

The rules were changed in June 2024, allowing Nintendont to be used for any% speedruns that are above 1:25:00. So the older forum posts are discussing when Nintendont was still banned. Unlock Read Speed has to be set to Off.

From what I can tell in discord discussions, third party controllers are allowed as long as you dont use the turbo function.

I noticed the response far too late and already decided to go the route of tinkering with a GCN and getting a copy of SMS NTSC-J 1.0, oops :p

But thanks for the response, I'm sure it will be helpful for anyone coming across this thread. I can't complain either way, as a big part of why I made the decision was to tinker with a purple lunchbox and upgrade a stock controller for fun.

As an aside, other than being trivial to use homebrew on and being cheaper, is there any actual advantage of using a Wii over a GCN? The only detail I could find is that DOL-001 has a less reliable disc drive.

Wii has more modern a/v out capabilities. To get 480p video out of a gcn (in the US) you needed to use the digital out port, which was an expensive cable you had to order from Nintendo that had a digital-analog converter built in. Nowadays you can do it with a Carby or similar but it's still more expensive than just using a cheap component cable on a Wii.

Not a lot of downside to using a Wii over a GameCube unless you want the expansion ports for modstuff.

It just occurred to me, since FlippyDrive acts like the disk drive to function, presumably operating at the same speed, would it be allowed for runs?

I realise it's in a weird area of being a modification that a runner would need to purchase an additional item for, but it would eliminate the fear of disk damage and having to acquire another, in an ever-inflating retro game market. It would also eliminate the issue of some disk drives being less reliable than others, given it's modern hardware.

Now that I think about it, this hardly changes anything compared to Nintendont with "unlock read speed" disabled, and it essentially replaces hardware with completely different hardware, but I would like to install that mod in the future, and this would give me another reason to invest.

FlippyDrive isn't eligible for submission to the Speedrun.com leaderboards due to unresolved issues around load speeds. At this time, the most reliable solutions for managing hardware failures, disc degradation, and similar concerns are Nintendont and Dolphin Emulator. These alternatives offer more consistent and proven support, ensuring a better experience for competitive play. To answer your other question, turbo and macro options on controllers are banned. Otherwise, 3rd party controllers are allowed.