Hello everyone! Recently, the discussion of emulators came up in another game I moderate, Sonic Heroes. We ended up allowing emulation there and since this game would be able to adhere to the exact same emulation rules, we decided to allow it here as well.

As such, emulation is now officially allowed for Egg Shuttle and Individual Levels with the ruleset below.

Emulator rules:

• Dolphin version 5.0 (or up) must be used.
• Please use a stable build of the emulator, no development or beta builds.
• "Speed up Disc Transfer Rate" must be disabled in the properties of the game iso.
• "CPU Clock Override" must be set to 100% or turned off completely.
• Under the graphics settings, in the hacks tab, please uncheck "Skip EFB Access from CPU". The rest of the defaults are fine.
• Emulator must run at full speed. An occasional lag spike is fine, but consistent slowdown is not.
• The window's title bar showing the emulator version, framerate, etc. must be visible in the video.
• Modifications, cheats, editing .ini files and emulator exclusive functions are not allowed.
• Emulator is only allowed for Egg Shuttle and Individual Levels.

Note: Any of the emulator rules shown above may be changed and retro-actively applied if new information about emulation is found that would require a rule change.

Why not Any% and All Chaos Emeralds?

• We've only confirmed Dolphin's accuracy in-game time wise thus far. For real time categories to be viable as well I would like a very detailed side-by-side showing that all aspects of the game are equal. This means load screens, lag (or lack thereof) and anything involving the overworld or cutscenes. The main point of emulation is accessibility, so having the game's main category and all of the IL's now open to you is a good first step.

What's the thought process behind some of these emulator restrictions?

• It's best to check out the thread in the Sonic Heroes for that. Any of the points involving emulator settings and functionality are explained more thoroughly there: https://www.speedrun.com/sonicheroes/thread/4m5el

Made some slight adjustments to the rules and updated the post above accordingly.

It seems Dolphin 5.0 automatically has "Speed Up Disc Transfer Rate" disabled and it's not even an option in the settings anymore like it was in 4.0. You could still adjust it by messing with .ini files, so instead I added to the rules that it's not allowed to mess with .ini files.

I also found some info from the Dolphin devs themselves about the "Skip EFB Access from CPU" options in the graphics settings. Having it checked on hurts emulation accuracy, so we should make sure that's turned off. All other defaults as pictured in this image are fine.

Also here's an image of the CPU Clock Override setting.

does increasing the internal resolution count as a modification/emulator exclusive function?

While technically allowed as it's graphical, I heavily advice against it in order to not risk worse performance. If your pc struggles too much, it's a reject

Update on the "Speed up Disc Transfer Rate", it is apparently not a setting in the emulator itself, but in the properties of the iso file, that you can access through Dolphin. Right click on the iso file and select properties to see if it's turned on or not. Added back into the rules.