I was hoping to have the following clarified. For those that saw my previous comparisons and posts for IS2 load times, I've completely switched to Google Play Emulator. I find it has many benefits of load times, fewer crashes, and just being less sketchy software. That being said, the main downsides are that virtualization required for google play emulator doesn't play well with other traditional emulators, and the key, there are no keybinds.

Personally, I switched fully to mouse-only gameplay. Every single action is purely LMB.

That being said, as I've seen more people interested in speedrunning and wanting to try with Google play emu, as well as seen discussions about people using scripts and macros.

I wanted to hopefully clarify the following rule:

No macros.

Keybinds are OK, but any keybind that is mapped to 2 or more buttons is forbidden.

So as I mentioned, google play emulator has no keybinds built in. Would auto hotkey be a fair alternative?

Here's a sample script I wrote: x:: MouseGetPos, xpos, ypos MouseClick , Left, 2319, 174,,0 MouseMove , %xpos%, %ypos%,0

So, pressing X on your keyboard will:

1. Record current mouse position on the screen
2. Move the mouse to the pause button and click it
3. Return the mouse to the original recorded position

Is this seen as a script/macro? Or as a keybind? The end result gameplay wise is that you paused the game. But the underlying required multiple steps to perform.

Figured I'd ask before runs start getting rejected for some people.

Has anyone done more of a deep dive into load times in IS2? Possibly by platform / emu as well? The first thing I noticed is that it seems like the load times are reduced if I face the same maps in a previous run without resetting the emu. I'm guessing this has something to do with maps staying loaded in memory. The other thing is how the emu / hardware pairing can give reduced load times. Looking over my 29M BSL run, it took ~12s from starting the BSL stage to the DP bar beginning to move. I was using LDplayer and a 9900k at the time. In spiefie's recent upload, this took about 7.5s (presumably he had attempted BSL previously in the same emu session). In my most recent run I had a 6s load time for the same period, and I had done a warmup run before so I imagine the maps were loaded into memory already. Using 7950x and Google Emu now.

So TLDR, has anyone noticed faster load times of the same map across different runs? Which emus feel the fastest for AK?