Okay so a question that frequently comes up is "why is emulator not allowed to save and quit mid-run, whereas console can?". By default, emulator saves and quits far faster than console does and was the primary reason why it was prohibited. However, the use of the "-slowboot" option for ePSXe ends up showing the PS1 boot screen, which reduces the time discrepancy down to roughly 5 seconds, meaning that they are more comparable. So why is it that emu is still not able to save and quit, despite this time difference being rather minor now? This post aims to highlight why.

So currently in the fastest any% route there is only one mid-run reset, and the route before that had 2. So why not just add the time on, that should fix things, right? At least in my personal preference, adding an imaginary amount of time onto a run shouldn't really be a thing, but for the sake of a fair argument I'll ignore that point for less bias. The issue lies with ePSXe itself.

From testing how the console route works on emulator, SydMontague found a quirk which lead to the Kunemon fight (the second fight in the game in that route) to be different, despite having the exact same RNG value. Now ePSXe is not an accurate emulator in any way, but is used as the standard due to the loads being comparable to that of a PS2 console with the fast disk speed option enabled. But enabling save and quit leads into a hypothetical situation where emulator could result in faster RNG manipulations due to this difference in how ePSXe emulates the RNG, meaning that it would be the fastest way to play the game. This is not a situation that should ever occur.

Another issue with emulator is that most emulators are not able to emulate lag correctly for the game, which can speed up certain fights by indeterminate amounts of time depending on what techniques are used, notably the Ogremon 3 fight with WaruSeadramon using Aurora Freeze, a move which generates a lot of slowdown if there are other particle effects happening on screen at the same time. This is a smaller issue but one that should be highlighted regardless.

So why ePSXe? Why not just use another emulator? Well, the issue lies in that the more accurate emulators are only aiming to emulate the PS1 to the highest amount of accuracy, meaning that the loading times are the same as that of a PS1 (very slow compared to PS2 w/ FDS). This is something that might be looked into with some discussion, allowing these sorts of emulators (Mednafen, XEBRA etc.) to save and quit, though the likely scenario is that a route that doesn't save and quit performed on ePSXe may still end up being faster. psxfin is another emulator which is actually completely prohibited, as although it is accurate enough to emulate console RNG, it runs the game faster than console does natively.

The separation of leaderboards has also been brought up, however as mods we do not feel this is an adequate solution. The separation only brings about a split in competition and the idea of an "emulator WR", which would be completely pointless, due to it essentially being a similar run to console only with slightly faster resets, less lag and potentially more favourable RNG manipulations, nothing to do with the players' skill level or, let's be real here: luck. Secondly, Digimon World is not Super Mario 64, it does not have many people submitting to the leaderboards and splitting up competition further seems counter-intuitive when you consider that if you don't care about competition, you can just speedrun with save and quit and not submit to the leaderboards. The third thing is also what emulators to ban and allow, as the best time would require the player to buy a PSP and emulate it that way, as that has the fastest loading times. And if you're having to buy hardware to compete, you could simply buy a PS2 and game? (an NTSC PS2 and copy of Digimon World is not too difficult to obtain if you look around, take this from somebody living in a PAL region who's bought both NTSC-U and J)

If there does happen to be an emulator which can accurate emulate console RNG and does not run the game too fast, then this can be discussed about how to implement the usage of it on the leaderboards while still maintaining fair competition.

Thanks for reading, hope this clears things up.