I ask this because i'm only able to play TLoD on emulator, and would LOVE to speedrun this. :) Mostly interested in doing a Low% run. lol

We are looking into it mate. I need to test the emulator: duckstation with certain settings. Need to test a bit more. It's on the way. Expect to be able to run it on emu at least at the beginning of the summer.

What would low% even look like for this game, I was thinking of the same thing but what about random drops like Bandit's ring from Drake? would using that if you get it back it a +1 item run (worse run)?

I think he meant Any% as finishing it as quickly as possible. That's at least how I took his question, but emulator usage like Duckstation finally feels like a viable way to play. However, I need to make sure it's as close to PS2 as possible without being better. Once I have the settings up I will be able to upload the emulator and its settings automatically there so people don't have to fiddle with it more than the controller or whatever they choose to use as well as resolution.

ah, ok. low% means beating the game with as little as possible, so it would include no shopping and stuff like that

Yeah, low% is the lowest level a character can be, along with only using items and/or weapons that are needed to complete the game. Essentially a barebones challenge run. :D So you can't use magic/drops/shops, for example. I would assume the only way to heal is through default healing, like dragoon form.

I do enjoy the stand-alone duckstation emulator. Also retroarch works pretty good too. :) The emulator category doesn't have to be 1:1 with the console versions. I expect them to be different, even if slightly.

Duckstation 0.1-4918 now available in the resources tab!

I have done some extensive testing on the Duckstation emulator, and this is the closest I could get it to while tuning it. So it will be imbalanced, but in the end they should be very similar. So console benefits everytime the screen needs to load a new area, whileas emulator will get into; and out of battle faster to mitigate the timeloss from screen transitions. Putting 1, 2, 3 frames on X button was only way to make the text progress as a normal turbo controller for some reason. You can have 2 buttons for X at maybe 2 and 3 frames (or more) if you want slower turbo speed (for shopping).

I had even more accurate settings but then it crashed on Feybrand intro every time when I had 2x readspeed, otherwise we would have almost perfect settings. Sadly... 3x speed was absolutely faster than console in every regard (even if slight difference).

If you get a 3:02 disc 1 on emulator, you would get something similar on a PS2 console with errors being about +/- 1 minute. So expect to get 3:01-3:03 on real hardware. In which direction, I don't know yet. The point is that it's very close to real hardware.

So, what is better than text trying to justify things? A video of course!

^ This video uses the settings provided in this thread.

There is another test (forbidden one) that is running with 3x speed (no comparison, but it was faster than real hardware when I compared it off-screen).

^ this is the FORBIDDEN TEST footage.

So now the obvious follow up question... what do we do with this? I expect the console to be faster in disc 2 and 3 while disc 1 and 4 might be faster on emulator(?) It will be comparable to a real run within the margin of +/- 5 minutes, from what I can see. That's pretty accurate. The best would be obviously if a top runner does a full disc 1 run to get an idea of how well balanced this is. However, the way I see this is that if you are serious about getting good. You will know approximately what your time is compared to real hardware.

I will run the full disc 1, one day... I promise.