Hi, if it's not specified in the rules then it probably means it's not allowed. You're the first person to ask for DC Emulators so there hasn't been a need to check/verify the integrity of the DC Emulators up until now.
You can talk to us on the Discord about it. In either case, @Spagettd was the one who forwarded this thread so we're discussing and we'll see if we can allow DC Emulation, we'll post an update here once that's decided.
To start out I have not tested it for Toy Story 2 so from my experience running other Dreamcast games I can say emulators will save a couple minutes just in loads. This might be even greater for Toy Story 2 because hardware loads are very long, roughly 25-30 secs each load screen. But I can do some testing later to see just how much it would save. I will also probably test the controls as on hardware the analog stick does not work properly.
So I did some quick testing and on my hardware Dreamcast run, from selecting Andy's House to when "Press A" shows was 33 sec, including cutscene which I skipped as soon as possible. On Flycast, Dreamcast emulator, from selecting Andy's House to when "Press A" shows was 7 sec, once again skipping cutscene, saving 26 secs. Andy's Neighborhood was very similar. Additionally from selecting "exit the level" to the level select screen showing, on hardware it was 19.5 secs and on emulator it was ~9.5 secs. For Boss levels, from selecting Bombs Away for "Press A" showing was on hardware 15 secs and on emulator was 3.5 secs, saving 11.5 secs.
Most every load screen on hardware was very similar from previous testing I did so using these numbers from testing emulator I would average the time save to be 6.5 to 7 minutes of emulator vs hardware.
I don't really care if you allow emulator for Dreamcast as my DC run is not good and could be easily be beaten by way more than 7 mins as I already have a 1:16:47 that I accidently got Tarmac Light Puzzle Cutscene Skip so it wasn't allowed on the boards. Allowing emulator would allow for much greater accessibility to DC Toy Story 2 leading to maybe more runners other than myself. But 6.5-7 minutes on just loads is a lot, it is up to the mods to decided what they would like to allow.
Also the controls are the same as hardware, analog still does not work properly. And I noticed quite a few visual bugs with the environment when testing on the emulator.
Edit: Other Dreamcast Emulators like Demul and nullDC have very similar loads to Flycast so will most likely save the 6.5-7 minutes. Additionally GDEMU, which removes the disc drive and allows games to be run off a SD card, GDEMU saves close to the same as emulator but I don't own one so I can't test that at the moment.
@GBsaysHi since emulator loads faster than real DC (which was what i was expecting) then if they do allow emulated DC speedruns, theres a good chance those will be put into a seperate subcategory
Hi, @BraydenTheLoser14, we decided to not allow DC Emulator due to the big differences in Loading Times. There is currently no Load Remover that is image based that could be used for Consoles so allowing the Emulator on the same board isn't fair/viable.
We also don't see a need in creating a separate board just for DC Emulator as the demand is not very big and there's easier & better ways to run the game (e.g. PC/N64 Emu) so unfortunately if you really want to submit runs of this game for Dreamcast, it'll have to be original hardware but I hope to see some runs from you maybe for the other versions? :)
