Hi all, I became Mod on this board this week and noticed that the times are in Milliseconds, but no precise timing start/end rules have been set.

I tried taking the existing rules and specifying them further down, so that it is consistent with the existing runs and for future runs, it's clear how to time. (One run had to be retimed - the one from @wanderson921 - and is now ~0.1 seconds faster than before).

So here's a little "tutorial" of how to properly time your run.

Start

Rule: "Timer starts on pressing the start button (last frame that "Start" is fully visible, with arrow)".

Most of the time, the transition after pressing "Start" will be easy to spot, with the "arrow" before start and incoming white pixels at the top and bottom:

It is possible though that the transition only shows up below, like this the following (in this case, please make sure to still take the frame before the transition starts):

End

Rule: "Timing ends when last stairs are entered (first frame that Tater is not visible anymore)."

This one is really simple and easy to spot.

Calculating time between start and end frame

Now that you have the frames, how to measure the time between them?

• Youtube: You can navigate with "." and "," until you find the right frames and then put them here: https://mattbraddock.com/yt-frame-timer/ Be sure to get the right FPS and it will calculate the time between the start and end frame.
• Video editing software: Usually some kind of timer is available which can be used to count frames or time directly. There's VSDC for example which is free and has a timer available.
• Twitch: Not sure yet (please let me know if you know!) try with one of the methods above.

Thanks for noticing.

Hi, I noticed that both my Emu- and original hardware runs show up on the leaderboard, that seems a bit odd.

Instead of deleting runs, I wanted to ask if you could enable that only the fastest run for each player is shown? As far as I see it it's just the enabling of the "Platforms obsolete each other"-Flag on the bottom of the "Edit game" page.

Has anyone figured out how to manipulate seeds / level generation on Gameboy? I'm still not sure whether it's timing alone or if inputs matter.

Also I noticed that in @ShesChardcore's run, the title screen (with "Gauntlet II") is not visible. Shouldn't this be required to avoid that somebody uses emulator save states? There's no music on the character selection screen so that would be hard to spot. As far as I see, every run for the NES category starts with the title screen and I think this should be required for the GB categories too.

Hi, I think the name of the game is just "Ishido: The Way of Stones" (without the extra "the" before "Stones")? At least it says so on my Game Boy cartridge and also on the Cover Picture.

Hi all I had some trouble deciding which strategy to go for in the right upper corner of Map 2, and made a little comparison video, for anyone that's interested:

It seems that moving the apple is around 0.37 seconds faster than going around them.

Hi, I'm currently running the Gameboy version of Qix and was wondering where to submit my run,"Level 10" on GB:

One possibility would be to add a new category here for Gameboy, the other to request a completely new game. Personally I think a new category would be better: 1. The GB version is quite similar (graphics differ a bit), 2. Name matches exactly ("Qix").

Any thoughts on this?

You can run this game using an emulator, but please read the following restrictions before submitting a run.

This is inspired by the biggest GBA-only speedrunning community Metroid Zero Mission and this post. As this is currently not a big community, the rules are not (yet) as strict. Nonetheless, as VBA/VBA-M is wildly inaccurate, no runs using it will be accepted.

Allowed emulators:

• BizHawk (mGBA core, profile: TAS)
• OpenEmu (mGBA core)

(Potentially also others using the mGBA core or which are similarly accurate.)

Explicitly disallowed:

• Visual Boy Advance VBA/VBA-M

When submitting a run, please state what emulator and version you are using.

See also the GBrunners page for a detailed comparison.

Hi there. Because I started my timer by hand, my run got re-timed. For future runs, I want to make sure I start at the right time, and as a non-native English speaker I'm not really sure what exactly "Time starts the frame your character moves after starting the game" means.

There's a fade-in of the game (from a black screen) and a non-moving character up until some point. And I see two possible candidate frames for a timer start:

1. The last "still" frame before the first movement (after this the "character moves" - but it hasn't moved yet) - then I would phrase the rule as "Time starts the frame before your character moves"
2. The first frame after the first visible movement (on this frame we're sure the character has moved, but it's somehow already too late) - then I would phrase the rule as "Time starts the frame after your character has moved for the first time"

Which one fits to the definition? I know it's just about which frame to take from two subsequent frames, but it's not clear to me.