So I recently got back into Flashback speedruns and improved a lot since last year. I noticed throughout practice that genesis emulator runs faster than console. Well, That's the case for most genesis games but some make a pretty big difference and this happens to be one of them. Emulator does a way better job running through any lag spots in the game. Sometimes with very little to no lag at all. I went ahead and did a comparison video of the very first level. Same strats and everything. You can tell there's a minor slowdown while loading each new area of the level but it's very noticeable at 28 seconds in. This is just one example. VIP mission in level 2 there's a pretty bad lag spot on hardware and I can't imagine how it runs for Death Tower since that level is a lagfest naturally. Any place there's enemies emulator will do a better job handling any lag that comes with it. Anyways, I'm going to separate them because I'm all about a fair leaderboard.
Its nice seeing a side by side comparison of this in action. I remember you trying the emulator on your stream and you could tell straight away it was running slightly faster. A seperate category should be made IMO :)
I did :) Yeah it was pretty crazy. I did a emulator run earlier with a bunch of mistakes and got a 21:33. Basically the same time as my console run from the other day which was much cleaner than my emu. I'm still gonna run both regardless. Just sucks when it's this big of a difference. It's like Jurassic Park (Genesis) all over again. lol
You never stated which emulator you tested. Note, some emulators are going to be more accurate than others, especially when comparing newer ones (like BizHawk) to older ones (like Kega Fusion). Even more, you still can encounter slight differences between versions of the same emulator if, for example, fixes were implemented to improve accuracy.
By lumping all emulator runs together in the same category, you may be inadvertently incentivizing people to use inaccurate and/or broken emulators to gain a slight time advantage. I think it would be healthier to encourage them to use more accurate emulators instead. This goes for all games, not just Flashback.
That's a very good point. I used fusion but haven't tested the others yet. I'm almost certain they all run faster than console like they do in most cases. Except Mister. That one seems to emulate console speed perfectly. Problem is there's too many emus out there these days. If I could I'd just allow fusion and call it a day. I'll do some more testing when I get home.
Actually.. I'm going to do this. Test emulators out and see if any run at the pace of console. If they all run faster I'll go from there and pick the ones that run at the same speed for emu. Upload another test video as well. Thanks for your input Tasco :)
No problem, Brando! I appreciate you taking a closer look at this. Since you're the one verifying runs, it's no doubt important to understand the timing differences for the sake of fairness.
Also, in case there are certain emulators that do provide an unfair advantage (for whatever reason), best to address such things in the rules now, rather than having to deal with controversy after the runs are submitted.
Of course! a fair clean leaderboard is the best way to go. I did another test with Fusion, Bizhawk and console side by side comparison and yeah you were not wrong my friend. Even emulator has it's slight differences. I personally feel it should be fusion for emulator runs only. Considering most of us already ran on that emu we can basically continue with what we've been doing. I still think console falls behind way too much for a game you can almost perfect so separating them would be good.
OK. Based on these test results (and my own independent verification), I agree that there's a significant enough gap between emu and console to warrant a separate category. However, I don't agree that we need to restrict emu runs to Fusion.
Problems with limiting runs to Kega Fusion v3.64:
- That version was released for Windows only, so that's an immediate disqualification for other OSes.
- Some people could have troubles related to controller incompatibility, driver or hardware issues, etc.
- Fusion development ceased years ago, so it's unlikely to see any updates (at least not official ones). It would be a bad situation if a future Windows update or change were to break software compatibility.
- Since Fusion appears to be the fastest emulator tested, there's no good reason to ban emulators that run at a speed closer to console if they're already at a time disadvantage to Fusion (especially other emulators which strive for high accuracy).
Since there's clearly no ideal emulator from a timing perspective, I think it fair game to allow them all. Though if there are specific emulators which break the game in some way, that's another story. The more popular emulators that are being actively developed are unlikely to have such issues. If we're only talking about lag, and we're already excepting Fusion despite this, seems fine to accept other emulators that don't run any faster than Fusion.
Fair enough. Best to just stick with what we have now and go from there. Rules have been updated :)
