So..... I just tried out xemu emulator and all I have to say that the difference is insane. Loading screens, cutscenes everything seems faster than the cxbx. Just look at the video how fast the intro section is. Since people are active now in this game, I think we should lay out some rules on which emulator should be used for the leaderboard. Xemu is faster, shadows work, soundeffects work, music works, there are some fps drops here and there but nothing too big. On other hand cxbx is just bad, things dont work like they should, there are crashes, random out of bounds etc... I don't know how other xbox speedruns deal with this issue, but there should really be a rule as to which emulator must be used.

I couldn't get Xemu set up, and unfortunately since it's illegal to distribute/host working files we can't easily ensure that everyone will be able to get it working. However, if Xemu, Cxbx, original Xbox, and 360 are all different speeds and have different quirks, it may be worthwhile to segment runs at least between emulator vs console, to maintain fairness for those playing on real hardware. I don't have an Xbox and my 360 has a broken disc drive, however, i'd be happy to run emulator still even if it was segmented off. We could also investigate timing without loads, however as a previous moderator of other games, I'd like to suggest that the job of calculating the time without loads be the responsibility of the runner, rather than the mod(s).

As soulcloset said, if people were to run this via emulator, cbx while glitchy is the easiest option. Xemu is better no doubt but without a bios file and others, it isn’t easily accessible. Is for console vs emulator, I saw only one run and there seems to be barely any difference. However if there is shown to be a significant difference, then we can split it.

Actually, I did see that the previous runs on consoles for PS2 said they should seperate, so perhaps it is something to consider?

I think doing subcategories for console vs emulator would be a good idea, although Sneezeball and I were talking about timing without loads as well. That's kind of the ideal option, but at the least I think we should split hardware vs emulator. That's just me though, I don't necessarily speak for everyone haha