Im posting this here in case there is anyone unsure of why there are 2 seperate versions of the rom and not sure which to choose. As far as I know, either of the roms are completely acceptable to use for speedrunning the game and submitting to SRC.

First off, I am part of the team that made the romhack. Originally when we released the game, the menu defaulted to Merc mode (hard mode) because we felt that players would 1st play Mercy, then Merc, and then settle on playing Merc mode from there on out.

However, since everyone has been running Mercy mode, we decided to release an "updated patch" that swaps the menu to Mercy mode (easy mode) as default.

The entire point of the updated version of the game is a simple quality of life improvement so runners no longer need to go through the menu each time. They can simply pick the "version" they want to run and start the game. The ONLY difference between the roms is a menu swap, which isn't even included in the timing.