We'll be excited to have you! Expert is where most of the runs happen - I'm currently grinding Expert 100% in preparation for Completithon, I'm running it May 23rd. It'll be good to see some new people!

Hi! Apologies for the suuuuuper late reply, there was a bout of life happening on my end.

What category to run is what category you like. NG+ Is definitely the easiest, but requires work to unlock - star rank on the pilots you want to use so they start with twin blasters, and all coins on the difficulty you want to run so you can start with the secret base and the homing shot. If you want to just dive in and start running, run New Game. I'm the only 100% runner currently, which entails getting all coins on a given difficulty, so feel free to drop me a line if you want to do that.

The only glitch that I'm aware of only affects Expert 100%, on the right side of Astropolis it is possible to die while running into the wall and pick up the Pepper Coin during the ship exploding cutscene. Other than that there are minor things, like landing a double hit on the first phase of Andross while he shakes by firing fast enough, but that isn't consistent given the inherent lag in the game.

SNES Mini is the only allowed platform. Record away!

If you'd like, the Star Fox Squad Discord is where discussion happens, and I'dve seen this a lot sooner there. Here's an invite link: https://discord.gg/0ZumT4PFmqz6AXtS

You're correct on that, I should have been more clear.

Currently, we are only accepting runs on the SNES classic due to the lag induced by the epilepsy filter that it includes. Dumping to an sfx2 compatible (or overclocked sfx) game does not have that lag inducing filter. It is even possible to remove that filter within the SNES Classic by adding -fp0 to the global command line. Those runs would also not be accepted. That may change when it is released on Nintendo online.

I have been meaning to test the differences that the filter provides outside of the most obvious screens (those with any fire on them) by comparing the "natural state" (SNES Classic with filter), SNES Classic with -fp0 mod, sd2snes, and I also own a repro cart of the beta version. I have not done that yet as I needed to upgrade my hdmi capture setup, which I finally was able to do a few weeks ago. That said, regardless of those findings it'd be difficult to nail a specific time that playing without the filter would save on each run.

With the leak of it being in the nintendo online that may be a distinct possibility, but we will see when that gets announced and released. As it stands, it's difficult to condone what would be runs on less than official or legal hardware.

That isn't particularly surprising, BSNES has a reputation for requiring a monster setup to run correctly. Give BizHawk a shot, It does require a good amount of fiddling to run decently, but the minimum specs are far below BSNES/Higan and it still is much further on the accurate end.

All else fails, after Distant Star Cares wraps up we'll do some comparisons with SNES9X 1.53. Tokko_Tomcat has ton of experience running that core in a variety of environments and we can compare that to BizHawk, which Zallard has more experience with.

The reason why emulators and the -fp 0 mod on the SNES classic are banned is because emulators do not account for the filter on the SNES Classic that causes slowdown. Compare these two videos: and , any time there is fire on screen, be it from a column (such as in the cannon betrayers or Eladard and Meteor on Expert) or from the fire lasers of first form Andross, the SNES Classic slows down due to the anti-seizure filter. -fp 0 is a hack to remove that filter, which also speeds up the game, and emulators do not have it at all since the filter is part of the SNES classic kernel.

We don't feel that people should have to modify their consoles to compete, thus those options are banned. We can discuss emulator runs as a separate category, but be advised that ZSNES (which is what you used from the load state screen if I'm not mistaken) is globally banned as an emulator. SNES1.5x has yet to be tested for this game. We'd start that conversation with BSNES/Higan or BizHawk.