Concerning the particular rule, I believe that it was made with incorrect/outdated information. I want to explain the particular chain of events and why this information came up, and future developments showed that the 1.11 driver being the cause of abnormal loads is incorrect, as a second game's leaderboard has also propagated this information.

It is also inconclusive whether or not 1.11 causes any kind of load differentials, as any load changes that can happen as a result of PSdriver is on a game-by-game basis and does not cause games to load faster as a "blanket rule" so to speak.

About two years ago, I ran Resident Evil 2 on PS2. There was a Claire A run by a runner named Trevor Seguin which was grandfathered into that leaderboard, having been a relic prior to Twitch.tv. Nobody could get within several minutes of that run because his loads were so fast.

I bought multiple PS2s to test loads on after seeing a video for another game, Xenogears, which showed that a specific version of PSDriver rendered text faster. My goal was to determine why that was.

I had bought a modchipped PS2 SCPH-70012 with PSDriver 1.11 which I ran RE2 on and got loads similar to Trevor's run. I was able to get within 1 minute of his record on a run full of mistakes, compared the loads in his video to mine, and also found a similar result from other players who also had 1.11 on PS2s.

At that time, I had assumed and made the conclusion that it was 1.11 which loaded things faster, knowing nothing about the functions of modchips nor having another modchipped console to create another testgroup in my personal setup. A separate leaderboard was made for "PSDriver any" and "PSDriver 1.11".

Fast-forward to around a year and a half ago, I did the run again on an SCPH-90001 US model which I had gotten modchipped for the sake of convenience (I had the work done on this console after I had used my own run on my modded SCPH-70012 and everyone else's consoles as a testgroup). I hadn't disabled the modchip prior to this, and got exactly the same load times on this PS2 (which was running Driver 2.00 btw).

I believe other people (I don't remember who specifically, I think Darazanjoll was one of them) also concluded that modchips, depending on whether the modchip was enabled or disabled (Matrix Infinity modchips, for instance, deactivate when you hold the Start button on bootup), would have changed the version of PSDriver.

Every run on the 1.11 Driver leaderboard for RE2 was modchipped (mine, Trevor Seguin's, and AndehX's consoles to name a few), and had said modchip enabled to play one region's games on a foreign console, all with abnormal load times.

In other words, the enabled modchip had been interrupting specific checks in the disk loads, causing them to load faster.

Unfortunately, there is no way to tell from the outset whether a console is modded or not without comparing load times (checking the Top 3 times seems to be the only reasonable way to verify this, yes) but 1.11 is NOT what caused those abnormally fast loads in other games.

It is also inconclusive if 1.11 or modchips actually change any load times in RE1 or RE Survivor (which has recently implemented this rule). I had only confirmed this on RE2. Please use this information to alter the rules and do your own research accordingly, because the present state of requiring people to show their PS Bios screen for verification doesn't present a proper solution to the real problem (if it actually does exist for RE1 at all).

If this rule was implemented with other information that I am not aware of, I do apologize in advance but would be interested in knowing said information.

Yes, the fact that the leaderboard on RE2 has been changed from "1.11" to "modchip" as a result of my findings on-stream, and moderators at the time having changed the name of the leaderboard to "modchip" to reflect that.

https://www.speedrun.com/re2#PS https://gyazo.com/473873738ebd3f204558e53e5f10bdc2

That is my evidence.

https://www.speedrun.com/re2/thread/3k9l5/1#c5uk1

there's also this post by Aaron which indicates that 1.11 isn't exclusive American consoles. Actual PAL and Japanese consoles have it too. It's smack at the top of the RE2 leaderboard forums too. 1.11 being banned for JP runs is silly, real consoles have it.

yes this means the RE1 boards are also wrong, pass the memo along

Yeah that seems good. 1.11 I just saw on the other leaderboards assuming it was an issue so that's my bad. The rule I fully stand by is just showing proof of hardware after the run. That was my main concern honestly.