WinKawaks cannot emulate Metal Slug 6 because it was not made for the Neo Geo. It was made for Atomiswave.
There is an Easy category. No runs yet, though, so... guaranteed world record!
We just had a discussion about that on the Discord server. Come join it! It's a better place for these kinds of topics.
FightCade uses multiple emulators to simulate different arcade machines/consoles.
For Neo Geo, FightCade uses FinalBurn Neo, not MAME. FinalBurn Neo is based on FinalBurn Alpha, which was "coded for speed and not accuracy", as one of it's devs put it in this post: https://neo-source.com/index.php?topic=3260.0
Anyway, this doesn't really matter. The problem is that FightCade now has a mod that allows for overclocking. FightCade runs and Kawaks runs might be, in the future, merged into a new category called "Overclock". For now, the FightCade mod is not official, but just the fact that it exists excludes it from the Arcade category, which aims for high fidelity. (And if you ask me, I think MAME should also be banned from that category.)
To find out which difficulty you are playing on, press the "Test Menu" key (Default key: F11), then go to “Setting Up The Soft DIP”. Then select "Slot1 Metal Slug 3". There, it should say something between LEVEL-1 and LEVEL-8. LEVEL-1 = easy LEVEL-4 = medium LEVEL-6 = hard LEVEL-8 = very hard
A bit lower in the same menu, there should be a line where it says "CREDIT/LEVEL". Set that to "ON/ON". Exit the Test Menu using the grenade button and navigating to "EXIT". Now when you play, it should display the difficulty and the amount of credits at the bottom of the screen. (This is not required, but appreciated.)
I suggest just doing another run with the correct timing. If you are using LiveSplit, there is an autospliter that will time the run for you. There is a guide on how to set it up in the resources Tab. Although if you just want to do one run it's probably not worth the trouble.
Set the overclocking to 64MHz, as it says in the rules.
Submit your run in the WinKawaks category (NOT the Arcade category).
Yes, that would be the correct category.
Basically you have the Steam version, which is a bad port that runs at different speeds depending on your OS, but is popular so it gets it's own category.
Then you have WinKawaks, that allows overclocking of the NeoGeo cpu, which makes the game run faster/without lag. Its convenient and popular, so again it gets it's own category.
Then you have Arcade, which is meant for real hardware (Arcade cabinet and NeoGeo home console), and also allows emulators that we have specifically determined to be very faithful (MAME, WolfMAME, FBA, FBN).
And finally there is the Other category which has everything else, either because we didn't test it or because it works in a weird way.
Suki can you please change the title from "Metal slug 5" to "Metal Slug 5" (change the 's' to a 'S')
It's triggering me to no end.
Thanks!