I just wanted to alert everyone that there is a new "100 Rounds" category. I discovered that the round counter is only 2 digits when I made it to the 100th round, so it displays as "Round 00" and the next round is "Round 01" so it made sense to have a 100 round category as sort of a completion category. The run I submitted is my first completion. Enjoy!
It seemed silly to me that there was a category (in this case, 100%, which refers to playing through the 9th inning) that didn't have a win condition; wins and losses were all submitted to the same category. With that in mind, I have created a new 100% category that requires the player to win the game. All previous runs that were player wins have been moved to the new category. The old category will remain, with the requirement for future submissions that the player lose the game.
It was brought to my attention by SpeedwalkerMicah that load times varied drastically between different players. In order to make the leaderboards fair for everyone, it was important to prevent this from having an impact on the differences between people's runs. I have therefore changed the posted rules for timing to exclude the opening loading screen and to stop time when the prize envelope appears on screen, to make it equivalent to cases where the envelope doesn't actually appear. All leaderboard times have been adjusted accordingly.
The notes for vaxherd's any% route simply state what to do if starting from empty save RAM, but don't say anything about how to do this. I tried starting a run by deleting all files and creating the starting files required but this yielded incorrect stats for my new characters. I am assuming the discard counter is what needs to be reset, I tried setting the discard counter used in the glitchless category and indeed got different character stats, but still not the right ones.
Could someone please state in explicit detail what is required to set up an NES cartridge from any state to execute this run? I imagine it will be useful for new runners to be able to find this information here as well. Many thanks in advance.