I'm kind of new to speedrunning and interested in giving this game a shot as its one of my favorites.

I have the game on Wii U VC, Wii VC, and N64, but emulator would be much more comfortable for me.

But I noticed in the rules description that emulator is banned. I don't mind my times not being recorded if I play on emulator, since I'm not really interested in the leaderboard aspect of the community, but I'm curious if there's anything about playing on an emulator that makes the speedrun not work properly or would mess me up when I try going from emulator to a different version of the game?

I noticed the comparison video where the times where significantly faster on emulator, but thats alright for me while I'm just starting out.

Some emulators make the loading zone transitions look very strange for me, but it should be identical gameplay wise. Pretty sure you don't have anything to worry about. Emulator will put your time way out of whack though compared to everyone else, and for me I don't really get it haha.

Ah I gotcha, thanks. Yeah the times don't really matter so much to me, since I'm more concerned with beating my own times than other people's.

I just travel a lot for work, so I'd like to be able to speedrun the game from my laptop rather than lugging a game system and capture card around with me all the time. And then if I ever want to compare, I can just wait until I'm home and can run the game again from my N64 or WiiU for a valid time.

Yeah the reason emulator is banned is because it is really fast and it was never that popular anyway because of how poor the emulation is. You need certain plugins to make it look good and not flash. We used to track the times separately before this site was around. If you need help with anything, feel free to join the discord. It's in one of the popular topics the Newbie thread i think? I can't link atm cause I'm on mobile sorry.