Hello all,

After much consideration and research, we the mod team think the best for the competitive future of SotN speedruns is to move forward and accept the Canary branch of the Xenia Xbox360 emulator. For now, we will only be adding this platform to the Alucard Any% category and, depending on how things go from here on, we may add the rest of the categories.

During the time we spent researching how the game behaves, we found out it's a pretty accurate emulation of the PAL version of the game. This means it runs exactly at 60 fps, as opposed to the NTSC version, which is slightly slower at 59.94 (there were suspicions about this happening on original hardware too, but this has helped as confirmation). Due to this slight difference which translates to considerably big time fluctuations between platforms, from now on, all NTSC will be adjusted to match the frame rate of the PAL version for fairness in competition. For instance, in Any%, the difference PAL would make over NTSC is about a second and a half. In categories which take longer to complete, this could be as much as 3 to 4 seconds, which is definitely a time measure that could decide not only world records, but also lower placements on the leaderboards.

As far as loading times are concerned, testing reflected that loading times are consistent with those of original hardware, plus/minus one to four frames in some areas. We are aware that some sound issues exist, such as the absence of music and "crunchy" sound effects, but for now it seems it's not something that can be fixed and since the main game is run without music to improve performance, there is no issue with this. Regarding further research, we have not tested any Richter categories (the character shouldn't make any difference, but we can't be too careful) nor do we have any accurate information on how the game behaves (fps, load times, etc.) on Xbox One in case we need to make any adjustments on these platforms as well, so any help is welcome.

IMPORTANT: the version of Xenia we are allowing is the Canary branch, not default Xenia, which was found out to run at 61 fps, a frame rate far too inaccurate to be allowed. Visit https://github.com/xenia-canary/xenia-canary/releases for more info. As updates come up on GitHub, we will need to test whether they affect frame rates or loading times, so any version up to the date of this post (2024/11/20) is allowed, as they seem to be accurate and consistent in performance. As for future releases, as mentioned, they will be tested.

Kind regards,

The mod team