[Rolken]

Thus far emulation has been allowed here under a sort of gentleman's agreement - don't cheat with savestates, don't slow down your PC, etc etc. As part of my general inclination towards greater clarity on our methods, I think it's time we standardize and rigorize this.

There're open source emulators for MegaDrive/Genesis, Master System and GBA - basically every 2D system except DS. I propose we modify each of them to create a "speedrun edition" which a) disallows savestates except perhaps level select, and b) automatically generates encrypted movie files (as SM mentioned in chat) that also store the real-time emulator speed. Not only does it render the emulator uncheatable, it provides instant proof of any records you achieve, and could even allow competitiors to compare centisecond on 16-bit games.

This all is new territory for me, so if anyone wants to help out I'd love it. As usual I'm prepared to make the effort myself, but with TSC4 occupying my Sonic schedule and my general lack of emulator experience it'd be awhile before I could get around to finishing it all. I think it's significant enough to justify doing in any event tho.

[Rolken]

On a side note, while mentally hampered by sickness I've been loathe to meddle with the inner workings of TSC, so instead I've been hacking around in SPA. The end goal is to make some maps, but so far I've managed to find most of the RAM variable locations and all of the level graphics in the ROM. I just need to find how the level structure itself is encoded.

[douglas]

Sounds good to me - maybe hard-code savestates for level selects or whatever?  I'd volunteer to give it a crack but this year I'm so ridiculously busy I'd be totally unreliable.

[SadisticMystic]

Getting an emulator to determine if a savestate is level select or not is probably more trouble than it's worth.  Gens+ has the right idea here: a movie can start from one savestate, no matter what it is, but loading a savestate while it's recording isn't helpful unless you want to cause a desync in playback.  This would allow for more flexibility, such as "I want to run Icecap 2 S; the run ends up faster if the initial savestate is from the end of act 1 while holding a lightning shield rather than from level select, so I'll start from there."

Twin Galaxies has commissioned an emulator that it actually allows, with similar features to what's planned here.  http://www.twingalaxies.com/index.aspx?c=48 gives the details on it.  I don't think we need to go so far as to disable pause while recording (TG tends to be more anti-pause than us), though.

Dump to AVI has already been put into Gens Movie and VBA, and that would definitely be a nice feature to have.

Subseconds can already be compared for runs on video by taking a frame count.

[Rolken]

I was thinking of hardcoding savestates like douglas said, but that works too. Taking frame counts isn't the most user-friendly tho.

[SadisticMystic]

I just found out that the GIZ format isn't as cheat-proof as it was once thought to be, so the creation of these emulators might be a more pressing need than expected.

[MK]

We should make the non-savestateable emulator, then release IPS patches for competition roms that make it go straight to level select, or enable it by default, or something.