VG Competitions for RB forum members

[Ziggy]

I had a couple ideas for a while that I thought might be fun for the community here. It also might help increase site traffic.

Would anyone be interested in participating in speed runs, high score runs, etc? This would be closed off to the RB community, so we don't have to worry about competing with world records. Entries would be made in the form of positing a video to YouTube or similar. I had some ideas for rules and whatnot, but I thought I'd see what interest is like first.

[MrPopo]

A consideration is that recording can be challenging. If it's a PC game there's a fair number of options, but for console games (especially the retro ones) it's more difficult if you're not using emulation.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Oh man we should have had this brought up at the beginning of the month to apply course times on our together Retro entry, Sega Rally.

I am down though.

[Ziggy]

A consideration is that recording can be challenging. If it's a PC game there's a fair number of options, but for console games (especially the retro ones) it's more difficult if you're not using emulation.

I don't think it's that big of a deal. Emulation is an option for the most popular retro consoles. And when emulation wont do, capture cards aren't that expensive. And if you don't wanna spend the money on a capture card, just use your cell phone to record the screen. I realize that the quality of that might be sub standard to what we're all use to today, but hey, it'll do.

[marurun]

The problem is that there are also lots of tool-assisted emulators out there. How can we be sure who is playing legitimately and who is not?

[Ziggy]

We use the same rules speed runners use.

[MrPopo]

Which generally disallows emulators. About the only one allowed is DOSBox.

[Ziggy]

https://www.speedrun.com/games

Plenty of entries on this site are using emulators. Granted, only certain emulators are allowed.

http://www.speedrunslive.com/faq/

Says: Can I play on an emulator?

If the emulator is accurate and the community for that game accepts emulator as a valid choice, then yes, you can. The most commonly used emulators for each system include:
NES - FCEUX 2.2.0
GB - bgb
SNES - SNES9x 1.53
GBA - VBA 1.7.2
Genesis/GameGear/SMS - Fusion
N64 - Project64 v1.7
For reference, the following emulators are globally banned for use in racing:
SNES - ZSNES, snes9x 1.4x
N64 - Project64 2.x
GB/GBC - VBA, VBA-M
GBA - VBA-M (use VBA instead. If VBA does not support your GBA game, please contact an op.)

[Sarge]

I'm not opposed. Given that it would just be the RB community, we could just go on the honor system. I'd like a good capture setup from my original systems, though.

Also, don't a lot of the movie files generated by emulators (before conversion to AVI/MP4/whatever) log how many restore/rewinds occurred? If that's the case, we could just post the metadata from that for verification.

[CFFJR]

I like this idea, I'd participate.

I don't know how competitive I'd really be, since I have plenty of games I'm good at, but not "speed run good", you know? But I'm sure we could come up with plenty of competition types.