Emulators

All Emulators officially released by Nintendo (such as Wii VC, WiiU VC, 3DS VC, and SNES Classic) are acceptable for runs. Other emulators generally accepted by SpeedRunsLive are also accepted for runs here. Commonly recommended emulators are RetroArch (with bsnes or Snes9x core), Higan, Snes9x, SNESGT. Older versions of Snes9x (v1.43 or older) as well as all versions of ZSNES are banned. These emulators do not properly emulate the game for speedrunning standards. Keyboard is allowed, but should have a setting enabled to prevent left+right (see below).

Emulator functions that are not available to console players using a standard controller are banned from use during runs. This includes but is not limited to: savestates, pressing two opposite direction inputs at the same time (left+right), turbo, fast forward/rewind, run ahead, and RAM watch. Auto-splitters that use RAM watch are generally accepted but should not give any advantage to the runner.

RetroArch is the emulator of choice for runners that want to minimize input delay/latency. It features many settings for reducing latency at the cost of performance. Use the values listed below, but adjust the frame delay as high as possible without dropping any frames.

• video_refresh_rate = "60.099"
• video_threaded = "false"
• video_hard_sync = "true"
• video_hard_sync_frames = "0"
• video_frame_delay = "8"
• video_max_swapchain_images = "2"