LogFAQs > #967010757

That's a very frequent conversation we have in the NES speedrunning community, and it really varies by game as far as the impact emulation vs. original hardware has. With most games they just ban certain emulators like Retroarch, and there are a lot of differing opinions on MESEN. I prefer to play on original hardware myself, but as long as people can show they're playing legitimately on an emulator I couldn't care less if they use one, as long as it's within the rules of the specific game and they aren't using features of the emulator that aren't available on original hardware.

For Friday the 13th, we didn't allow emulators up until recently because of how they could manipulate the games RNG due to how resets work. With that run there are 256 RNG seeds the game can give you, and the seed depends on the exact frame you press start on to begin the game (I want to say it was frame 110). When you reset on a console it hops to a random point in those tables and you can't really predict anything, but on emulators it always resets to the same state, so people were able to get the right seed around 40% of the time, where console players would be hitting reset for hours just to get a few attempts, and couldn't properly replicate that even with a full power off each time. Thankfully we have a romhack now that always gives the good starting seed, but prior to that it sucked.

Sorry for the long winded explanation there, but I feel like I might be in a pretty unique situation to be able to explain some of the emulator vs. original hardware thing from a speedrunner/moderator perspective.