Contra III The Alien Wars, Emulator checks

This guide is for runners playing on emulator, while there is a whitelist of emulators, the amount of different settings, versions and hardware combinations can make the emulator behavior vary in unexpected and inexact ways compared to a real SNES, specially in this game.

A little bit of technical info: The frame rate specification for NTSC TVs is ~59.941 FPS, however, TVs are flexible enough to accept frame rates within ~0.3% of 59.941, including the SNES' 60.0988 fps. So when you go to play an NSTC SNES game on your NTSC CRT TV, the TV is actually displaying 60.0988 frames per second, not 59.941.

As runs become more and more optimized, and this game having a good amount of differences in platforms it has become paramount to analyze thoroughly each run submission, specially emulators, as you will see.

Snes9x 1.53 and above

This emulator runs at 60fps making it a bit slower than a real SNES (60.0988fps), however it emulates lag way faster. At the moment that trade-off is considered ok within the community, but as moderators we recommend you to use a different emulator because snes9x have settings that can make it run at the same rate or faster than a real SNES eliminating that trade-off and making it an unfair platform when compared to SNES due it still emulates lag faster.

Some settings that can cause wrong behaviors are sound sync and the refresh rate of your monitor. If you still use this emulator, please perform the emulator check and the end of this document to confirm it is running at the intended speed.

Bizhawk (BSNES)

Probably the best emulator as it emulates the real hardware to the cpu cycle, however this emulator isn’t free of some problems in rare cases (ie. higher than 60hz refresh rate monitors). To be sure please perform the emulator check and the end of this document to confirm it is running at the intended speed.

Higan

As long as the core is Bsnes, the same Bsnes instructions apply.

Mesen-S and other emulators

Not allowed, not accurate lag emulation.

Emulator Check

Make a recording of your emulator, play the game (or use the practice rom), reach stage4, and do a frame count on your local file with avidemux or online with https://somewes.com/frame-count/.

Starting from the first visible frame of stage4, and ending in the first frame when the background desert is visible:

This section is used because it is one of the longest in the game without virtually any lag.

Frame count should be:

(+/- 1 frame of tolerance just in case recording distorted the video)

If you are not having the same frame counts, please check your settings until you get the same frame counts.

You don’t have to do this each time you submit a run, this is intended to guide on how to be sure the emulator is running within standard. We recommend checking this every time you change your emulator settings or hardware.

Submissions that don’t meet this benchmark will be rejected.

Remember to always include the emulator, core and version you are using, runs without this information will be rejected.

Thank you so much and happy aggressive attacks!