As of 17.05.2022, VBA-rr is no longer allowed for GB/C publications.
Original post:
Note: This idea only regards Gameboy and Gameboy Color in VBA-rr. Gameboy Advance in VBA-rr will remain allowed regardless of this poll. Also, lsnes will remain allowed for GB/C submissions.
Over the last years, GB/C emulation has gone through dramatic improvements, to the point that console verification has become a common thing for TASing GB and GBC games. This became possible thanks to the endeavors of the people behind Gambatte and GBHawk, of which some of them are also prominent contributors on TASVideos like TiKevin83, CasualPokePlayer, Alyosha. Especially today, with the release of BizHawk 2.8, we've achieved quite a milestone for GB/C, thanks to the accumulated improvements to emulation accuracy, the introduction of SameBoy core for GB/C, and some Lua support for Linux via Mono.
On the other hand, VBA-rr hasn't got any update in 5 years. It's not able to produce any console verifiable movie due to its
inaccuracy, to the point that can cause some glitches that don't happen on real hardware. The movie timing reported is always wrong because of inaccuracy of loading times. The audio emulation is noticeably bad. It doesn't emulate real time clock properly. It doesn't emulate GB and GBC BIOSes. It doesn't have piano roll functionality (TAStudio or TAS Editor) while instead both BizHawk and lsnes do. There are more issues I can't remember right now, and probably even more on top.
Last GB/C submission with VBA-rr was from
7 years ago, but I wonder if anyone is still using it today for TASing. Do you know of anyone? Or do you think there is any reason why anyone could be still needing it? Did anyone ever use VBA-rr on Linux?
From what I could gather, the reason why there are still some people using VBA-rr for
GBA TASing today, it's because they can't use BizHawk, due to having very old PCs. But that should never become a problem for GB/C TASing, as there is still lsnes as an alternative available for that, which also works on Linux.
While I consider console verification to be a staple on TASVideos, everyone in the staff agrees that any decision about this matter should be up to the community. So vote, share your opinion, ask questions, and discuss about anything that you think about it!
