Hey everyone, I'm new to this website but I have done some speedruns without using emulators, which brings me to my question. What is an emulator? I'm just looking for some basic advice on using them and stuff like that. Thanks!
ROMs are often named "game name + (U) or (J) or (E) + [!] or or [o]..."
(U) = USA
(J) = Japan
(E) = Europe
[!] = verified good dump
= bad dump
[o] = overdump
there are more labels but this is just a short summary
You can't play a game on an emulator unless you have a ROM of it. We can't tell you where to find one, but Google is your friend.
Technically that only applies if the game originally used a ROM (Read-Only Memory) chip or something similar enough, like an EEPROM or Flash memory; copies of the game data for disc-based systems are ISOs (after the ISO 9660 standard, where the ISO is the International Organization for Standardization) or may have been decomposed into BIN (raw binary), audio data (like WAV and MP3), and CUE (a cue sheet, which tells the system which audio file corresponds to each track), while the Intellivision emulator and any potential emulator for the original Breakout actually need to emulate discrete logic circuits (jumper paks in the case of Intellivision).
Anyway, to do the kind of speedruns that we do with an emulator, you need a special version of the emulator with such features as savestate rerecording (the ability to seamlessly revert to a savestate while recording your progress) and frame advance (the ability to input each frame individually and only move to the next frame when you are ready): http://tasvideos.org/WhyAndHow.html
