Hello everyone, first some context into what me and some other friends are testing:
We speedrun Trauma Center Second Opinion on Wii, and because we're encouraged to keep our playing environment as close as possible to an unmodified Wii playing an unmodified game, the ideal scenario would be to run a physical copy of the game through the disc channel. But as fate would have it, it's faster to play a Japanese copy of the game, so we need to bypass the region lock. Enter Gecko OS, Neogamma and USB Loader GX, all viable options for loading a physical copy of the JP game on a US/EU console.
Recently, one player finished one of the episodes in the game with record time, with an IGT (in-game time) of 2:36.99. Another player then beat his IGT time with a 2:36.06, but when we looked at the RTA (real time attack, aka the actual real time elapsed) times, the previous player had the smaller RTA time by nearly 6 whole seconds. How was it possible that players with identical game copies on (near) identical hardware had such a big gap on RTA? The answer turned out to be, load times.
There is a screen transition when taking certain mandatory actions in the episode, where the game fades to black, likely loads some data from the disc, and then presents the new screen. These turned out to be much faster for one player compared to the other, so we began testing out different scenarios in search of a pattern and alleged culprit.
I'll cut to the chase here and mention the two things that stood out from the data: DVD drive version and whether or not d2x-cIOS was installed. The first one was easy enough to account for, the player with the latest model had the advantage of having a faster drive, which is known to be faster than its peers in other games: An example from the Pikmin 2 speedrunning community
After both players had Wiis with the "fast" DVD drives, we began looking at possible effects different loaders had. The numbers presented below are our findings, and the value itself doesn't mean much, just know that less is generally better (ie, the game exited the screen transition faster). The data has been averaged over some runs to remove some of the natural variance associated with reading from discs. All data is collected with a physical copy of the US release of the game and the latest version of the respective loaders:
"But why does any of this matter?" you might be asking. In speedrunning, we try and match the "vanilla" environment as closely as possible, to ensure that people aren't required to homebrew in a specific way to compete. And a faster load time resulting from installing homebrew is the opposite of that goal, and we use the disc channel as a ground truth for that.
Thank you for reading and sorry if it's too big of a wall of text, but I felt the need to provide as much context as possible since it's a very specific issue. Hoping someone can help!
We speedrun Trauma Center Second Opinion on Wii, and because we're encouraged to keep our playing environment as close as possible to an unmodified Wii playing an unmodified game, the ideal scenario would be to run a physical copy of the game through the disc channel. But as fate would have it, it's faster to play a Japanese copy of the game, so we need to bypass the region lock. Enter Gecko OS, Neogamma and USB Loader GX, all viable options for loading a physical copy of the JP game on a US/EU console.
Recently, one player finished one of the episodes in the game with record time, with an IGT (in-game time) of 2:36.99. Another player then beat his IGT time with a 2:36.06, but when we looked at the RTA (real time attack, aka the actual real time elapsed) times, the previous player had the smaller RTA time by nearly 6 whole seconds. How was it possible that players with identical game copies on (near) identical hardware had such a big gap on RTA? The answer turned out to be, load times.
There is a screen transition when taking certain mandatory actions in the episode, where the game fades to black, likely loads some data from the disc, and then presents the new screen. These turned out to be much faster for one player compared to the other, so we began testing out different scenarios in search of a pattern and alleged culprit.
I'll cut to the chase here and mention the two things that stood out from the data: DVD drive version and whether or not d2x-cIOS was installed. The first one was easy enough to account for, the player with the latest model had the advantage of having a faster drive, which is known to be faster than its peers in other games: An example from the Pikmin 2 speedrunning community
After both players had Wiis with the "fast" DVD drives, we began looking at possible effects different loaders had. The numbers presented below are our findings, and the value itself doesn't mean much, just know that less is generally better (ie, the game exited the screen transition faster). The data has been averaged over some runs to remove some of the natural variance associated with reading from discs. All data is collected with a physical copy of the US release of the game and the latest version of the respective loaders:
- Disc channel on a "slow Wii": 4.733 seconds
- Disc channel on a "fast Wii": 4.633 seconds
- Disc channel on a vWii: 4.616 seconds
- Gecko OS on a "slow Wii", without d2x-cIOS: 4.783 seconds
- Gecko OS on a "fast Wii", without d2x-cIOS: 4.633 seconds
- Gecko OS on a "fast Wii", with d2x-cIOS: 4.633 seconds
- Neogamma on a "slow Wii", without d2x-cIOS: 4.733 seconds
- Neogamma on a "fast Wii", without d2x-cIOS: 4.633 seconds
- Neogamma on a "fast Wii", with d2x-cIOS: 4.433 seconds
- USB Loader GX on a "slow Wii", without d2x-cIOS: 4.550 seconds
- USB Loader GX on a "fast Wii", without d2x-cIOS: 4.433 seconds
- USB Loader GX on a "fast Wii", with d2x-cIOS: 4.416 seconds
- General -> IOS for games = "correct IOS"
- Wii -> Block IOS Reload = "No"
- Neogamma on a "fast Wii", with d2x-cIOS, but configured to use IOS 9: 4.633 seconds
"But why does any of this matter?" you might be asking. In speedrunning, we try and match the "vanilla" environment as closely as possible, to ensure that people aren't required to homebrew in a specific way to compete. And a faster load time resulting from installing homebrew is the opposite of that goal, and we use the disc channel as a ground truth for that.
Thank you for reading and sorry if it's too big of a wall of text, but I felt the need to provide as much context as possible since it's a very specific issue. Hoping someone can help!