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FAQ
Before 2017, BGB and Gambatte were the only allowed Game Boy [Color] emulators for speedruns in the Pokémon Speedruns (PSR) community, as they were the most accurate to console. As general purpose emulators, however, neither was perfect for the evolving needs of PSR.
With Gambatte being the best open-source option available, PSR developers created the Gambatte-Speedrun fork to address issues pertinent to PSR and speedrunning in general.
The most recent release of Gambatte-Speedrun can always be found at this link. All releases of the emulator can be found on github here.
Yes, a BIOS (or bootroom) file is required before playing. These files will typically have a .bin extension; once a bootrom's file location is specified, you won't be asked for it again.
Gambatte-Speedrun does not distribute any of the Game Boy bootroms, so they will need to be obtained from elsewhere.
It's required to match both console "RNG" (random number generation) and timing.
The Game Boy Player platform has a "fade" added on hard resets to roughly match console behavior and timing. This includes the [slightly more than] half-second window after hard reset where inputs can still be registered (while the fade is taking place). In the non-PSR release, the Super Game Boy 2 platform also has a 2-second delay after hard reset to match the behavior of that console/platform.
The text after hard resets was added to easily identify the emulator and ROM, to help with verification of speedruns submitted to leaderboards.
The emulator has knowledge of the English-version ROMs approved for speedruns of Pokémon Red/Blue, Pokémon Yellow, Pokémon Gold/Silver, Pokémon Crystal, and Pokémon Trading Card Game. If your ROM matches one of these approved ROMs, "<PSR>" will be displayed in the title bar of the emulator window (directly after the file name of the ROM).
Most functionality that is typically banned in speedruns has either been disabled or removed in Gambatte-Speedrun, to prevent unwanted behavior from occurring during gameplay. Generally speaking, these "unwanted behaviors" are ones not possible to normally occur on console (e.g. specific input combinations, certain bindings of inputs, etc.).
The #gambatte-speedrun channel on the PSR Discord server will be the best place most of the time. You may also want to file a github issue (link) so that it can be more easily tracked.