rcarter2 : Aww, thanks! Though you beat it just a few hours after I did haha.

rcarter2 : Did the person who has the crazy fast time use save state hacking or something similar? I see no code to skip levels or anything like that. Just wondering if I'm on the right track here.

Jordanv78 : No, what he did was not in any way manipulating a flaw in the emulator. That is the reason why it will probably count for the competition. It is something you could do on the cartridge too.. I know what he did, but I refuse to do it. 

rcarter2 : Hmm that's weird because after a basic search on Google I didn't see anything other than the infinite lives, and the level warp...other than the aforementioned Save State Hacks that you can do with Hex.

Is this cheat listed on the net somewhere? I'm just surprised that I don't know what the exploit is because I usually know most of them on the NES anyways

Jordanv78 : I have never been able to find it online. He either found it by complete accident when playing, or he just knew about this glitch in the game when nobody else did. 

New Rule
Using any cheats that gives you unlimited lives or lets you skip levels will not be tolerated, if you submit a time that you cheated with, you will be banned. You are allowed to use the level warps. Once this competition ends, than you may beat the game however you want but until than, no cheating!

Davideo7 :

Question... how can you properly police that type of thing?

Yes, it seems like it would be hard to tell who cheated or not. While times that are only a minute or two are obvious, someone could wait around in game to get a more modest looking time.

If you do have a means of figuring out who did what, then disregard what I said above.

Actually though, I might have an idea of how to verify that someone beat the game without cheating, though it involves having to take a second screenshot (which might be too inconvenient, especially for those who beat the game already)... If anyone is interested, I could go into more details.

legacyme3 : It's not something I want the public to know about.

madison : Feel free to go into more detail.

Davideo7 :

If it's what I think it is, I completely understand.

legacyme3 : Yeah, it's probably what you think it is. Don't tell anyone though.

Davideo7 : My idea is that if you take a screenshot of the stage name for the final boss (like where it says Stage 7-5 Immense Lava Beast), judging from the number of lives the person has in the picture, you can tell if the person did not cheat. If you use either of the two cheats, your lives are stuck at 5, even if you gain or lose them, so if you took a picture of the final bosses stage name, and the lives amount in the picture is a number other than 5, then you know they didn't use either of the cheats.

One problem however would be if someone legitly made it to the final boss with five lives, in which case they would have to kill themselves once to take this screenshot (which would only take a few seconds if you skate right into the boss).

Also, as I mentioned earlier, people who already beat it would have to do it over again (though I'm 100% confident that none of us cheated).

Hopefully, I explained that well enough. It might be too inconvenient to actually implement.

sonicmcmuffin : No I don't want people using the infinite lives cheat either. I think it could help someone beat the game quicker because than they don't have to worry about gathering or conserving lives.

The netplay idea is definitely interesting.

madison : That's not a bad idea, it's something I'll think about.

The only problem with madison's idea is that in speed run mode, you can only submit one screenshot. If you submit another, the old one gets replaced. So you would have to go in yourself to check all the submissions to look for the other screenshot.

rcarter2 : I think you're thinking of the old java emulators. When you take a screenshot in high score mode with the RGR Plugin, I'm almost positive it doesn't replace the old one.

Davideo7 : Well, it doesn't replace it on the retrieval page. But when you submit it, it replaces the old submitted page. That's what I meant.

rcarter2 : I was thinking that the second screenshot thing would just be something you submit and leave up for a day or two so others could see before resubmitting your actual ending time.

But, I really don't think we'll have to end up double checking anyone's scores anyways, since no one else seems to be submitting any times (probably because the game is pretty hard).