For reference, this started with
this submission, from March of 2018. I was the one that accepted it (I was still senior judge at the time). And I remember discussion with various staff members about the movie (and its settings, particularly GBC-in-GBA, and how they interact with the rules) at the time, although I can't say precisely who were and who weren't involved at the time.
I was aware of the rules as written for Game Boy modes - in fact, I had
written them just a few months before. And in fact, just days before, the rules were in fact
updated to allow GBC-in-GBA without the need for special GBA enhancements - this was clearly updated with this method of console verification in mind. The one thing that was overlooked is that Pokémon Blue is a GB game and not a GBC game (unlike Pokémon Yellow), and so the part about enabling GB-in-GBC was (incorrectly) not codified in the rules.
It's not like Pokémon games were all that consistent with Game Boy versions, anyway - Pokémon TASes were divided all over the place with GB movies made with the Gambatte core, "SGB" movies made in VBA, and GBC movies for Yellow which were freely cross-obsoleted by Red/Blue on the other systems.
At the time, this didn't even look like it would be a controversial change. Console verification is a key aspect of TASVideos, and has been for many years. It is one of the targeted end-results for emulation accuracy, and that is something that has been highly prioritized across TASVideos and its rules for many years.
Quite simply, there was (and, in my opinion, is) zero reason to get in the way of console-verified publications for games such as Pokémon, just to stick to the version rules as they were originally written. To me, it was clear that running a Pokémon game in GBC
was the optimal platform for it, as it had absolutely negligible downsides from a viewing perspective (no hardware revision-based issues to speak of, just a change in RNG which is invisible to the viewer), it had colorized palettes which provides a better viewing experience overall (and puts it more in line with the older VBA-"SGB" publications, and GBC Pokémon Yellow publications).
Now, regarding what should happen today, I reiterate the following points:
• GB-in-GBC should be an acceptable choice for Game Boy movies, owing to advantages such as console verification (which is important to us), and general lack of downsides. There's a lot of talk about imperfections across hardware, but in my mind, unless there is
demonstrable evidence for a submitted GB game that it has issues in GBC mode (such as what's shown in Alyosha's post, for another game), this should not be grounds for rejecting a movie. And the rules should be updated as such, as they should have been back when the rules were updated in March of 2018, and how they have been de-facto enforced since.
• GB games that are run in GBC mode (such as this publication) should be labeled as GB rather than GBC. This is exactly to prevent the issue that brought Nach to this thread to begin with, the fact that it's labeled with a platform that makes it non-intuitive to find.
That being said, I currently do not have plans to resync this movie. If anybody else wants to take it up, feel free.