Hooray! I've been wanting some things to change regarding this.
1. Agreed 100%. When I was judging the
Resident Evil 4 Mercenaries runs, I never liked that they had to be Moons to get published. A game mode is a game mode, whether it requires SRAM to unlock it or not.
I think the simplest way to allow these that would fit within our framework is just to consider them independent game modes. This would not only cover unlocked modes like the Mercenaries maps, but also New Game+ modes that are unlocked after completing the game. It also means that these modes could have their own Full Completion runs, or any other Standard category. Obviously a New Game+ run would be a separate mode from one with a fresh save file.
2. I think obviously we accept it as-is right now, but I think I might prefer the SRAM one, because it's faster and doesn't detract anything from the normal run? I can see why others might feel differently though, from a legitimacy standpoint. I also thought we were going in the direction of not superseding Standard branches even if content overlapped, so maybe both would be ok.
3. This is one where I don't think there's going to be a neat solution. I get that some SRAM can be a huge burden to make (some examples were brought up before that I forgot), but what's the alternative? Hacking the SRAM can bring up a host of issues, since you would still have to prove that such a state is achievable, which would need a complete playthrough of the game anyway. Sorry, but I don't have any good ideas on this at the moment.
Synced this one as well. Is the ROM name right? capbowl.zip does not sync but bowlrama.zip works perfectly.
I can confirm sync on this (using WSL temporarily, and on MAME 0.247). I'm not super familiar with MAME but this was fairly easy to set up, I don't really see anything wrong with allowing this so far.
Here's the full contents of the error window: https://pastebin.com/ZwEZ97cE
The GUI issue may be related to this, not sure. I can press continue and get a window identical to the one I posted yesterday - notice how it also has the wrong title on the window. Stretching the window out doesn't help. Maybe this is a Windows 11 problem.
I'm also still not getting any best results when I start with a cleared state and use < or <=. The value option works now, though.
Some of the objects are on top of each other. It's still completely usable though.