There will always be people who cheat, and the more people know of ways to cheat, the higher the chance that someone cheats, and so the higher the number of submitted recordings in which the player somehow cheated. Did you consider that before you posted your question? Because while you are concerned about people cheating, you have just given detailed descriptions of how to cheat, and lots of people did not know the ways you just described...(posted 9584 days ago)I did not know about the slowing down trick, and I have only known about using pause for a short time. And the only reason I know about pause now is because I was actually more or less accused of using it by someone who hadn't even bothered to look at my recording.
Like I said, there will always be people who cheat, and I am not too concerned about that, because there is no way you are going to stop it. I think (but of course there is no way to be sure) that the majority of the recordings on MARP are legitimate. And the less public talk about cheating, the more likely it is that it stays that way.
My opinion on things that are possible on MAME, but not on the actual arcade machine is this: If you are recording a game that you plan to submit to some repository, everything should be as close to the situation on the actual arcade machine as possible. So if the arcade machine does not allow you to pause, then you shouldn't do it while recording on MAME. And if the arcade machine does not have a keyboard or trackball or gamepad or whatever, then you shouldn't use any of those while recording on MAME. I don't care what you do when you are not recording and planning on submitting it.
Having said all that, there is a very good argument to use whatever MAME enables you to, even if that is different from the arcade machine: It is very clear that Twin Galaxies will always make a distinction between arcade machines and emulators, so, for instance, my MAME world record on Donkey Kong will never be considered the world record for the arcade machine. In short: People used whatever the arcade machines allowed them to (and whatever was allowed by judges watching them), so why not use whatever MAME allows you to, too?
And, yes, I think you are right: The MAME Dev team probably does not care at all about concerns like the ones you raised. Their main concern is to emulate, as realistically as possible, the arcade machines, and as such, recording a game does not even fit in to start with.
If setting world records on emulators ever becomes a big thing, the judging will probably become more strict too, and merely submitting an inp may not be sufficient anymore then. A recording is nothing more than a nice way to preserve your accomplishments forever then, but it may not be considered anything more than that unless approved by some official judge of some kind then.
And there is one more thing that a lot of people seem to forget: MARP is simply a repository for people to submit their recordings to, and banning recordings has so far not been part of that policy. Whether or not to allow certain recordings to earn points for MARP's leaderboard is a different matter, and maybe the way to solve this is to not automatically assign points to every submission, but to have the uploader explicitly indicate whether he wants his submission to count for the leaderboard. So this would effectively mean that there were several categories. The same goes for autofire; there is no MARP policy to ban autofire, but there may be some decision soon on that with regards to accepting it for the leaderboard. Pending that, I have clearly indicated which of my recordings made use of autofire, and regardless of the final decision, I am planning on replacing those recordings with ones in which I don't use autofire.
But if you really want to compete and are concerned about the validity of some of the recordings of some of your competitors, then maybe you shouldn't upload to MARP but to the TG MAME site instead, because there, at least, every submission is submitted to scrutiny by a TG judge.
Just some thoughts...
Cheers, Ben Jos.