wow finally some long winded posts that didn't include much flaming :)(posted 9585 days ago)Unfortunatley Ben's right in that there will always be cheating and i think even the cheaters know that marp stands for fair play regaurdless of what actually gets uploaded, so the only thing stoping it right now is guilt. The bad thing is if there isn't a full proof method to determine if someone's hands are really that fast and staminatious (i knew many non-cheaters that were incredible with their hands!)
There is a slightly possible although severly big-brother way to theoretically prevent a majority of pausing+slomos. What would happen would be for each inp file there would be an encrypted header and tailer that would store the begin and end time of recording the game. To verify a recoring as not cheating you'd simply decrypt the time difference and divide by the frames in the inp file to get the recorded fps. However i haven't figured out a way to keep the encryption algorithm secret so savy cheaters couldn't just run the encryption algorithm with bogus times to match the game's frame rate. and even if you have an encryption algorithm hiden behind a link, anyone would be able to run it because mame has to. So that idea proly will never pan out.
cheating will always be around, maybe it could be banned but there would be a lot of subjective judging to ban a cheating inp. At least with playbackability, if it doesn't playback there's your indisputable proof that it doesn't belong on an "Action" Replay Page.