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There's been a few rule changes over the last few months. Most of these have been announced on the TSC Twitter, but if you've missed those then here's a quick list of what's been updated.

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General: The original game and all its contents must be preserved and unmodified.
Sonic Generations: Modifications of any kind, including cosmetic mods, are disallowed.

This rule should have been a no-brainer, but cosmetic Sonic Generations mods were generally overlooked, as they didn't have an effect on gameplay. However, it was recently found that a few "cosmetic" mods did have a small impact on gameplay that gave an advantage to players running mods. To that end, on top of the general rule, mods are explicitly banned again under the Sonic Generations rules, as that's where most of the issues were.

Even though this was mostly an issue with Generations, the rule applies to all games. Play the vanilla version.

As a side note - if you guys see any stats on the Sonic Generations charts that are in violation of this rule, let us know and we'll take care of it.

General: Any game running on a PC or emulator must perform at full speed while playing the game you're submitting for (60 FPS in most cases). The exception is if lag is caused by the game, rather than by bad hardware or emulation.

This is to prevent players from being able to slow down the game akin to using the slowdown function on an emulator and gain an advantage over players running the game at full speed. The rule is largely intended to combat bad hardware or bad emulation, though, so it only applies to PC games, and there's an exception for lag caused by in-game bugs.

Sonic Heroes: Use of the Team Blast Glitch -- switching characters while simultaneously using Thunder Shoot to rapidly fill the Team Blast gauge --  is forbidden for all Team Dark charts except Rings.

The Team Blast Glitch was previously banned for all charts except Chaotix Rings. This rule was somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent with our other rules, so it was removed. TBG is still banned for Team Dark charts, though, as it breaks every level excessively to the point of reducing them to TBGing over and over.

Sonic Generations: In Speed Highway, resetting a bell to make it dispense more rings than it should is not allowed.

This is a ring scalping bug that allowed you to collect infinite rings in Speed Highway that was largely forgotten about until recently; it's banned now.

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That should sum it all up - now go submit some stats :P

The second TSC Charity Marathon ended with a whopping $2286.22 in donations to the American Cancer Society, with donations still being accepted through Saturday (they work now!). Thanks to all streamers and viewers that supported the event! I'll be using this topic over the coming days to talk about the marathon itself and things behind the scenes, so keep an eye out.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Donations for Ponies, Part 1
Pleasing All of the People, All of the Time
Donations for Ponies, Part 2

You can watch videos from this year's marathon and from last year's marathon by visiting the archives at TSC's Twitch.tv channel. We intend to stream more in the future, so give us a follow if you haven't already and watch via the TSC Stream link on the sidebar when we go live.

The 2013 TSC Marathon starts on Monday, March 25 and runs all week to draw donations for the American Cancer Society. Watch the action at http://www.soniccenter.org/stream or on TSC's Twitch channel at http://www.twitch.tv/tsc_streams (we're expecting a short TSC outage on Monday night, so don't forget the Twitch channel!).

Join us for online play in All-Stars Racing Transformed and Puyo Pop (Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine), and leave comments with your donations to request things on-stream. Watch speedruns and casual play from various TSCers and guest speedrunners from SpeedRunsLive and Speed Demos Archive.

Marathon Volunteering Topic

Let me open by saying that I'm appreciative of all of the people that did step forward to do something. However, we only have volunteers for about 25 games (we ran about 40 last year, including bonus streams), and there are some popular games missing from that list of 25. We have no volunteers for any 8-bit games, no volunteers for Sonic Adventure 2, and no unconditional volunteers for either version of Sonic Unleashed, among other things. Strangely, we've had more new and/or less social TSCers volunteer while many of our big hitters haven't stepped up, which means we're working from scratch with many people as we test their streaming setups, check how well they can play, and see if they can socialize.

What does all of this mean for the marathon? If we are planning for the week leading up to Easter, then the current games/volunteers list is bordering on too little, too late. I'm okay with a shorter marathon, but not if it means we won't run some of the popular games that are necessary for excellent Sonic marathons. Those of you that haven't finished testing streams need to get that done right away. Those of you that told me in passing, "Oh, I can probably run a game," need to post in the volunteering topic if you meant it, as I'm not counting "probably" towards our volunteer list.

If you plan to reply about running a game, do it in the volunteering topic. I'll see where we stand a week from now, and decide if we can move forward with our plans, if we need to postpone the marathon, or if we need to call it off.

For those of you that missed the first marathon or just want to reminisce, watch this. I'll make sure that plays 15 minutes before our next marathon as a lead-in.

It's probably a good thing that our after-Christmas mini-marathon didn't happen, because Respawn Point ran a Sonic marathon that week and I'd completely forgotten about it. They raised $3250 for Child's Play, so kudos to them. We've been in talks about moving our marathon to Easter and making a full marathon like last year, and if I don't need to do as much hand-holding as last year, I'm all for it. I'm going to start fresh, being careful what I take from the Christmas marathon topic because I know that people's plans change; this means that I won't be taking anything volunteered in the old thread, so re-post anything that you personally wanted to do.

The trickiest thing about using Spring Break for the marathon is that some schools use the week leading up to Easter while other schools use the week after. My instinct is to aim for the week prior to Easter, but it's dependent on when our runners can show up as well. If people can comment on which week is better, that would be great.

A few people have volunteered for help with prizes for donation-based raffles. If you're helping with this, be sure that your prize can easily be sent to somebody without you having to manage the shipping. If you're unsure about this, consider digital prizes. We'll have a big focus on preplanned bonus streams for certain donation totals, as that was a huge donation driver last year. Karaoke was a donation driver as well. Our initial goal will of course be $1813.81, just over last year's goal, but I'd like to make a large stretch goal of $3250.01 -- not because I want to compete with Respawn Point, but because TSSZ declared $3250 a "community record", and I love proving TSSZ wrong.~

Given that the only new Sonic game since the last marathon is Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed (not counting the new version of Sonic Jump), we're going to have to repeat some games. We need to approach these repeats in different ways if possible, e.g., using a different character or a different set of courses. The audience participation was pretty slim last time -- about 20 or so for Puyopuyo, three for All Stars Racing, and one for Brawl -- and we can definitely afford to bump that up.

I'd like to see less personal advertising this time. That doesn't mean you can't plug your stream or YouTube channel at the start or the finish, but the extra space you're devoting to personal banners could be going towards a webcam shot of you playing and/or a chat box.

I'll leave people to comment on whatever they have in mind.