Version Differences

There are several different revisions (or "versions") of the A Link to the Past ROM. Generally speaking, the best version of the game for speedrunning is the initial version released in Japan, which the community calls Japanese 1.0 (or JP 1.0 for short).

Versions

Japanese 1.0

The Japanese 1.0 version has a couple of important things going for it that make it the main choice for speedrunners 99% of the time:

1. It has several meaningful and commonly used glitches in it that were patched out in later revisions.
2. Japanese text is much faster than the English text in the US version.

Glitches

The Japanese 1.0 version has some specific glitches in it that don't appear in other versions.

• Death Hole
• Fake Flippers
• Hera Hole EG
• Item Dash
• Mirror Block Erase
• Overworld YBAs
• Super Bunny
• Superspeed

These glitches typically save a good chunk of time. Even NMG categories commonly leverage item dashing, fake flippers, and superspeed. These glitches are a big reason Japanese 1.0 is preferred. Other Japanese revisions have the text advantage over English, but subsequent revisions of the game (including the US version) have the above glitches patched out.

In addition to those, there are a few glitches in JP 1.0 that are undesirable. These are never enough to make a run slower, but they can make runners' lives harder:

• Link can take damage while he's falling in a pit or void. This is what enables Death Hole, but it can easily occur in situations where the player isn't trying to cause a glitch.
• The chest game can only spawn the heart piece when Link opens the 2nd chest in the game.
• Bombs hijack one of the sprite z-coordinates while determining recoil trajectory to apply to Link after he's damaged by the bomb's explosion. If the sprite that normally controls that z-coordinate is floating or airborne (or it was despawned while it was floating or airborne), Link may be recoiled in strange directions from bombs. This has the potential to interfere with setups for bomb jumps or bomb clips, both of which rely on predictable recoil from explosion damage.

Text differences

Here's an analysis on how many frames it takes to scroll through certain text in the game for both the Japanese and English versions. In general, Japanese text is a lot faster—especially for crystal cutscenes.

This means in an Any% NMG run of the optimal route (no extra text anywhere), the US version loses around 1 minute to a Japanese version.

Japanese 1.1

Also sometimes known at Japanese revision 1, this version patches out the 1.0 glitches. It also drops some of the undesirable glitches, except for the bomb recoil bug, which is still present.

Although this version has the Japanese text time save, the absence of the 1.0 glitches makes it worse for speedrunning for nearly every category.

US version

The US version is based on the Japanese 1.1 version. Sometimes players mistakenly think they're the same outside of the English vs. Japanese text, but they're not. The US version has some additional fixes and changes not present in JP 1.1. One example is fixing the bomb recoil issue.

The US version is slow in virtually every speedrun category due to the time lost to English text.

Japanese 1.2

The Japanese 1.2 version patches out the torch glitch on Ganon. This typically makes it very undesirable to play on, but an exception exists for the Glitchless Dungeon Order (GDO) category, where this is arguably the best version to play on because:

1. It lacks the glitches exclusive to the JP 1.0 version, but all of these are banned in GDO. And performing any of them by accident or muscle-memory automation will disqualify the run for leaderboard submission.
2. Similarly, the torch glitch is banned in GDO. It can be easy to accidentally do this during the Ganon fight when playing on versions 1.0 or 1.1.
3. The player still reaps the benefits of the fast Japanese text.

Outside resources

A more thorough look through the version differences around Japanese 1.0, Japanese revision 1 (commonly called JP 1.1), and the US versions can be found on kan's blog