Super Mario 64 Speedruns

What is BOB, CCM, WF, JRB, DW/BitDW, BBH, DDD, FS/BitFS, SSL, LLL, HMC, WDW, THI, TTM, SL, TTC, RR, BitS?
Stage names. Lurk more on SM64 streams or read about it or play it.

What is "XX Star"?
0 Star = "Beat the game", or "Any%" (fastest route)
1 Star = Any% without skipping DDD
16 Star = Any%, no SBLJ
31 Star = Any% no SBLJ and no mips clip ("30 Star" stops the timer when you get the 30th star)
45 Star = Get 3 stars from every main level, beat the game. No restrictions
70 Star = Any% no BLJs. (idk about mips clip but lol no reason to use it)
120 Star = Get all stars, beat the game. No restrictions.
Those are their definitions. To check out how they actually are played out, you can check out videos on
- Marioruns leaderboards - http://marioruns.com/leaderboards/n64/120
- Japanese wiki  - http://www31.atwiki.jp/sm64/pages/31.html

What is BLJ? And mips or mips clip? And why 16 stars?
Backwards Long Jump glitch. If you can do several long jumps in a row while aiming backwards, your negative speed increases significantly (forward limits your speed), making it possible to go through walls and stuff. None of them are allowed in 70 Star, being the main purpose of the category.
- Stairs BLJs are used to pass the 50-Star door and the 70-Star endless stairs (most popular).
- Lobby BLJ (LBLJ) is when you do it in a little glitchy area of the lobby, mostly used to clip the 8-Star door (Bowser 1) (allowed in any category that allows "BLJ"s, in general) (not allowed on SRL bingo races)
- Side BLJ (SBLJ) is done by the side of the little stairs inside the room before the basement, which skips the 30-Star door (Bowser 2), and can also surpass Dire Dire Docks' entrance. It is not allowed in 16 Star runs or bingo.
- The fastest route to grab Hazy Maze Cave 100coin star involves BLJ'ing on a elevator to clip through a fence wall, which is perfectly fine in 120 Star.
- Mips is the castle bunny, which spawns when you have 15 and 50 stars. The point of 16 Star runs is to use it to clip through the 30-Star/Bowser 2 door due to bad collision detection in the game (fastest way to beat the game, combined with stairs BLJs, before SBLJ was discovered and found to be humanly possible) 15 Stars spawn mips, grab the submarine star to unlock Bowser 2 level, get the upstairs key, BLJ the stairs and get to Bowser 3 (final), hence, 16 Star.

What are the differences of the Japanese over the English version?
The intro is a bit less than 3 seconds shorter, JRB's cannon star is outside of the box (3~4 seconds faster), the game can sound glitch in SSL secrets if you keep moving (among other more unlikely instances), CCM Lil Penguin star spawns above mom penguin instead of by the side (irrelevant), the text from the SSL Hands boss is considerably shorter, although the japanese textboxes scroll slower. Japanese version is not chosen over English solely because of text. After a lot of comparisons (mostly by Shredwot iirc), it was found that English is faster on 70 Star by 1s, and Japanese is faster on 120 Star by a bit less than 3s. For other categories I don't know. PAL version runs at a considerably slower framerate, and Japanese-Shindou has slower loading times, and they "fixed" the BLJ glitch. For more details go here https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_64/Regional_and_Version_Differences

What about Wii Virtual Console and Emulator?
Emulator is obviously faster because you can configurate it to have less lag, etc. None of them emulate Nintendo 64 games accurately, even if it did, add up the possible setting inconsistencies, it is obviously not the main competitive platform used. Virtual Console has basically no lag and loading times are faster (after all, it's a new release, another hardware). The top speedrunners agreed on N64 being their standard, due to lots of reasons which aren't worth discussing (after all, there's hardly an issue on choosing to compete on the console of original release). But, lol, you can speedrun the game in whatever hardware you want. How much faster they are? I read somewhere that EMU 40s and VC 1:30 on 120 star, but I honestly don't know and don't care.