Very awesome Job Corey and Jeff!  All explained awesome!  :-). 

My thoughts:

1. The four-way should not be a requirement. As has been discussed elsewhere, anything other than a four-way is gonna hurt way more than it helps! I had an 8-way restrictor on my joystick for a short time while waiting for the 4-way and it was awful. The concern, for example, that one could "steer while climbing" with an 8-way by using the diagonals is not valid. DK doesn't acknowledge simultaneous directional inputs. You're either pushing up, left, right, or down - there is no "up-right" or "up-left."
EDIT (two years later): as it turns out, I was incorrect about this, at least in part. While I still think it's much harder to play with an 8-way, on an arcade machine you can indeed hit two directions simultanously, register two inputs, and do "steer-climbs". I was basing my assertion that you couldn't on tests I did in MAME. What I didn't know at the time is that for DK (and other 4-way games) it's hardcoded into MAME to only register one directional input at a time.

I think people should be allowed to submit using whatever controls work best for them because nobody has ever identified a control setup that would give an advantage in DK (except the old "keyboard vs. joystick" debate, where the keyboard can add a tiny bit of precision at the very, very highest skill levels of play).

2. The power supply thing is something that PSP added to the requirements when he was with TG because he noticed sometimes that certain elements of the game (the pie boards specifically) behaving strangely with certain new power supplies. I don't like this rule either. It's an extra layer of needless bureaucracy, IMO. If the power supply makes the game glitchy, it will be apparent in the gameplay. Certainly won't give anybody an advantage, in any case.

3. I like "Arcade(multi)". I think it says everything it needs to say!

4. The board is worth thinking about though, because the TKG-3s DO offer an advantage in the form of the ladder cheat. However, the title screen on the TKG-4s say "(C) 1981 Nintendo of America," whereas the TKG-3s say "(C) 1981 Nintendo", so there's no need to show the physical board because the title screen will make clear which version is running.

i always thought 106 wouldnt let you enable cheats if recording, dont think i ever tried it though...

i think if you fast forward the game and it gets to the end ok that should be fine. if someone enables invincability to get past an enemy it will still kill them when you play it back...

 

I have added the following Special Rules to the top of their respective High Score List:

No-Hammer: Special Rules: Score Submissions must not contain any use of the hammer for any reason, whether on purpose or accidental.

No-Killscreen: Special Rules: Score Submissions must reach and proceed after normal killscreen time.

Level 1-1: Special Rules: Score Submissions must be played on the first barrel board on level 1. The score must be achieved by one man only. You may achieve your score with any of your remaining men, it does not have to be achieved on your first man only. The board must be completed and the points accumulated during that completed run will be adjusted accordingly.

TKG3 is the early version with the ladder cheat i think...

 

No, you can't do it that way.  In the correct version of DK, you CAN still survive by hanging out on a ladder and having the barrel roll over your head.  The key is that the survival rate is low when doing this on the correct version (but it's higher than zero).  So, just because you see someone use a "ladder cheat" move does NOT mean that they are using the incorrect version of the game.  Conversely, just because someone never uses such a move does NOT mean that they are using the correct version of the game.

There may or may not be other differences between versions of the game.  It's pretty much the one thing that keeps the legitimacy of any high score board is to make sure everyone is using the same software.  All of the other nonsense regarding power supplies, the shape of a cabinet, and to some extent even the controls that are used really don't matter -- but it DOES matter that we are all using the same software, which you can't necessarily tell just from witnessing the gameplay.

IMO, scores achieved using anything other than TKG4 should not be counted (or should be tracked completely seperately).

The different "versions" of Donkey Kong has been discussed a few times on older cagdc or TG threads and of course I can't really recall how to find them.  I'm also not much of a hardware guy and am much less familiar with the cabinet side of the hobby than most other members.  Note also that by "versions", I'm not speaking of obvious hacks or clones with different Titles or misspelled Titles or anything that wasn't licensed and copyrighted by Nintendo.

But even within Nintendo, there were apparently several different versions of the game released.  In fact, it's possible to find several different Manuals which cover some of them (someone in one of those old threads uploaded pdf scans of a few of these Manuals).  It became likely that there may actually be more versions of the game than many of us thought or realized.  It's possible that not all changes to the software were tracked with a seperate TKG number -- some of the earliest versions may not have even had a TKG number or may have been tracked by Nintendo another way.  There also exist anomalies out there such as the "hard chip" which a few active members here actually owned on their cabinets without realizing it at first -- where, for example, the Pie Factory and Rivet screens immediately behaved as if it was Level 5 right off the bat.  It's unclear whether this was actually released by Nintendo (as a mod for arcade owners to install to make their games harder to earn more quarters) or by some unknown third party.

There are also different hardware configurations -- for example, there are 2-chip sets and 4-chip sets and after reading some of these threads it wasn't clear to me whether or not this necessarily correlated with certain versions of the software or not.

One of the decisions that TG made, and which most of the players seemed to buy into, is that you could tell that the correct software was running by seeing "Nintendo of America" on the opening screen, as opposed to just "Nintendo".  It's not clear to me how accurate that really is, but it could be a good start anyway.

So, the issue is complicated, but I think it would generally be a mistake to be lax on this issue where scores on games that are played on different versions of the software get sort of lumped together on the same scoreboard.  I'm not sure what the "best" way is to make sure a game is legit, but it's important to know that there ARE other versions of DK out there that DO play differently and CAN impact scoring.  I'll leave the rest up to you and the others to research this issue further and to determine how you want to run your high score lists based on your findings.