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NESBot: Tool Assisted Speedrun On Real Hardware
Xistic writes "For many years tool assisted speedruns were purely theoretical and the domain of emulators. No longer! Using an Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller to drive an actual Nintendo console, pjgat09 plays back prerecorded input to beat Super Mario Bros. in record time. The selection of possible games is limited: 'If the game relies on any uninitialized memory for randomness, or if it is heavily based on console timing, it may not work. In the case of Super Mario Bros however, as long as the button presses start play back at the right time, the movie will play back correctly.' The author includes complete instructions on how to setup the device."
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Though I am impressed that someone got an Arduino to do something like this, I still think that it's impressive that it only barely squeaked by the "real" record. Here's a human player (not Tool-assisted):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRyhpxR3l_g
By my count (seconds are "game-seconds"):
1-1 Tie
2-1 Arduino up 1
4-1 Tie
4-2 Arduino up 3
8-1 Tie
8-2 Human up 4
8-3 Arduino up 2
8-4 Arduino up 2
So if my reckoning is correct, the Arduino, with all its glitches, only beats a human player by 4 in-game seconds. Though SDA counts time from when the games starts to finishes, including loading times between stages, in which case it looks like the Arduino may have won by 5 real seconds. Still, the human players have done incredibly well on this game to fine-tune it to the point they have. Yes, I am a geek.