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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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Great. All it needs to do now is develop an ego and look down on people who just want to have fun with their games, and this device can replace every speedrunner on the internet. Another job lost to machines...
Sure looks like he's going through the flesh-eating flowers and the rotating balls to me, or is the game just not accurate enough to detect these collisions?
Mario appears to be invincible here.
Not really. Far more work went into designing the setup so that it properly worked on an NES rather than an emulator, which, as TFA explains, was not an easy task because of the way lag is handled, among other things. Your suggestion would just add a constant delay to all the moves to account for the mechanical motion required.
On a related note, some of my friends thought IBM's Watson wasn't very impressive because it was receiving text input and parsing the results instead of "listening" to the answer being spoken, translating it into text, and then coming up with the question. Given my cell phone can translate speech into text, I have a feeling IBM didn't feel like that feature was important to the demonstration...
That run exploits bugs from SMB that I didn't even know where there. I counted at least 4 times that he ran through walls in one way or another; to say nothing of the way that he would jump on the edge of a pipe while the flower was out and not take a hit.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As a long-time fan of tasvideos.org, I have to say that I, at least, am quite impressed by the very first transition of a movie to real, physical hardware... even if they had to get the controller out of the way.
It is not so much a seminal technical achievement, as a true landmark for TAS fans and aficionados.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
This won't work with all games. Many games made by Konami use aggressive random number generators which depend on the number of clock cycles consumed while the game waits for the next frame.
Then the game also plays digital samples through the DMC channel, and the DMC channel does not have a known consistent power-on state. Because the DMC channel periodically interrupts the CPU to fetch bytes, that will affect the number of cycles it takes while it waits for the next frame.
So we have two issues coming together, number of leftover cycles from power-on state, and initial DMC state, so when you play one of these games, the game's own demo mode isn't even consistent between multiple power-ons.
You can try it with Blades of Steel or Double Dribble, and see that their demo modes aren't always identical between different power-ons, even when you are aren't touching the joypad.
No chance of those games being TASed on hardware.
Other games are far more friendly, and don't rely on exact timing for their random number generator behavior.
When I was 10, I sunk probably a thousand hours into that game and never beat it. I got to the last Bowser a few times and died and wanted to cry.
It sure is fun to see it beat in 5 minutes.
3:54, about to fall down a hole and does Mario Galaxy-style parkour to get out of it. You could do that in original Super Mario Brothers?
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Sure looks like he's going through the flesh-eating flowers and the rotating balls to me
Hitboxes for most enemies in SMB1 are only half as tall as small Mario.
One of the key things that makes this work is that on the nes the game controls polling of the controller and the controller polling process involves controlling a shift register in in the controller. Afaict his board locks to one of the signals that controls the shift register and uses it to stay in sync with the game. This allows it to play through an entire game with frame accurate timing. Something that would be MUCH harder to do by mechanically actuating a real controller even if you took a sync source from the console.
And doing it without a sync source would be basically impossible.
was not an easy task because of the way lag is handled
Lag probablly isn't a particaully good term for the issue. AIUI the issue is that there is not a 1:1 mapping between controller input cycles and frames out output. Since his device is locked to controller input signals rather than dispaly frames he needs to strip out the frames that don't have a corresponding input cycles.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Next up, High Frequency Tetris on sub millisecond collocated hardware!!
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.
but some of it involves doing crazy things like pressing up *and* down on the controller at the same time.
Is that even possible on the original physical controllers?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Yeah, I do have a problem with someone calling bullshit out of stupid animal reflex. Thirty seconds of reading the articles or the above and below comments would have explained that no, hitboxes are actually pretty forgiving in SMB if you exploit them just right.
And I had a dream to build a mechanical setup to control a 360 controller to "TAS" Trials HD. That game begs to be demonstrated as a perfect play. But alas, I don't have any skills like that so the dream is dead.. I suppose it would be easier to try to take apart a controller, learn the signalling and basically have a minute long macro button. Any takers?
You should see how many updated movies on TASVideos (which I've been visiting for a long time now) beat each other by a few *frames* (i.e. 1/60ths of a second).
It's not uncommon to have a movie obsoleted in favor of a 2-3 frame improvement, especially in the Mega Man games, which are very, very, very competitively TASed.
Interestingly I once saw this in some C code:
I've never found tool-assisted speedruns entertaining at all. Legit speedrun videos themselves are kind of boring, but at least they're for real. It's no different than going through a game with invincibility, or infinite time. You're changing the rules of the game - like giving yourself as many mulligans as you want in golf. Or editing out all the frames in which you missed a couple of pins in bowling to make it look like you got a 300. And the worst part is that sometime videos aren't marked as tool-assisted, so it leaves doubt as to whether some true speed runs were assisted or not.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
Or find one of the third-party controllers that used the Playstation-style 4 buttons instead of the D-pad.
Once it's perfected it'd settle all disputes of emulation error vs real bug.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The Playstation's "buttons" are connected to a single disc inside the controller's case.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.