Longest-standing Video Game Record Declared 'Impossible,' Thrown Out After 35 Years (polygon.com)

Twin Galaxies, the video game record keeper and official source for Guinness World Records, has declared one of the oldest gaming world records invalid after 35 years. From a report: Player Todd Rogers has been stripped of his world record for finishing the simple Atari 2600 racing game Dragster, after months of debate over his completion time. "Based on the complete body of evidence presented in this official dispute thread, Twin Galaxies administrative staff has unanimously decided to remove all of Todd Rogers' scores as well as ban him from participating in our competitive leaderboards," reads a post on the Twin Galaxies forum from the organization's staff. That's a major blow to a prolific record holder, whose career stretches back to the earliest days of console gaming. Rogers courted controversy with his oldest record, however -- and it directly caused his ban. In 1982, Rogers submitted to Activision's official fan newsletter a time of 5.51 seconds, which the company recognized in print, awarding Rogers a patch Twin Galaxies later added Rogers to its own leaderboards in 2001, and Guinness World Records awarded the player with the honor of holding the world's longest-standing gaming record in April 2017.

Comments

Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to this, my record of 5.52 seconds is now on top.

That's Arthur Sullivan Smith. Just the initials are fine.

Re:Yes, finally

[The MAZZTer]

Not sure if you care, but the best possible score is 5.57 seconds. That's how he got found out.

Re:Yes, finally

[angel'o'sphere]

How do you figure that?
And how did he file for the record?
I mean if you write it by hand, my hand written 5.51 would read 5.57 for an american.

Re:Yes, finally

[jellomizer]

Could his Computer be a hair faster, or the timer a bit slower?
I mean it is a 2600, not quite a Real Time system. If the CPU was clocked up (even by accident) 1/20th of a second, difference is possible.

Re:Yes, finally

[The MAZZTer]

Well, all games run on a fixed set of rules. Think of Monopoly etc. Video games are no exception. And the rules put in place by Dragster do not allow getting any faster than 5.57. One could argue maybe the analysis was incomplete or flawed but there's a whole lot more sketchy stuff about Rogers that makes it probable there's been no mistake (imo). I'll post some videos in a top level comment that go into detail about this stuff.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

If the 2600 was clocked up the video signal would also be clocked up and the timer would also be clocked up.

The 2600 does not have a real-time clock. The game only tracks time according to how many video frames were generated.

Re:Yes, finally

[mysidia]

The game only tracks time according to how many video frames were generated.

Is it possible that some frames were lost, or failed to be generated?

0.06 seconds is a pretty tight margin.... it's not like the fastest possible was 5 seconds, and he was claiming 1 second with no explanation.

Do the rules preclude using an external timer? Could also be a transcription error or other honest mistake. Was there no proof of the score included with the submission?

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Could his Computer be a hair faster, or the timer a bit slower?
I mean it is a 2600, not quite a Real Time system. If the CPU was clocked up (even by accident) 1/20th of a second, difference is possible.

That's only possible if there are two clocks, a real-time clock and a system clock. I doubt the Atari 2600 had more than one clock. With a single clock, and it was clocked up (even by accident) then everything else is sped up proportionally and therefore the "game time" remains unchanged. If the clock was slowed down (even by accident) then it might give some edge based on the players' reflexes being the same but the minimum time as set by the programming would remain.

The only explanation I can give for the difference in the minimum time set by the programming being beat by a player is some random glitch in the system that coincided with the game play. A glitch that "skipped a beat" in one part of the game, and not another, but also did not cause some other obvious crash or glitch. It's not impossible for such a thing to happen but highly improbable.

Re:Yes, finally

[JMJimmy]

The guy was a prolific cheater who use a friend (who's now in jail for fraud) to verify his scores or submitted them himself (he worked for Twin Galaxies). If you watch the video in the article there's a lengthy and thorough pile of evidence.

Re:Yes, finally

[freeze128]

Engadget is reporting his time was 5.51 MINUTES. I sure hope that's a speak-o.

Re:Yes, finally

[dgatwood]

Any chance it was a PAL version of the game console, where the clock divider is different, and thus it shows fewer frames per second?

Re:Yes, finally

[jellomizer]

Possible there may had some problem with the Memory (something not-unheard of) where the memory segment that is taking the counter for the clock wasn't getting updated all the time.
print c
0
let c = c + 1
print c
0
let c = c + 1
print c
1

Or when it counted the frames it had a floating point error.

Re: Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Would Arthur Sullivan Smith lie to you?

He even speaks German.

Re:Yes, finally

[lord_mike]

Perhaps he was playing the PAL version on an NTSC TV. It is possible to get a pal signal on an NTSC TV. It is black and white and you have to really mess with the vertical hold, but it works, especially if you have an old black and white TV. That's how I manage to get a PAL ZXSpectrum running here.

It's unlikely, of course, but certainly not impossible. What's more likely is he may have turned the power switch on and off a few times quickly (called "frying" the cartridge), causing s blip in the ram which happened to give him a nice score that time around. Noticing that it was a great score, he took a picture and sent it in. I will have to find my old dragster cartridge and see if it's possible to "fry" it into a good score.

Re:Yes, finally

[beelsebob]

The Atari 2600 had no floating point unit.

Memory errors are highly unlikely - since generally these things rely on the hardware timer unit (which is synced to the system clock), without which nothing else works. As others have stated, rogers had a huge list of dodgy "records" that have either been proven to be impossible, or are strongly suspected of being impossible. He's even got records like scoring 6000 on a game that counts its score in an 8 bit register.

There's basically no evidence that any of his records were ever legit.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

The STELLA chip in the 2600 only had enough RAM to hole ONE SCAN LINE of video.
If your program didn't keep up, very bad things happened.

Re:Yes, finally

[sexconker]

Activision said it was 5.54 back in the day, and initially rejected the 5.51 claim. They later accepted the 5.51 claim.
5.57 is based on some other competitor's analysis of the code.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

NTSC is clocked at 60 frames/second. PAL is 50 frames/second. The register settings were different for USA cartridges and European cartridges, so that required some twiddling around with the VSYNC of a CRT monitor.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible that some frames were lost, or failed to be generated?

If I read the wiki page right the Ataris CPU had an input for the TV scanline and was "racing" it. The frequency of the CPU was controlled by how your TV displayed frames. Also the limited amount of resources ( 128 byte ram in total) made threads prohibitively expensive, so logic and rendering were done together.

Re: Yes, finally

[ArmoredDragon]

That should depend on the game. I could see 6000 if the score was counted in increments of 50 or some other multiplier. It's not unheard of.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

STELLA is not a chip in the 2600, that was the development name of the entire console , you mean the TIA, and it has no ram, that is in the RIOT

in otherwords, shut the fuck up

Re:Yes, finally

[lgw]

Not just some other competitor, but several people in the speed running scene reviewing that work. The code is simple enough to understand fully (the ROMs were quite small, and this game was simple even by 2600 standards), and everything that can happen frame-by-frame has been reduced to a spreadsheet.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah.

Atari 2600 uses SRAM, not DRAM so lack of memory refresh won't lead to data loss.
It is pretty inconceivable that a game from that time would use floating point arithmetic for the counter.
I can't imagine that the timer is anything but a simple load, increase and store running from a vblank interrupt.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

If you watch the video in the article

Let me just stop you right there. Nobody here reads the articles and nobody who reads articles watches the video (intentionally, at least).

Re:Yes, finally

[Just Some Guy]

This is an excellent time to make an exception to that otherwise-sacred rule. The video was awesomely damning, entertaining, and infuriating. Other "accomplishments" it documents:

- Getting high scores of exactly 15,000,000 on two different games whose scores increment by 100 each time. Not 14,999,900 or 15,000,100, but exactly 15,000,000.

- Beating the second highest scores on those games by factors of like 30x. He got 15,000,000; #2 got 500,000.

- Beating the Barnstorming game by an unlikely margin. Summary: every time you move up or down in that game, you lose a bit of horizontal speed: the fewer movements you make, the better your time. Testers hacked up a copy of the ROM to remove all obstacles, then timed flying from one end of the course to the other in a perfectly flat line. Rogers beat that machine perfect time by over half a second.

- Scoring 1,698 in a game that increments by 5 points at a time and that caps at 1,300.

Re:Yes, finally

[tlhIngan]

Could his Computer be a hair faster, or the timer a bit slower?
I mean it is a 2600, not quite a Real Time system. If the CPU was clocked up (even by accident) 1/20th of a second, difference is possible.

No, it was physically impossible. To determine if it was real, they went so far as to disassemble the cartridge ROM and calculate what are the possible numbers that are valid for the time. That was how it was determined it was not possible - there was no way to score lower than 5.57 using the code.

And no, PAL/NTSC makes little difference - these systems do not have a real time clock at all, so the "time" is really calculated by cycle counting at best. (The 2600 worked by "chasing the beam" - i.e., it only worked as a 1D system so the CPU is only just a bit quicker than the CRT in preparing the line of graphics. During the horizontal blanking, it would then prepare the next line of graphics. There was no framebuffer so everything was handled pretty much as a 1D graphic system. Sprites and the ball you had to update them every line including disabling the sprite hardware when you weren't drawing it that line.

The impressive part is someone basically executed the code manually and was able to give the precise timing to generate a list of all the possible times (you can empirically do it using a tool for tool assisted speedruns, but they calculated the exact numbers that come out if you hit the button at the exact time, which in a simulation by executing the code manually you can do.

Re:Yes, finally

[cb88]

The Atari 2600 doesn't drop frames as it essentially draws the frame directly onto the screen as the beam scans across the screen... so the only way to drop a frame is to blink.

It also only has 128 Bytes of ram... yes that's right an eighth of a Byte. With a special expansion card you could add something like 6k and many cards, and banked roms so it could go above it's normal 4k of rom limit.

Re:Yes, finally

[hairyfeet]

I always wondered if he was playing on one of the bazillion Atari clones, as some of them were seriously buggy. What some kids don't remember is that when Atari was #1 the courts ruled that because you could build an Atari with COTS parts that pretty much anybody could build an "Atari Compatible" game console, which is why the NES and later consoles had lock out chips.

I had the Colecovision with the Atari add on and my cousin had a clone and while my Colecovision Atari module would play pretty much everything his would play the Atari titles fine but some of the third party stuff would be "off" so he would have to bring them over and play them on mine. I always figured those were the games pushing the system, probably expecting everything to be 100% like an Atari and I guess his wasn't.

If he used one of these clones? i could see it not clearing memory correctly or having some other bug that would give him an advantage a real Atari wouldn't.

Re:Yes, finally

[Ksevio]

Thanks to this, my record of 5.52 seconds is now on top.

Each frame of the game is roughly 0.03 seconds so it's not actually possible to get 5.52 - you should claim your record is 5.54 instead

Re:Yes, finally

[sexconker]

Yes, but Activision at the time had a different "best possible score". No one knows why.

Re:Yes, finally

[Lunix Nutcase]

It also only has 128 Bytes of ram... yes that's right an eighth of a Byte.

Ummm... Your math seems a bit dodgy there...

Re:Yes, finally

[Lunix Nutcase]

All of which would still be cheating...

Re:Yes, finally

[farble1670]

How do you figure that?

They built a rig that can play the game optimally and that's the best it can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Yes, finally

[lgw]

They likely didn't ask the guy who wrote the code.

It always amazes me, as a dev, the bizarre idea in gaming that "the devs" actually have a 100% correct understanding of how the code works. Very rare, in my experience.

Re:Yes, finally

[chuckugly]

How do they know there's not some input edge case that allows for a better time? Seems like an audit of the machine code and the hardware would be the only way to really know. I didn't spend time watching the video.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like an audit of the machine code and the hardware

They fully disassembled the game code, analyzed all code paths for vulnerabilities and found none, then calculated an optimal input sequence based on the game's algorithm. The only way to get better than 5.57 would be if cosmic rays magically zapped your Atari and flipped some bits in the timer value.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Jail time for video game score fraud? Man, this is some serious shit!

Re: Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

1/8 kB obviously

Re: Yes, finally

[Brockmire]

These guys need to be working on beating Cancer!

Re:Yes, finally

[chuckugly]

Could still be a hardware issue. I've worked on enough real time systems to know that what's true in theory is often not completely true in practice, because someone overlooked something. For a modern example look at RowHammer. Has anyone addressed the supposed two other times he performed this feat in public? Once at CES IIRC? I'mnot saying this is legit but the proofs are not completely convincing to me. I had both an original 2600 and a VIC-20, by the way, yeah, I'm that old. The joystick was the achilles heel of the 2600.

Re:Yes, finally

[gl4ss]

sure if he didn't bullshit on a number of other records as well and said he got it multiple times and had people to testify.. ..but nobody recalls actually seeing it.

Re:Yes, finally

[gl4ss]

Any chance it was a PAL version of the game console, where the clock divider is different, and thus it shows fewer frames per second?

not really no and it would be a cheat as well, if the euro version of dragster did that. it's more likely that it just runs slower anyways, just giving you more react time. but having PERFECT inputs the time wouldn't be possible at all.

the codepath doesn't allow for the time he claimed.

still, a lot of folks kept claiming that the rom doesn't matter or that emulation is not correct or whatever.. but the rom doesn't lie and it's not some obscure chip bug or whatever.

thing with todd was that it wasn't just one score.. it was multiple scores. in multiple games. ridiculous scores with no proof, nobody to testify.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right; but there's TOO much evidence on this guy about his behaviour.

(Over on Reddit, they're asking why it took a former referee to weigh in before they took action; rather than the preponderance of technical evidence. I half wonder if a lot of the database is actually suspect.)

Other games, though, suggest that while any ONE of these might have been somehow a fluke possible, too many happened. (A hacked version of one game removed all obstacles ("Barnstorming") and his record STILL bet that.

So, yeah, ONE record possibly is a hardware issue. This many? There is way too much smoke for there not to be a fire.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

"Is it possible that some frames were lost, or failed to be generated?"

For the 2600? Not at all likely.

Code on the 2600 is running so efficiently (by necessity) that the code is literally running right in front of the TV's beam as it generates a screen. It has to in order to make all the color and graphics changes on the fly.

If a frame was lost/corrupted, you'd visually see it as the screen will roll - the program has to manually count out the number of scanlines it sends per tv frame - the TIA won't start a new frame on it's own.

As for "transcription error" or other "honest mistake", I think Rogers would have had plenty of time in the last few decades to correct the multiple places getting it wrong. And as for him getting it wrong himself, the track record he apparently has for breaking unbeatable records throws a lot of doubt on "innocence".

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Those rules were often locked to the frame rate. So if the lowest possible score on the PAL version was 5.57, it would likely be 4.61 on the NTSC version.

Re: Yes, finally

[meerling]

Not really, the software is really small. By todays standards, it's positively microscopic. Heck, your webpage probably has more code.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

They have audited the assembly and found no way to go faster.

Re: Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Good news: they do.

Re: Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

they guessed it from the code.. it wasnt such a big deal at the time and they were using him for sales/pr. they didnt do a good job at the guessing.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Jail time for video game score fraud? Man, this is some serious shit!

There are other (sexual) charges as well. You just want to troll without really read or watch the video.

Re:Yes, finally

[farble1670]

Has anyone addressed the supposed two other times he performed this feat in public? Once at CES IIRC?

Link it.

Re:Yes, finally

[dddux]

I guess over here your name would be Arthur Richard Sullivan Evans. ;)

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not in jail for fraud, he's in jail for raping a child.

Re: Yes, finally

[michael_wojcik]

These guys need to be working on beating Cancer!

No, we already know what the best possible time is for Cancer.

Re:Yes, finally

[chuckugly]

It's in the part 2 video.

Re: Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the timer was in a fast-moving spaceship.

Re: Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

The atari 2600 has no scheduler. It is a real time system.

Re:Yes, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody was 'clocking up' their systems in 1982, when he said he set the record.

Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which avoids any of the possibly interesting gaming or technological details?

Did he use a glitch?

Is that what this is all about?

Glitching is widely accepted in other speed running of games.

Or did he just straight up cheat by modifying the game source?

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

He lied.

Re:Long write-up...

[Tempest_2084]

Basically he said he did it back in the day and sent a photo to Activision (which is how it was done back then). Activision published it in their newsletter so everyone assumed it was legit. He also claimed to do it publicly a few times but no one could say they witnessed it. Fast forward 30+ years later and people started digging into the code because they suspected his score wasn't possible. They determined that the game code doesn't allow for anything less than 5.57 so he must have lied. He tried to avoid the question and I think at one point he was supposed to do a new live event to prove his score was legit but obviously none of that happened. So basically it was just old school lying and less than adequate fact checking back in the day.

Many of his other scores were under suspicion too because they were either outrageously high (like 1,110,500 in Fathom where the next highest score was 152 and the game ends after 7 rounds so you can't cheese it for points) or outright impossible (his Barnstorm score was proven bogus when someone removed all the obstacles in the game and they still couldn't come close to the score he claimed). He also submitted a lot of scores that ended with the wrong digit (like ending in 50 when the game only awarded points by 100's). So after a lot of reviews they determined that he cheated once too often and banned him for life. I'm sure some of his scores were actually legitimate (he's a good player from what I've read) but when you cheat once then all your scores have to go.

Re:Long write-up...

[mark-t]

So.... did anyone ever figure out how he might have created the photo?

Re:Long write-up...

[DontBeAMoran]

Maybe he altered the photo in his shop.

Re:Long write-up...

[Tempest_2084]

That's the weird part. Either it was a mistake on Activision's part (maybe a 7 looked like a 1), or maybe Todd said he got 5.51 and made the photo extra blurry so you couldn't tell, or it's even possible that there was no photo and Todd just said he got the score and Activision believed him (this was all new territory back then). Either way Todd ran with the lie and claimed that 5.51 from then on. I don't think we'll ever know as that photo (assuming it ever existed) is long gone. There are many who doubt the photo ever existed.

Re:Long write-up...

[be951]

Best guess, he got 5.57 and something (bad TV picture, angle of the photo, something on the screen, etc...) accidentally or deliberately made it look enough like 5.51 to get by.

Re:Long write-up...

[mysidia]

but when you cheat once then all your scores have to go.

How about.... "Show me video and live proof for all your other scores by playing on a copy of the game and system provided and supervised by an independent 3rd party (to ensure no tampering), And it's gone, until after you achieve a score that shows what you claimed is possible ?"

Re:Long write-up...

[mysidia]

Could have been using a different cartridge, or doctored the system or cartridge or display, then took the photo.

If you're sophisticated enough you could also (maybe) pass the video out through an analog filter circuit of some sort that would tamper with certain scanlines before they go to the monitor.

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a lot harder to do in 1982

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

"when you cheat once then all your scores have to go". Apparently that doesn't work with donable Trump.

Re:Long write-up...

[rsilvergun]

The theory is the game glitched.

Re:Long write-up...

[Blymie]

It's easy to manually edit photos, if you have your own photo lab and know how...

And we're not talking about adding someone into the scene, or anything large scale -- just adding a bit of length to the top of the 1. I bet his high school / whatever had a photo lab, and I bet he took the pic in black and white even.

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw a long standing record rescinded and thought "Must be Dragster".
His score is possible, and has been repeated, with a hardware fault at a specific point at a specific time. Without the fault it is impossible.

The debate has been did he get that fault by accident and manage that score, or did he just cheat? I've read about this score for over 10 years myself and by flipping a single bit on the cartridge, someone repeated his feat. That is just a single bit changed, so it actually "IS possible", but not on perfect hardware.

Of course what I read years ago may have been wrong.

Re:Long write-up...

[skids]

How about: "Jesus fuck, it's a game. A GAME, not a secret recruitment test to pilot alien spaceships for real. Play it for FUN and don't take it so seriously."

Re:Long write-up...

[freeze128]

If that were true, it wouldn't explain all the other high scores for other games that are ridiculously unattainable. He lied, and continued to get bolder and bolder about his lies. If it were an honest mistake or a bad photo only, his dragster score might be contested, but I doubt that he would be banned from the Twin Galaxies register.

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

more likely it was a transcription error and he got 5.57 which is possible, and it somewhere got changed to 5.51 by mistake. At this point after 30 years he probably even believes he really did get 5.51

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well. He submitted his record in 1982. There was already multiple home computers on the marker and capable of matching the graphic resolution of the Atari 2600.

There was probably no easy ways to create a screenshot of the Atari 2600 but the resolution was so low that creating a fake screenshot from scratch was probably relatively easy using a few lines of Basic (or whatever language was available on his computer).

It would be interesting to get access to the photo he submitted. If the quality is good enough, it might be possible to recreate the original image and see if he made some mistakes.

Re:Long write-up...

[beelsebob]

No, more likely he lied. If you go read the article, and watch the video, you'll see that this guy has a HOST of dodgy "records", that have either been proven to be impossible, or are strongly suspected of being impossible. He's for example, "scored" 6000 in a game that counts its score in an 8 bit register.

There have been other cases where he claimed a transcription error, or a coffee stain causing someone to misread an error... In those cases, even the corrected version turned out to be impossible as well!

Re:Long write-up...

[Lanthanide]

Citation please.

I've come across this story a few times, that he's cheated, and this is the first time anyone has ever said that it was a glitch that has been reproduced and it is known how to reproduce it.

Given that this bunch of nerds spent months debating his case, I suspect that if what you say is true, they would have known about it, and it would have been included in the subsequent articles. Instead of calling him a cheating liar, they'd be saying he got lucky with a rare glitch (which are now commonly accepted and in fact form the basis of speedrunning).

Re:Long write-up...

[be951]

I'm not discounting the possibility that it was deliberate, which could mean the others just show a pattern of cheating.

Re:Long write-up...

[St.Creed]

Burn at the stake, heretic!

Re:Long write-up...

[mark-t]

Think about when this was done... while trivial by today's standards, what you're describing may not necessarily have even been possible for someone who didn't have an entire game cartridge fabrication facility at his beck and call.

Re:Long write-up...

[mark-t]

That would make the most sense, IMO, and may be a legitimate grounds to invalidate the score, but not accuse of him deliberately cheating.

Re:Long write-up...

[rl117]

Pretty trivial to dump the screen RAM and then tweak it before taking a photograph. Copying the digits out of another dump isn't hard.

Re:Long write-up...

[thegarbz]

That was a lot harder to do in 1982

Ever wonder why all the tools in photoshop are named after physical activities you'd do in a darkroom? Like cut, paste, dodge, burn, mask, etc?

What is being proposed was trivial in the 1928 let alone 1982.

Re:Long write-up...

[Aighearach]

You really need to rewatch the movie. You don't have to take it seriously to get recruited to fly the alien spaceship, you just have to live in a trailer park and get a high score.

Source: In 1985 I had a Last Starfighter lunch box.

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

For invalidating the score, certainly. "Cheating" however is one of those tricky terms but these are groups that tend to take the vast majority of issues under consideration before making such a claim.

To be a glitch, either it would have happened once and never again, in which case he wouldn't have claimed to be able to do it repeatedly without actually triggering the same glitch repeatedly, or it would have to be more along the lines of a bug that can be exploited on demand.

Just like with any other code, such unintended exploits do add a whole bunch of problems into the mix. But keep in mind there are entire large groups of people who specifically go about finding these glitches, some of which are only possible in the code via programmed inputs and haven't done by hand, though others of course can be. Frame perfect timing for example can be done by hand but has a good chance to not trigger correctly, but via computer provided inputs it can be triggered consistently.

There are also entire speedrun categories made for exactly that type of thing.
Some must be reproducible on the real hardware to even qualify, others allow emulators.
Some specify exactly what types of code exploits are allowed and what isn't.

There is plenty of room to claim a record without the need to lie about what you have done.

Finally as was mentioned, unintended results of exploits do need taken into account when interpreting the code directly before declaring something impossible.

Not long back sethbling and some others found a couple exploits in the SNES super mario world, which allowed them to overwrite certain memory locations with values of their choosing (Eg by using the x cord of the sprite as the value or possibly the memory location)
Using these they wrote a small bootloader of code into ram and jumped to it, all from within the game and using a normal controller.
That code let them then inject even more code directly using a multitap and a few controllers.

They ended up writing two new games to memory, pong and snake basically, and used the graphical assets on the cart to do so.

Later on it was demonstrated this can be done by hand as well.
Naturally this same method was used to jump to the end game credit screen, aka beating the game, and doing so in an insanely short amount of time.

But this was all demonstrated, documented, and held the record specifically in the world record category for glitched exploited runs.

The guy in this article had lied not just about this record but many others, and in ways that can only be intentional. Cheating is a good label, seeing as there are records in categories specifically allowing one to cheat the game rules and code, but expect that you actually did what you say you did. The non-glitch records expect no different.

Re:Long write-up...

[Rockoon]

Wow such complete ignorance.

This is 1982. Consoles didnt have "screen ram." The CPU in this console was literally the video chip and had a total of 128 bytes.

Now please explain why you would pretend to be knowledgeable right now? You are pretending. You know it. We know it. Fucking dishonest fuck.

Re:Long write-up...

[erice]

Pretty trivial to dump the screen RAM and then tweak it before taking a photograph. Copying the digits out of another dump isn't hard.

The 2600 doesn't have a screen buffer, which makes screen captures non-trivial. But the graphics aren't very detailed either. He could have just created the image from scratch on an Atari 8-bit computer. C64 wasn't out yet. Apple's and IBM PC's didn't have the color range. TRS80's and PET's were monochrome. VIC20 might have worked.

Re:Long write-up...

[cfalcon]

So no one should be allowed to gather high scores, and if anyone does so, we should just assume that all the high scores will be cheaters so it is pointless?

I don't know anything about the topic of the article, but I know that if you don't police high score tables, liars and cheaters will be the only ones at the top, without fail. Just because you don't see the point of a high score table doesn't mean there are none who do.

Re:Long write-up...

[mark-t]

While I wouldn't claim to be an expert, what I remember from photography class in school in the 1970's is that it is anything but trivial.

Doable, certainly... but from what I know, it would be at a considerable expense of time and effort, and often financial resources if the result is going to be genuinely any good (that is, it is not immediately obvious to even casual observers that it was a doctored photo).

In practice, I'd expect that it was just not viable back then to do convincingly without at least *SOME* commercial-scale opportunity for profit. to justify both the expense and effort that was spent simply making the photo. For something that offered no significant monetary incentive, such as holding a video game record, I think it's improbable to the extreme that anyone would doctor a physical photograph simply to prove something so mundane.

Possible, perhaps. But not likely.

At least, IMNSHO.

Re:Long write-up...

[mark-t]

It's easy to manually edit photos, if you have your own photo lab and know how...

For values of "easy" that include unlimited time to spend on getting the result exactly right so that it can't be easy to tell that the photo was altered, not to mention having the money you might end up throwing away on wasted materials because of mistakes that end up showing in the final print.

Sure it's possible... but back then only by people who had more years of experience doing it than somebody who was still in high school would have realistically been likely to have.

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't remember where I read it. It was when I was looking at 2600 emulators and one guy got that score by having a programmed input and flipping a single bit of the cartridge. I doubt that web page still exists anymore.

I don't think anyone claimed he got it legit, just that it would be possible in an extreme case. The story I was reading is someone wanted to put in perfect inputs to see what score he could get, the one listed here. Then he looked at the timing and tweaked it and got the quicker score.

All of this assumed you have perfect timing while playing, which was pretty nearly impossible anyways.

Re:Long write-up...

[farble1670]

For something that offered no significant monetary incentive, such as holding a video game record, I think it's improbable to the extreme that anyone would doctor a physical photograph simply to prove something so mundane.

The human race. You new here?

Re:Long write-up...

[farble1670]

That would make the most sense, IMO, and may be a legitimate grounds to invalidate the score, but not accuse of him deliberately cheating.

He had many other high scores that consisted of things like,

1. Scores proven to be impossible (e.g., they did things like modify the game code to remove all obstacles to get a fastest run possible)
2. Scores that were impossible increments (e.g., 1050 when the game increments by 100).
3. Scores that were improbably high (like many thousands of times higher than the next highest score).

Re:Long write-up...

[sinij]

Couldn't you just take two photos from a fixed camera position, one of a screen with x.51 and one of a screen with 5.xx? If the images are really close together couldn't you just double expose?

Re:Long write-up...

[chuckugly]

Also to add a layer of difficulty, it was a Polaroid apparently. The VIC-20 explanation seems much better, or a simple glitch he figured out how to exploit.

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if, it's a bogus score and doesn't count.

"Machine malfunction voids all payouts"

Re:Long write-up...

[Hognoxious]

what I remember from photography class in school in the 1970's is that it is anything but trivial.

Doable, certainly...

You should be at +4 insightful, not GP.

Re:Long write-up...

[thegarbz]

In practice, I'd expect that it was just not viable back then to do convincingly without at least *SOME* commercial-scale opportunity for profit.

Profit? You know some people do this as a hobby right? I still do this as a hobby. I made a lovely little "photoshopped" picture of a diver emerging from a puddle with nothing more than some creativity, a $50 enlarger saved from a trip to the dumpster and a little fun in the "darkroom" (actually the kitchen with the main lightbulb replaced with a red one).

In practice it is trivial to do. In practice many people enjoy doing it just for shits and giggles.

Re:Long write-up...

[meerling]

Yep, the graphics were pretty simple and easy to duplicate and fake.

Re:Long write-up...

[meerling]

If all you needed was a finished game screen picture, don't assume any specialized hardware, just use one of the available computers at the time, duplicate the finished time screen of the game, heck, the pixels were so big you could count them, then make a pixel perfect fake. It's not as hard as some of you are thinking.

Don't forget that graphics resolutions sucked big time! I hit up some sites to check, and the Atari 2600 had a display rez of 160x192. I can't say that's exactly right, but it does sound in the right neighborhood, so I'll go with it. Just remember, you can have icons on your desktop with more pixels than that these days.

So just fake a screen, take a pic with the Atari 2600 and the cables arranged so it looks like that's what's hooked up, and run with it.

So unless he tells us how he faked it, it's guesswork, but not really important guesswork because it doesn't really matter how, just that it was proven he did.

Re:Long write-up...

[meerling]

You are talking about the hard core high score video gamer crowd here.
You should hope they don't see your post or you may be found in an 'Unlit Dark Alley' strangled to death with a joystick cord. ;P

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or he doctored a regular photo, then took a Polaroid of it...

Re:Long write-up...

[mark-t]

The matter of how a game screen was faked in 1982, given the resources available at the time, is the entire point of what I was asking.

Re:Long write-up...

[mark-t]

You're talking in present tense.... were you doing this in 1982? Think for a moment about the tools that would have been available at the time.

And just how many years had you been doing it before you were able to make a picture that actually couldn't be easily distinguished as altered? Think about how old this kid was.

And just what kind of practice would you have needed, and how much would it have cost you to get there, to fake a picture in 1982 that looked indistinguishable from a polaroid pic?

Re: Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

he doesnt claim a glitch. nwver did. he claims "human factor".

Re:Long write-up...

[thegarbz]

You're talking in present tense.... were you doing this in 1982?

No but my dad was.

Think for a moment about the tools that would have been available at the time.

I don't need to think about it at all. Most of the tools I'm using have dates around that time stamped on the side. Even the book which I used for developing exposure tables and techniques is from the 60s. The only "modern" thing I use for my hobby is perishables like film and developer powder.

The only real barrier is that I got most of this from the trash-heap whereas people would need to have invested in their hobby back in the 80s. But people did. Heck every male in a generation above mine in my family at one point or another turned part of their house into a darkroom.

And just how many years had you been doing it before you were able to make a picture that actually couldn't be easily distinguished as altered?

Define easily altered? Remember the quality of photos people were putting out back then? There was no 50mpxl pixel peeping or analytical techniques. My first ever attempt at exposure blending looked damn good and the result came out on an 8x5 to say nothing of the far smaller photo sizes that were common at the time.

And just what kind of practice would you have needed

Worked first go. It's not that hard. The darkroom was incredibly forgiving. Remember it's a place people often turn to in order to fix their in camera screw-ups. The process also isn't quick. You watch developing happen in real time and each step takes minutes at a time. It's not hard to get right first go. Unlike Photoshop where you click the button and instantly get a blend and then reach for the Ctrl-Z

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Doable, certainly... but from what I know, it would be at a considerable expense of time and effort, and often financial resources if the result is going to be genuinely any good (that is, it is not immediately obvious to even casual observers that it was a doctored photo).

For some people who values the record holder as the highest trophy, your statement does not prove anything at all. Besides, he has a helper who helped him verify the record. Thus, his intent was very strong and it was much stronger than anyone else. He is one who will go to any length to get himself fames./p.

Re: Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

the guy made a 35 year career from it.

profit.

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

VIC-20 didn't have enough colors, and it was too limited in how colors could be used (you couldn't just make any pixel any color you wanted, you only got 2 per block making simulating an Atari 2600 impossible). Atari 8-bit, however, could simulate the 2600 perfectly and if you were going to fake a screenshot would be the only system of the time that could realistically do so.

Re:Long write-up...

[Anonymous Coward]

So.... did anyone ever figure out how he might have created the photo?

Just create the screen in a vic 20 and used a cheap-ass 110 or a Polaroid to take the picture.

Re:Long write-up...

[toddestan]

Or a piece of electrical over the screen to chop part of the 7 off to make it a 1. Purposely underexpose so you can't see it. Given it's a Polaroid it would be relatively easy (by 1982 standards) to try different angles, lighting in the room, etc. until you got it right.

Re:Long write-up...

[chuckugly]

Doesn't seem like the most plausible thing to do, the VIC-20 idea seems more workable. For starters the 1 has a base that the 7 lacks in Dragster. Possible sure, but given the technology and resources available to a teenager in those days it seems like not a likely thing to do. He would have to dim part of the top horizontal bar and figure out how to create a short horizontal base at the bottom.

I actually was one of the few who bought Dragster and played it on an original 2600. It was a strangely addictive game.

Indicative of Honesty

[letthelightin]

Most organizations would try to cover up such flaws instead of announcing major corrections. For that I applaud them.

Then again... does anyone really care? Is this merely a publicity stunt?

Re:Indicative of Honesty

[SeaFox]

Then again... does anyone really care? Is this merely a publicity stunt?

It might be a way of publicly shaming him, since it's unlikely people would keep track of changes in the record after him holding it for so long.

Re:Indicative of Honesty

[Anonymous Coward]

They spent a lot of time covering up this one and similar submissions from this player. They took a bad PR hit when a video about it made the trending list last week.

Re:Indicative of Honesty

[Tempest_2084]

>>They spent a lot of time covering up this one and similar submissions from this player.

Pretty much. Somehow he became the 'golden boy' of classic gaming high scores and they decided it was in their best interests to keep his cheating a secret. People knew, but either they were pressured to keep their mouths shut or were friends of his and just looked the other way. Unfortunately for them, people kept digging and finding more and more evidence of irregularities and eventually they couldn't keep the lie up without looking totally ridiculous.

Re:Indicative of Honesty

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the Artie Ziff quote,

"Marge, I would appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone about my busy hands. Not so much for myself, but I am so respected, it would damage the town to hear it."

Space Race...

[Anonymous Coward]

My father and I used to play an Atari game called Space Race where you had to run through an asteroid field. I forget what our high score was for most of the time we played it but one day I absolutely tromped anything we'd ever had before by 50% but not only that I learned a new way to play it and could reproduce it though I knew my dad wouldn't believe it at all without proof and he wasn't into waiting to see me play it.....so I played again and recorded it on our VCR(and beat it by even 1 more point than before). When I told him I had beat the score he immediately told me I was fibbing but then I said, "I knew you were gonna say that so..." and then I let him watch the end of it. Debate ended quickly..

Re:Space Race...

[Anonymous Coward]

Something like that happened with me dad too. Of course, it wasn't an atari game, it was Natalie Portman dumping hot grits down me pants. Aye, I was naked and petrified for hours, I was.

Re:Space Race...

[Anonymous Coward]

Naked yet wearing pants? Hax!

First

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

not the same machine

[KiloByte]

Tool-assisted means in an emulator. The vast majority of emulators are at most cycle-accurate, which in some cases changes observable behaviour. Also, it's possible it was a different version of the game -- a lot of game rips are not bit-to-bit identical; versions for different markets notoriously have slight or not-so-slight alterations beyond just translated messages. Likewise, PAL vs SECAM vs NTSC have different timings that often alter the game.

Re:not the same machine

[Anonymous Coward]

All of that was investigated and discussed in the 271 page Twin Galaxies forum thread linked from the article, as well as in other places like TASVideos (where the tool assisted run was published.) Every known version of the game has been disassembled and analyzed, including looking for things like regional differences. 2600 emulation is very well understood at this point in time.

It's possible that all of this analysis had an error in it, of course; but you'd need to do better than some vague "what if"s against a mountain of facts.

Re:not the same machine

[quantaman]

Tool-assisted means in an emulator. The vast majority of emulators are at most cycle-accurate, which in some cases changes observable behaviour. Also, it's possible it was a different version of the game -- a lot of game rips are not bit-to-bit identical; versions for different markets notoriously have slight or not-so-slight alterations beyond just translated messages. Likewise, PAL vs SECAM vs NTSC have different timings that often alter the game.

Possibly, but were a lot of discrepancies and impossible scores entered, I think one record had a value of like 15,000,000 exactly where the other top scores were in the thousands. And most of the records were recorded under very dubious circumstances (with his friend as the referee and only witness).

I suspect Twin Galaxies knew a lot of the records were bogus, but a celebrity is better PR than a cheating scandal.

Re:not the same machine

[Eloking]

Tool-assisted means in an emulator. The vast majority of emulators are at most cycle-accurate, which in some cases changes observable behaviour. Also, it's possible it was a different version of the game -- a lot of game rips are not bit-to-bit identical; versions for different markets notoriously have slight or not-so-slight alterations beyond just translated messages. Likewise, PAL vs SECAM vs NTSC have different timings that often alter the game.

Yeah, I was wondering too if they were miss something.

I'm not saying the guy is legit, but I still wonder if Todd Rogers really cheated and if all those people analysing the record are forgetting a little detail like that.

Still, since the only proof he have is a picture of the score, it's pretty poor since he could have hacked the memory to achieve it.

Re:not the same machine

[bugnuts]

What you said about emulators might be true, but is immaterial.

He was found out because they looked at the code and found it mathematically impossible for the code to generate that time.

Many other techniques are used to find cheaters. Some of them double-down and have everything removed from the leaderboards as not only being cheats, but haven't learned to stop lying. Others have confessed, and recreated some of their legitimate scores.

Here's a pretty good video about speed-run cheaters.

Re: not the same machine

[Anonymous Coward]

Not always.
TASbot works on real hardware.
You make the input file in emulator then tweak it until it syncs on the real thing.

Re:not the same machine

[KiloByte]

Mathematically impossible on correct hardware. Not necessarily on the piece he had. 2600 hardware wasn't anywhere close to reliable, and timing errors were prevalent.

And, analyzing just the source code is not always enough. For example, given the following:
                size_t v = n + offset + page_address(page) - page_address(head);

                if (likely(n <= v && v <= (PAGE_SIZE << compound_order(head))))
                                return true;
                WARN_ON(1);
If n=4096, offset=0, page_address(page)=0, page_address(head)=0, compount_order(head)=0; even measured both at the start at at the end (to eliminate something trampling our data in meantime), it's impossible to hit the warning, right? Hah.

This said, I don't claim the guy is honest, merely that the way used to "disprove" his record is bunk.

Re:not the same machine

[Anonymous Coward]

Talking out your 4$$.

Re: not the same machine

[Anonymous Coward]

They were analysing the machine code, not a high level language with lots of edge cases. The Atari 2600 uses the 6502 CPU core, and we have perfect simulation tools for it. We can see the state of every single transistor in that CPU at any given time. So you tell me what's more likely; That he lied about this high score, like he lied about many of his others, or that he was the victim of a cosmic ray reflected off the wings of a butterfly to perfectly strike his Atari 2600 and cause a glitch that miraculously also didn't cause his game to lock up.

Re: not the same machine

[KiloByte]

They were analysing the machine code, not a high level language with lots of edge cases.

Machine code is simple, right? So ask the guys dealing with recent speculative caching issues...

The Atari 2600 uses the 6502 CPU core, and we have perfect simulation tools for it.

It sounds trivial: just execute the opcodes one by one, right? So read the article here -- any usual emulation technique results in differences that not only are user-visible but can make the game unwinnable. And even that is still far from being fully accurate.

Re: not the same machine

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds trivial: just execute the opcodes one by one, right?

There has been transistor level emulations for years, even ones a decade ago that can even run in shitty javascript. This is not a complex processor, it is not in a multitasking environment where arbitrary code is running concurrently to the program of interest: there are very finite number of possible states the system can be in, and for some simple programs (e.g. this game which is small and simple by even 2600 standards) you can build a complete state machine of all possibilities.

Re: not the same machine

[meerling]

The processor was a 6507, and not a 6502.

Re: not the same machine

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore BEN HECK of all people is building machinery to accomplish this exact task using AI to find the best time. He even invited Todd Rogers on the show to help train the thing.

Bloody Hell

[Travelsonic]

It really took 35 years... 35 YEARS to figure out that it was physically impossible, and deemed invalid?

Re:Bloody Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently nobody cared enough to validate it sooner.

Re:Bloody Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike some of his later cheats, it was only impossible by 0.06 second...believable to most. Also, the game was an obscure one, only 300,000 global sales. There may not have been all that many people who cared about a record in Dragster.

Re:Bloody Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It took 35 years for someone competent to bother to spend a couple of days analyzing every instruction of the game to find out what the least number of frames you could beat it in would be.
No-one has spent 35 years dedicating their life to that crappy game.

Emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I'm curious about is whether all these frame-perfect tests are being done on hardware on emulators because all the discussion really hinges on the accuracy of emulators at that point. The other part, which I find less likely, is that gamepad input is being read multiple times per frame and so per-frame measurements might not be 100% accurate.

Re: Emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

We have perfect simulation tools for the CPU used in the system. Look up visual 6502, it's pretty damn amazing. It wouldn't surprise me if we have perfect simulations of the other chips in the console, given its simplicity.

Todd Rogers can claim a new Guinness Record...

[mykepredko]

For having the longest standing video game record being declared impossible.

Imagine how long Russian election hacking

[Anonymous Coward]

will take to prove :(

Re:Imagine how long Russian election hacking

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like how the republican who got accused of sexual harassment demanded a recount and claimed irregularities despite it being one of the states that actually enforce photo id voting.

Re:Imagine how long Russian election hacking

[Anonymous Coward]

There are numerous election tampering methods besides voter fraud. Ballot stuffing, boxes of ballots being "mysteriously" found in the trunk of someone's car that wind up changing the result, an unusually high number of mail-in votes that have a significantly different vote distribution that everything else, vote machine rigging (if used), etc.

Hardware vs code

[Anonymous Coward]

I could see his machine being a bit overworked and perhaps there was something not 100.01% right in the hardware anymore. Maybe it clocked slightly different or something.

But his statement about starting in second gear when a code review says that's not possible makes it really suspect.

Occam's razor in me says - crappy TV in 1980 and a 7 looked like a 1 :)

Re:Hardware vs code

[Tempest_2084]

>>Occam's razor in me says - crappy TV in 1980 and a 7 looked like a 1 :)

That was one explanation for it, but he said that he got the same score at least two other times. So even if the first score was just a typo, he ran with the lie.

Re:Hardware vs code

[Anonymous Coward]

you clearly don't know how an atari 2600 worked. it doesn't have a separate clock, just the ticks from the CPU, and so the timer was tied to the framerate. so if the hardware was overclocked,then the entire game including the timer would have just ran faster and returned the same exact time vs if the machine were running normally.

however they did say if he did find some glitch to start in second gear then his time actually would not be very good, and a 3.xx second time would have been possible.

Re:Hardware vs code

[Anonymous Coward]

Dragster was from the days of extremely low resolutions. There's no way a "1" could be confused as a "7" because the resolution wasn't fine enough to put serifs on the "1". Think of how numbers look on a seven segment display. That's how the numbers looked on most Atari 2600 games.

Re:Hardware vs code

[chuckugly]

How about that: http://www.gamesdatabase.org//...

Re:Hardware vs code

[chuckugly]

Two other times in public with a large number of observers. Seems like someone should address that little detail .....

Re:Hardware vs code

[meerling]

The entire screen resolution was 160x192 pixels.
There were no pixels wasted on fancy fonts.
The 7 and the 1 were very distinctly different, so just like the the AC mentioned, nobody was going to mistake those two.

Hardware vs code

[Sabalon]

I could see his machine being a bit overworked and perhaps there was something not 100.01% right in the hardware anymore. Maybe it clocked slightly different or something.

But his statement about starting in second gear when a code review says that's not possible makes it really suspect.

Occam's razor in me says - crappy TV in 1980 and a 7 looked like a 1 :)

I was watching some videos about this guy

[The MAZZTer]

If you want more info these videos are great.

Some more info about the other sketchy high score stuff this guy has been up to. Dragster is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ben Heck builds some TAS hardware to attempt to verify the 5.51 Dragster record, using feedback from Todd Rogers himself. The attempt ultimately fails, with Todd's help only getting a 5.6-5.7 while plugging data in from deniers of Rogers' record worked first try for a 5.57 (not counting a data entry mistake).Part 1- Building the hardware Part 2 - Trying to reproduce the record Interestingly, nobody comments on camera about the failure.

Re:I was watching some videos about this guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because he was trying to toy with it to see if he could, through a series of small adjustments, get the same results with someone coaching him on the changes. Ie, it's possible that something that happened 35 years ago translated to a second person is going to be a very long, tedious process to get the right result, even in the best circumstance. Personally, given that he's got the hardware setup, I would have just brute forced it. That'd be much more interesting because that would actually be much more solid proof than people arguing over the possible. There's an actual finite possible space and the input rate is low enough to readily allow for a brute force approach.

Re:I was watching some videos about this guy

[Ecuador]

Thanks for the videos. I got more curious and read a bit of the dispute thread. It is crazy. Apparently there is this guy called Jace Hall who is "Head of TG" and he uses (well, used to for months at least) the most retarded arguments to defend that cheating player. My favorite one was where he is explaining that a model that only simulates the gameplay cannot be comprehensive and he proposes an example comprehensive method: read at your own peril!. Because he claimed in another post that he is talking about comprehensive stuff like Space X would do it, someone tells him Space X would fire him if he worked for them and our guy Jace responds by bragging: "Based on this statement, it is likely that you have have not been to Space X. If you ever get privately invited, you should go. They do some interesting stuff there.".
Anyway, I got my 30 minutes of comedy for today...

Re:I was watching some videos about this guy

[doug141]

I have reviewed the video, specifically the run around 19:30, and note that the tester is leaving a bug unexploited here. I remember getting crazy fast times by holding the throttle (button), and shifting to fifth as quick as possible, then fluttering the joystick left to keep it redlined in fifth, producing constant wheelies. If exploits such as this are specifically disallowed, then fine.

FWIW, I also discovered en exploit in decathalon's pole vault that allowed jumping the whole way up the screen: if you repeatedly hit the button to let go, each press restarted your "parabolic" arc. So, if you let go just after placing the pole in the hole, than kept mashing the button, you'd keep gliding upward at a very high angle to crazy heights.

Re: I was watching some videos about this guy

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the 5,57 tactic

Cpu in freezer

[Anonymous Coward]

The old cpu in a freezer trick.

No, i just made that up.

Real Life Eddie Plant

[BBF_BBF]

Wow! This guy's the real life version of Peter Dinklage's character, Eddie Plant, in the movie Pixels!

Re:Real Life Eddie Plant

[freeze128]

That character was based on Billy Mitchell, and even looks more like him too.

Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output.

[mykepredko]

Interesting thought - I just took a quick look at the schematics of the CX2600 & CX2600A gaming systems at: http://www.atariage.com/2600/a...

and saw that there is only one main system clock which is roughly 3.58MHz - that means that this clock is not only used for the processor but for the video signal's NTSC colour burst (3.579545MHz).. I can't find a reference to the exact colour burst frequency tolerance (I thought it was around 20ppm or around 70hz) that is required for a proper TV signal output.

Having a colour burst outside of the tolerance would mean, at a minimum, messed up colours and maybe the inability for a TV set to be able to display an output at all. No way could a variation of 5% (1/20 of a second) be tolerated by a TV Set.

I guess all my NTSC knowledge/Skills/Experience are now worthless - except for trivia in cases like this.

Watch "The King of Kong"

[Hussman32]

Watch "The King of Kong" if you want to get a flavor for what the competitive video game community is like. The people who make up the players and judges are, oh, how to say it politely, different.

Re:Watch "The King of Kong"

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps different, but read Twin Galaxies take down of the film. It was - ahem - creatively edited in ways to make things seem more interesting.

Re:Watch "The King of Kong"

[LordSkippy]

"The King of Kong" was great, but "Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade" gives a better insight into the community and the different personalities. KoK is a better film, but Ghosts covers a wider selection of the people in the community. Both those behind Twin Galaxies and the arcade player record holders of the 80s. Some of then are very cringe worthy.

Re:Watch "The King of Kong"

[Anonymous Coward]

The "competitive video game community" is actually several communities. Not all of them are as bad as you say.

There are the high-score douchebags you allude to. They play really old games, compare meaningless "points", and act like assholes. Most of these guys are in their forties and regard the NES as "too fancy". These guys fight a lot. They also cheat fairly often, which leads to more fights. It's all very WWE-ish. Their "home base" is twingalaxies.com.

There are the speedrun guys. They're generally pretty nice. Go watch a GDQ event (AGDQ or SGDQ) to see what I mean. Can there be drama? Yes, but it's generally not as stupid as the drama from the previous group. Their "home base" is speeddemosarchive.com.

Then there are the TAS guys. (TAS = Tool Assisted Speedrun.) They keep to themselves mostly. They get along well enough with the speedrunners, even joining in with the semi-annual GDQ events occasionally. But due to the nature of what they do, the high-scorers tend to fear them precisely because they can be frame-perfect and can find a bullshit record rather easily. Due to the repeatability of a TAS script and the very factual nature of their postings ("the machine does X, then it does Y"), they have very little drama among their ranks. Their "home base" is tasvideos.org.

Re:Watch "The King of Kong"

[Anonymous Coward]

Gah. Reddit's markdown is making me soft.

Speed Demos Archive
TAS Videos

Re:Watch "The King of Kong"

[Anonymous Coward]

To expound on the TAS bit: you don't submit a video, you submit a file that is just a recording of inputs at each frame. This is used to verify that your submission is legit; since there is no uncontrollable RNG on the consoles, the same set of inputs on the same frames will always produce the same result (on emulators; it's possible to do so on the actual consoles, but requires special hardware and lots of time tweaking things.)
Sidenote: shout outs to Bisqwit, one of the founders of tasvideos.org; he has some really neat youtube videos and projects (currently describing the process of building a compiler to properly translate Chrone Trigger into Finnish, and it's worth checking out his patch generator for Castlevania 2)

It's also possible that after 30 years

[rsilvergun]

he can't do it anymore. There are feats of videogame prowess that my younger self could do that our out of reach today, and I'm only 40.

Re:It's also possible that after 30 years

[Master Moose]

I'm 39 and you're an old fart!

Re:It's also possible that after 30 years

[LeftCoastThinker]

I'm with you. I used to have mad reflexes back in the early 80's and ruled the arcades everywhere I went; you might have seen my initials, ASS, at the top of the high scores list, but these days, I can't even fire up the old school games without being reminded how much slower my reflexes are than they were back then.

Still, good times. And I'm glad there are plenty of modern games that eschew twitch reflexes for things like strategy, story and depth.

Re:It's also possible that after 30 years

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is as a kid you forgot how bad you were. I can complete Shining Force 2 in a day but as a kid it took me over a month.

Re:It's also possible that after 30 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to say that's the case with your anecdote, but your perception of time is also different. It felt like my brother and I spent weeks playing Final Fantasy, but we had rented it for a week at most. I don't know if it's just a quirk of memories, or if perception of time really was different, but I suspect the latter as I get older and it gets harder to think of a year as a long time.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that but speeding up the CPU would speed up the game timer so you're back to the same number.

The game counts the number of frames generated and that is translated into the timer display ( 0.016 sec per frame).
The game also runs in lock-step with the display: One game tick per frame. The game does not advances until a frame is generated and it advances by a fixed value.

No matter how fast or slow you clock the system the game will display the same number.

The system has no independent wall clock.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[Blymie]

Well... we're talking late 1970s here. TVs surely could have lots of variance. Most even had vhold and lots of other such knob adjustments, and I think the set I played the 2600 on first, even had tubes!

I agree it doesn't seem likely -- but, I don't think it's even remotely impossible for a set to get a sync on an off signal here...

I blame the dot matrix printer

[perpenso]

Not sure if you care, but the best possible score is 5.57 seconds. That's how he got found out.

So his crappy early 1980s dot matrix printer and/or used up ink ribbon lost a few dots and the 7 looked like a 1? ;-)

Technical Details & Clarifications

[OmnigamerSDA]

Hi, I'm Omnigamer and I initially investigated this score back in April/May 2017. I performed the reverse engineering on the game code, and developed the spreadsheet model. You can find more information in my initial post on reddit, which also includes links to the Dragster simulator spreadsheet: https://www.reddit.com/r/speed...

Just to answer a few other technical questions being brought up in the comments:
-Accuracy of emulators isn't part of the equation here, since the models were drawn up from machine code. You can argue that there may be some other anomalies in the system, but so far none have been discovered or observed in the wild. That said, the game lives almost entirely within the MOS 6507 in the Atari, which is among the most studied processors on the planet.
-Changing the system clock would have no effect on the end time; the displayed timer increases by a fixed .0334 every gameplay frame per player. A faster system clock would also impact video output, as other commenters have noted.
-The currently available "optimal" solution for in-game parameter of distance is known, and cannot reasonably be performed by human hands. This time is a 5.57, and is about 150 distance units from being a 5.54. The best available human strategy is about 220 distance units from a 5.54. Covering that remaining distance would require a breakdown of multiple game mechanics.

I'm happy to answer other technical questions as well, either here or on my Twitter ( @TheOmnigamer ). Thanks!

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[OmnigamerSDA]

1. No - it doesn't matter whether the processor is running at 5 kHz or 10 GHz, timing would always be tied to the number of times the main loop executes. Since the increment is fixed and not based on real-time, there would never be an opportunity to gain additional distance or inputs where the time didn't also increment. Clock glitches could potentially affect certain mechanics, but multiple glitches at very specific points would be required to significantly impact the time.

2. No - see above. Video rate would have no impact on how the time was derived.

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I understand the 2600 did not have its own clock, and the frames were tied to the refresh, so having the refresh incorrect would still render the same score as if it was not incorrect.

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[OmnigamerSDA]

I merely provided a model. The model implied that the score wasn't possible.

If other individuals believe that my model and its implications were incorrect or incomplete, the burden of proof is on them to provide evidence of cases that don't conform to the model.

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[Just Some Guy]

Neither one, no. The 2600 doesn't measure seconds but frames. Seconds aren't actually clock seconds but the number of rendered frames divided by a constant.

If the clock crystal ran faster (but not so much that it screwed up the TV sync), then the "time" score would speed up by the exact same proportion. The 2600 would still calculate the exact same amount of animated movement per frame because that's how it works. On a modern computer, something updates video RAM while another something reads from that same RAM and generates a video signal for the screen to display. On the 2600, the CPU fills in the current TV scanline as it's being displayed, with only a few ms between screen refreshes to do work like calculating scores, etc. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... if you want to be horrified at what our predecessors had to do to put a dot on the screen.

The 2600 doesn't get feedback from the TV display. It just blindly writes its signals to the wire and it's up to the TV to decode them properly. The TV doesn't send a clock signal to the 2600.

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[SlaveToTheGrind]

We have this thing called burden of proof, and it is on the accuser.

More correctly, the burden of proof is on the person making a claim. Here, the first claim is made by the person alleging a high score. You could argue the still photo initially satisfied the burden of proof for that claim, but after people provided detailed evidence of why that still photo could not have been accurate, the burden would flip back to the claimant to show that he somehow achieved that score despite the strength of the evidence that he physically could not have.

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[Anonymous Coward]

Can the clock be slowed down instaed?
Maybe reasonable by human hands can be modified ;)

Still cheating tho

Just put a couple black dots on time of 5.81 (or 8.51 for that matter?) when you take a pic seems much simpler.

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[Guybrush_T]

Wow, quoting "burden of proof" completely backwards. AC ... troll ?

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[Anonymous Coward]

Mind-blowing shit dude. I wish I could understand this more deeply.

I can, however, state that I have beaten the original NES Contra game 3 times without dying. I reached the point where if I died, I'd just shut it off.

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[Anonymous Coward]

You mention in your reddit post that you're writing a book with an estimated publishing date of January '18. Is it out yet? Can we have details?

Re:Technical Details & Clarifications

[OmnigamerSDA]

Book was delayed due to a variety of personal events, but it should be out in late Spring or early Summer this year. You can see a sample of it on the product page here: http://www.speedrunscience.com...

'70s TV != Imprecise Signal Timing

[mykepredko]

Interesting seeing people's incorrect perceptions on 1970s/1980s TV technology.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there were very strong standards for signal timing precision - a bit of Googling found: https://antiqueradio.org/art/N...

Colour Burst frequency tolerance is +/-0.0003% which works out to roughly 10hz (I guess I mis-remembered or was thinking in terms of practical values).

It wasn't all capacitors back then - lots of silicon, although they were fairly discrete functions at the time. You can get an idea of what a Sony Trinitron TV had inside it here: https://www.manualslib.com/pro...

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[sexconker]

Old time TV sets were fully analogue.
There is no 'tolarance' for frequencies, everything that goes through the capacitors ends up on the screen.
As long as all the signals are coherent in relation to each other (the electron beam jumps to the next line at the end of the line and not in between) a TV will render a screen or a sequence of screens just fine in a HUGE soectrum of frequencies.

I had a NEC myltisynch 3D and an Arcon Archimedes, we run that combo in any thinkable weird screen set up the NEC could handle.

Wrong again, angel'o'sphere. Why is it you always show up to spout off on bullshit you know nothing about?

There's plenty of tolerance. There has to be. Blymie covered it very well. If you need a good overview of how analog TVs work and handled the addition of color, check out Technology Connections on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

NTSC rainbow generators

[Anonymous Coward]

If the 3.579545 MHz color subcarrier is the wrong frequency, the colors shift horizontally across the screen. Rainbow generators for testing NTSC color TVs worked this way: They put out a continuous color subcarrier at 3.579545 MHz +or- 15.734 kHz, which phase-shifted 360 degrees in one horizontal sweep period. The phase encoded the hue, so shifting phase gave rainbow effect. NTSC TVs were analog, so could be set to handle varied vertical and horizontal sweep speeds, but the 3.579545 MHz color subcarrier oscillator in the receiver was crystal-controlled at the fixed frequency for good phase stability over one horizontal sweep period. The oscillator was phase-locked to the color burst once each horizontal sync pulse, and free-ran between bursts. Peter Traneus Anderson

Re:NTSC rainbow generators

[mykepredko]

Peter, I don't think you're explaining it correctly.

The NTSC colour burst MUST, MUST, MUST be 3.579545MHz and be located on the back porch of the horizontal synch for a set number of cycles (sorry, I can't remember the number). Once the hsynch/colour burst interval has past and you are into the active video period, you could set the luminance of the signal to a medium grey and then insert the 3.58MHz signal with a sub-carrier as you describe to get different colours. The problem with this method is that it wasn't very helpful to fix problems with TV sets.

A more typical method of testing TV colour output performance was to use a color-bar generator which would send a phase shifted color burst clock output in the active video period - This would allow a technician to check the position of the bars (make sure the horizontal sweep generator was working properly) and see specific colour outputs. When I was a kid, I built one of these with the colour bars generated using a 74S151 8 to 1 multiplexor with the inputs being the colour burst clock signal incrementally delayed using multiple TTL buffers.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[Aighearach]

I've been playing with generating NTSC signals from 8 bit microcontrollers lately, and when you mess up the color burst (you'd have to switch to PAL to spell it colour, sorry) it just degrades to black and white but still works well. There is a big area of failing to B&W in between the cases of messed up colors and total failure.

Todd Rogers sits w/Ben Heck & his hacked 2600

[wrlee]

FYI, in case you haven't seen this, Todd Rogers sits with Ben Heck, using Ben's hacked 2600 to precisely control the game to try to recreate Roger's time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[Aighearach]

The funny thing about how wrong this is is that the older analog TVs implemented more of the NTSC spec and were much less tolerant of bad or off-spec signals than the newer ones. Some TVs older than about 1970 have trouble displaying the output of the older 8 bit consoles, because the consoles don't do all the stuff the standard asks for.

I've been learning all about this while playing with generating NTSC signals from modern 8 bit micros. Newer digital TVs are way less picky than old analog TVs, because the new ones just match the horizontal and vertical sync signals from a software buffer, they can just ignore most of the spec since they are fast and have large enough buffers to hold everything. This is literally all you need on a modern TV. Actually modern TVs are so happy with poor NTSC signals that once my software was writing the signal to the wrong port pin, and part of the image was still showing up on the TV just from the switching pattern in the noise! And I was using the normal recommended filter caps.

Many modern TVs actually don't even know what the different PAL/NTSC screen settings are! They just look at the sync signals and calculate it. You can do that with old analog TVs if you implement the whole standard, but if you only implement parts of it then only certain settings will work well. At a minimum, analog TVs are going to need more compliant vertical blanking at the end of a frame. Newer TVs can ignore all the crap in the standard at the end of the frame, and they'll see the vertical sync without warning.

The real question.

[Major_Disorder]

This is all well and good, but the real question is what was his score on Desert Bus.

File This Under First World Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this is the Anti-Off topic.

While people complain about news that isn't tech related, shouldn't we also complain out news that while tech related, is ultimately and obviously completely irrelevant not only most normal people, but pretty much everyone in the world?

It's like, a story on what type of fur makes for the best Furry costume.

Re:File This Under First World Problems

[easyTree]

It's like, a story on what type of fur makes for the best Furry costume.

No, that would be waaaay more interesting than this story.

Re:File This Under First World Problems

[Wuhao]

This is deeply relevant to anyone who ever found themselves watching King of Kong and devouring an alarming amount of popcorn in the gripping drama that followed.

Re:File This Under First World Problems

[meerling]

Nope. Slashdot has always been for whatever the admins find interesting or noteworthy but was particularly skewed towards tech.
It was always "news for nerds", not tech-news.
I have no idea why people still complain about what slashdot posts. They've been doing since they first came online, and everyone that reads them knows that, so why the heck do some people even bother questioning them? I know Commander Taco isn't around here officially anymore, but come on, they're always going to post whatever they feel like.

Re:File This Under First World Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

"Kill screen coming up!"

TwinGalaxies credibility

[Anonymous Coward]

They lost all credibility for me when they started to accept Pacman entries where Pacman passes, unkilled, through ghosts. Somehow they don't consider this a bug or malfunction.

You know what to do don't you

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what to do don't you - they reckon AI can beat any human player, set the AI to it, train it up and see how it does.

Re: You know what to do don't you

[Anonymous Coward]

AI will never win at tic-tac-toe.
Unless the player screws up that is a solved game. Going first or second you can force a draw either way.

Re: You know what to do don't you

[Anonymous Coward]

5.54.

we know already.

tas on emu, tas on hw.

Interesting Recent video of him

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting test that was done recently here

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[dryeo]

I'm sorry, but we have colour NTSC TV's here in Canada (some remote areas still have analog repeaters) and they used to be quite common.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[Aighearach]

Canadians choosing British spellings is just silly masochism.

it wasn't JUST dragster..

[gl4ss]

Each frame of the game is roughly 0.03 seconds so it's not actually possible to get 5.52 - you should claim your record is 5.54 instead

well todd didn't bother with such finesse so why should him? (the guy had some other games, where you couldn't even get a score ending in a 5 yet he put in a score with that into the tg db..

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[dryeo]

Why? It is correct, along with couleur.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[mathew7]

But isn't the colorburst signal relative to the B&W signal? The tolerances are low between the intensity and colorburst signal, but I don't think they are that tight for the complete signal/carrier. I mean, isn't the H/V sync's function to allow the TV to detect when a line/frame has ended? To allow low-quality sources to still display an image?
I know VGA is much newer, but I've played with h/vsync timings trying to produce the maximum resolution/refresh my monitor was capable of.

So an NTSC TV would probably accept a 27fps (56fields/sec) signal as long as it was valid NTSC.

Anyway, from the other posts it seems this is moot, as the game timing is calulated from frame counter, thus this discussion would be valid if a stopwatch or recording was used.

The longest possible *without tricks*!

[Anonymous Coward]

In Quake 3, you also can't go faster than, i think , 300 cps. But people easily did 1200 anyway, thanks to bunny hopping and circle jumping.
And unlike the oversensitive insecure loser game corp deciders of today, that was not considered cheating in any unacceptable way!
Au contraire, it was respected for its skill, and even made into an entire game mod and genre! The bugs are deliberately still left in every id Software game AFAIK.

So unless they checked it, on the original hardware, and determined there couldn't be e.g. a simple clock bug, this is still definitely not impossible, and in fact even cooler.

Otherwise, he's of course still a lying cheating cunt. But who the hell thought it was a good idea, to let people just submit their own scores, without anyone watching?

Re: The longest possible *without tricks*!

[Anonymous Coward]

dragster is a 2600 game. no input can make that time. none. nada.

Re: The longest possible *without tricks*!

[Anonymous Coward]

In q3 you can go faster. Duh. The code allows it.

Dragster doesnt.

Re: Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Outpu

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading these "maybe he didn't do it because....absurdly improbable thing" across dozens of "isolated incidents" and saying there is no pattern of malicious activity feels like watching the walking heads on news defending Trump.

Just because a monster wears your teams jersey today doesn't mean you need to root for him.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[meerling]

If you're talking back in the 70s, or even 80s, it definitely had at least one tube, the picture tube, aka CRT which of course means Cathode Ray Tube. :)
I rather hate CRTs, I'm so glad they're dead.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[Blymie]

Sure, the CRT yes. But, I mean vacuum tubes as opposed to semiconductors....

5.51 wasn't the record according to N. Korea

[Anonymous Coward]

Kim Jong Un set the record a few months ago!

http://www.gamingfreepress.com/north-korea-leader-sets-new-atari-2600-dragster-record/

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[bws111]

The purpose of the sync functions are to sync the oscillators in the receiver with the oscillators in the transmitter. There are still tight tolerances. For instance, if the horizontal oscillator is running too fast, the end of a line will 'wrap around' to the beginning of the next line, then when the sync happens the beginning of the next line will be drawn slightly below that wrapped part, giving a 'column' appearance to the left side of the screen. If the oscillator is running too slow the beam won't make it all the way across the screen before the sync, and the image will be 'compressed', with a black bar on the right side of the screen. If the vertical oscillator is off the picture will 'roll', either up or down. If the oscillators are too far off the receiver won't be able to sync at all, and the picture will 'tear' and possibly roll at the same time.

Later NTSC models that converted the signal to digital instead of using oscillators MAY have been able to cope with out-of-spec signals (for instance, detecting how long there was between syncs and adjusting how the line is filled accordingly), but there is no way a pure analog TV could deal with that, especially something as out of spec as 27fps.

Their biggest mistake was the lack of proof

[wardrich86]

Seriously... the "proof" he had of that Dragster score was bullshit in the first place.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[angel'o'sphere]

Analog TVs don't need to ccalculate anything from sycfh signals.
That is why they are called that way, the signal iself is the synch.

Old analog TVs work like a oscilloscope, they simply use the signal to drive the electron beam.
Unless you are so far out of specc that your TV physically can not handle it (filters), it does not care if you have a 24 half picture or any other 'frequenccy', most certainly it is completely immune to shifts in frequency ...

Heck, how do you think fast forward on a video recorder is displayed on a TV?

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[angel'o'sphere]

I pointed out that there is plenty of tollerance.
So, in which way am I wrong?

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[sexconker]

I pointed out that there is plenty of tollerance.
So, in which way am I wrong?

Old time TV sets were fully analogue.
There is no 'tolarance' for frequencies, everything that goes through the capacitors ends up on the screen.

Just go away.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[angel'o'sphere]

Then you go away?
What a kind of idiot are you?

The parent claimed that old TVs have a 5% tolerance to signs, input.
I pointed out: no, they are fully 'analogue', hence I put my 'tolerance' in the answer in 'quotes'.

Why the funk are you answering to my posts and insult me if you are to dumb to read the post I answered to?

What's the second longest?

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread is a little long in the tooth at this point, so I'm not really expecting an answer, but what's the second longest-standing record...that's legit?

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[bws111]

Sorry I am late with this. Hope it will help clear things up for you.

In the TV receiver are two circuits which generate sawtooth signals, one for the horizontal and one for the vertical. These signals are what generate the raster, by pulling the electron beam across and down the screen. These are not dependant on the input signal (if you turn on an old TV with no input, you get a full screen of 'snow' - the raster is being generated properly but there is only noise to modulate the beam).

The 'sync' portion of the signal only makes sure that receiver starts drawing a line at the same time the transmitter is sending one. So the transmitter sends the sync, followed by luminance, followed by a 'black' (actually part of it is blacker than black) period (which contains the sync for the next line). At the same time, the receiver starts drawing the line, and at the end of the line the sawtooth returns to 0 (retrace), exactly when the 'black' portion of the signal arrives.

The receiver will be drawing lines at the rate of 15734/second, no matter how fast you are sending them.

So what happens if you are sending lines slower than that? Things start out OK. the line starts at the same time. But, when the receiver gets to the end of the line and does the retrace, you are still sending luminance info. The beam is therefore not off, and at least a portion of the retrace will be visible (not good). If the difference in speed is small, this will just show up as garbage on the right side of the screen. If the difference is large enough, you will not only see the entire retrace, but the end of the previous line (which you are still sending) will be drawn at the beginning of the next line (really not good).

On the other hand, if you are sending faster than the receiver, the receiver will not make it all the way across the screen before being forced to start a new line by the next sync. The picture will be 'compressed' horizontally (circles will not be round), and there will be black space on the right of the screen.

The same thing happens with the vertical.

Now, no TV is perfect, so the manufacturers 'overscan' by a little bit, so that the edges of the picture are hidden by the bezel. This hides small errors.

The color portion of the signal is even more finicky, but I won't go into that here.

So, while the TV may display 'something' for a wide range of frequencies, it will show 'just fine' for only a VERY narrow range of frequencies. Therefore, your original statement is entirely false.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[bws111]

No, this is entirely wrong. The 'raster' on the TV is generated INTERNALLY and has NO dependancy on the input signal (other than sync). An analog TV with NO signal will display a full raster just fine.

Fast forward is done by skipping frames, not by sending the frames faster.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[Aighearach]

English is an open language and doesn't even have "correct" spellings, or therefore, incorrect ones.

You purport to be asking a question, ("why?") but you don't actually explain what you're confused about. So there is little chance for anybody to educate you.

You don't seem to understand very much of the conversation. I'm going to take a wild guess and say you're probably one of those Frenchies who don't even have an English name for themselves, and you should probably quit pretending that you're fully fluent.

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[angel'o'sphere]

Skipping frames and sending them faster, and sending them with a higher frequency.
The signal from the tape is simply directly send to the TV.

I don't know what you mean with 'raster', old TVs had no mask on the screen ...

Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output

[bws111]

A raster is an image created by starting in a corner, drawing a line from left to right (or the other way), advancing to the next next line, drawing that line, etc. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there is a mask (and, by the way, all color TVs have always had a mask). ALL TVs, computer monitors, laser printers, inkjet printers, fax machines, and almost everything else that produces an image does it with a raster. The very few exceptions include xy plotters, oscilloscopes, and a few arcade games (Asteroid).

If you remove the signal from an oscilloscope, what do you see? A dot (unless, like a TV, you are using an internally generated horizontal sweep in which case you will see a line). If you remove the signal from an analog TV what do you see? A complete raster, containing nothing but noise (snow). If you want to replace the noise with an image, you must, must, must provide image data EXACTLY as the TV expects it.

Frames are NOT 'sent with a higher frequency' when a tape is fast forwarded. The frame rate (and line rate) is determined by how fast the heads are spinning, which is a constant 1798.2 RPM regardless of how fast the tape is moving (or not). You can STOP the tape (freeze), and the image will still be shown at 29.97FPS. If you move the tape faster the spinning heads will 'miss' some frames, and the image appears as fast forward, but the frame rate is EXACTLY the same.