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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.
Not sure if you care, but the best possible score is 5.57 seconds. That's how he got found out.
So.... did anyone ever figure out how he might have created the photo?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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.