
Automatic 3Dification of Nintendo Games: The GlEnd() of Zelda - phoboslab
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDxjbXAqTPg
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ketralnis
I think the really clever bit is the way he's using save states to
automatically figure out the game physics. For instance, he holds the left
button and looks for a memory location that's decreasing, figures that must be
the X location. Then restores the memory state to before he did that. With
that info he differentiates obstacles by trying to walk into them. If it
fails, it's a wall (so draw it like a wall instead of a floor). Restore back
to the player's timeline and continue

He doesn't say if that's a step he does once per game or every few frames, but
given the clock speed differences between the host and guest VM it could well
be redone pretty constantly which would allow for games with more than one
mode of play

~~~
fixermark
Tom 7's work on machine learning and NES emulation is very impressive. This
isn't the first time he's attacked that space; you can see previous
experiences he had with an automatic game-playing AI he built called "LearnFun
/ PlayFun" on that YouTube channel also:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGJHR9Ovszs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGJHR9Ovszs)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-WgQcnessA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-WgQcnessA)

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cornstalks
Minor nitpick, but can we change the title here from "GlEnd()" to "glEnd()"?
That is, after all, the correct form of the actual function (and the original
title). Changing the capitalization to a big G suggests an entirely different
non-standard (and non-existent) function.

~~~
Sephr
It was glEnd() when this was submitted. Someone erroneously changed the title
afterwards.

Is there some unspoken rule on HN that all proper nouns need to be
capitalized? This doesn't seem fair when iPhone and jQuery can get exceptions.
Some of my projects' names use intentionally lowercase proper nouns, and I
would not appreciate someone changing the title of one of my self-submissions
to align with their capitalization beliefs.

~~~
spdustin
I Suspect It's a Case of Mistaken Capitalization of Titles

(In my case, using Chicago Manual of Style's rules for headline case, in which
"of", a preposition, would not be capitalized)

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jtolmar
Way back in highschool when I was a part of the ROM hacking scene, I thought
it might be possible to make an emulator that can automatically reverse
engineer enough of the ROM to start building a level editor. I didn't think it
was possible for it to always work - NES level compression formats are just
too weird for that - but I thought you could do it for at least some of the
more sane formats.

The work here on automatically figuring out what RAM belongs to the character
makes me think it's possible again. Cool stuff.

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Houshalter
I thought this was an elaborate April fools joke until halfway through the
video when I realized he was serious. Everything this guy does is amazing.

~~~
alephnil
I actually think it is meant as a joke. The paper and code he made available
seems be something he actually made, and that without looking into the gory
details seems to be doing what the video says it does. That said, the
conference it supposedly was presented at is clearly a hoax, and did
supposedly happen on April 1st.

~~~
artine
SIGBOVIC isn't actually a hoax: it's a real conference. It's just that it's
focused on the absurd and the silly rather than real science.

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brudgers
Homepage at CMU:
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/zelda/](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/zelda/)

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cyphar
The source code for the project is here
([https://sourceforge.net/p/tom7misc/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/smeig...](https://sourceforge.net/p/tom7misc/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/smeight/)).
There doesn't appear to be a license file, maybe we could ask him to release
it under a free software license?

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ant6n
This is really cool. I also like the video a lot. I wonder how the drawing
animations are done. Is it just recording drawing stuff with MS Paint? There
hast to be a better way!

~~~
stepvhen
He was definitely using a wacom tablet (or similar) and Photoshop (or
similar). The color selection is what I remember from Photoshop. And obviously
sped up.

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cyphar
I love the scientific approach to doing experiments to determine the type of
game and it's very cool that it can be done automatically.

