
How a Game-Playing Robot Coded “Super Mario Maker” onto an SNES - kevin_morrill
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/01/how-a-game-playing-robot-coded-super-mario-maker-onto-an-snes-live-on-stage/
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minimaxir
Another interesting run during the TASBot block of AGDQ was the Brain Age run:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRc5RH4tR1E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRc5RH4tR1E)
(you can see pictures of the setup in the article)

In the run, the TASBot is hooked up to the DS's touch screen...and hilarity
ensues. (it's a throwback to a Brain Age speedrun with a similar gimmick)

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lfowles
I was wondering how it tricked the game into recognizing the correct answer.
Does it end each question by writing the correct answer inside an already
darkened portion maybe?

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Karunamon
The tracking pays more attention to the length and position of your strokes,
rather than doing what you might think of as OCR on the finished characters.

Here's a tool-assised run that the TASBot run was clearly inspired by:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p_UtfOmp9E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p_UtfOmp9E)
\- you'll notice there's no opportunity for the actual numbers to be drawn in
many instances.

A Japanese language article that goes more into the specifics:
[http://dic.nicovideo.jp/a/tas%E8%AA%9E](http://dic.nicovideo.jp/a/tas%E8%AA%9E)

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phantarch
It's consistently amazing how ingenious some of these runners are in figuring
out ways to break out of the apparent rules of a formal system and get
creative with it. The TASbot guys have also done things like RAM manipulation
of Pokemon games in order to rewrite the game code into displaying twitch
chat.

AGDQ and SGDQ are two of the coolest video game-related events held every
year. They're always streamed on Twitch, and recordings are posted to youtube.
Anyone who has even a mild interest in gaming should check them out.
[https://gamesdonequick.com/](https://gamesdonequick.com/)

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Zikes
I watched a few speed runs from last week's Awesome Games Done Quick marathon
and several of the runners were able to perform some impressive game breaking
exploits in real-time. They didn't always manage it, but for most of the
finicky exploits they usually had 3-4 runners doing the same trick
simultaneously and at least one of them got it.

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JoshTriplett
In particular, two out of four runners of Super Mario World managed to move
objects to exact pixel positions such that their x/y coordinates represented
machine code to jump to the credits sequence, and then get the game to jump to
that code.

See the latter half of
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3An7eUsnUc&list=PLz8YL4HVC8...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3An7eUsnUc&list=PLz8YL4HVC87VqROwl3mdpVypnv2SXtGm_&index=79)
for the video.

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Fuzzwah
Direct link to the start of the run:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3An7eUsnUc&t=51m40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3An7eUsnUc&t=51m40s)

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JonnieCache
You may also enjoy this speedrun of pokemon blue from last year's Summer Games
Done Quick, where all 151 monsters are caught as quickly as possible.
Essentially nothing is done correctly: menus are underflowed, pointers are
gymnastically redirected, PRNGs are manipulated, various state machines are
thrown out of alignment and fun is had by all.

[https://youtu.be/wtZ7CzbxBFM?t=576](https://youtu.be/wtZ7CzbxBFM?t=576)

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starshadowx2
Ah, I posted this yesterday but it didn't catch. I'm glad it's popular now so
more people can see it.

TASBot is really great every year.

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kevin_morrill
Sorry didn't see this was already submitted. Happy if dang wants to move karma
over.

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starshadowx2
Oh no, it really doesn't matter to me. Karma/HN points aren't important, just
people seeing good content is. I'm glad you reposted it.

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saganus
Wow. Just wow.

I never cease to be amazed at the amount of things a dedicated hacker (or
team) can accomplish.

Also, great write up. Full of details and pictures!

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vlunkr
The amazing thing is that this isn't a ROM hack, it's all done by exploiting
glitches and completely hijacking the game. And it's done in real time on real
hardware. The stream is worth watching.

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jtolmar
It's a RAM hack!

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jordigh
A similar feat for Super Mario Bros 3. The guy used Excel to write NES
assembly!

[http://tasvideos.org/4961S.html](http://tasvideos.org/4961S.html)

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flanbiscuit
Was that really an original backdoor put in there by Shigeru? That's awesome

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vanderZwan
I guess you only watched the video. If you scroll down a bit further it reads:

> I thought it'd be fun to pretend that SMB3's legendary lead developer,
> Shigeru Miyamoto, had left an intentional "back door" hidden in the game
> which we had only just now discovered.

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vlunkr
To my knowledge Miyamoto has always been a designer/producer, not a developer.

