Longest-standing Video Game Record Declared 'Impossible,' Thrown Out After 35 Years (polygon.com) 234
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.
Yes, finally (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Re: Yes, finally (Score:2)
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 [youtube.com] 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.
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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.
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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
Re: Yes, finally (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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All of which would still be cheating...
Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output. (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting thought - I just took a quick look at the schematics of the CX2600 & CX2600A gaming systems at: http://www.atariage.com/2600/a... [atariage.com]
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.
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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.
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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...
'70s TV != Imprecise Signal Timing (Score:4, Informative)
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... [antiqueradio.org]
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... [manualslib.com]
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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.
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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 (Score:4, Informative)
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?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Faster Colsole would have messed up NTSC Output (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 i
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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
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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?
I blame the dot matrix printer (Score:3)
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? ;-)
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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.
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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.
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Yes, but Activision at the time had a different "best possible score". No one knows why.
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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.
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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
it wasn't JUST dragster.. (Score:2)
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..
not the same machine (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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. [youtube.com]
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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
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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 [arstechnica.com] -- 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.
Bloody Hell (Score:2)
Todd Rogers can claim a new Guinness Record... (Score:5, Funny)
For having the longest standing video game record being declared impossible.
Hardware vs code (Score:2)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
If you want more info these videos are great.
Some more info [youtube.com] 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 [youtube.com] Part 2 - Trying to reproduce the record [youtube.com] Interestingly, nobody comments on camera about the failure.
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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! [twingalaxies.com]. Because he claimed in another post that he is talking abou
Real Life Eddie Plant (Score:2)
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Watch "The King of Kong" (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Technical Details & Clarifications (Score:5, Informative)
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... [reddit.com]
Just to answer a few other technical questions being brought up in the comments: .0334 every gameplay frame per player. A faster system clock would also impact video output, as other commenters have noted.
-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
-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!
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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 wou
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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 sa
Re:Technical Details & Clarifications (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
The real question. (Score:2, Offtopic)
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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.
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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
Re:Long write-up... (Score:5, Informative)
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... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Long write-up... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe he altered the photo in his shop.
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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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 lea
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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?
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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.
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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 sc
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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.
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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).
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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 ?"
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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."
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Burn at the stake, heretic!
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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.
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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.
It's also possible that after 30 years (Score:3)
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I'm 39 and you're an old fart!
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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.
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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 commonl
Re: (Score:3)
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 we
Re: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)