TasBlock at AGDQ 2017: TASBot

I absolutely love speed runs and think they’re a great expression of the hacker mentality. To take a subtle bug in something like a physics engine and bend it to your will to eek out another 5s save off the world record is absolutely fascinating. Not to mention things like TASBot which always makes a great GDQ watch ▶ this video and got me interested in speed running in the first place!

LOL... from "Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!"[1] (which is insa^Wbizza^Wa very creative hack): "The cartridge is the dual of the Nintendo." [1] link edit: for a very impressive variation on the SMW "joke" in [1], I recommend this[2] video of TASbot streaming Skype realtime to [2xNES, SNES+SuperGameBoy] through the controller ports . [2] ▶ this video

He was the public figure for TASBot and TASVideos for a while (see link ). TASBot is really a beautiful idea to help visualize what tool assisted speedruns are doing via the controller button lights in TASBot's hands. I think DwangoAC and TASBot represented the TAS community at multiple events, not just GDQ. Tool assisted speedruns are remarkable to me because creating the authoring tools is hacking in the classic sense. And then there's the sheer insanity of exploiting broken game logic to gain arbitrary code execution solely via controller inputs. The most elaborate demonstration of this that I know of was given at AGDQ 2017, eventually injecting a video player into Zelda on SNES and streaming the video through the controller port: ▶ this video Ars Technica went into a little more detail about that feat: link

Assuming you're fine with using a $1 chip to make a TCP<->controller adapter, then you can make it work on SNES. ▶ this video

I'm quite amazed how resilient games are to this. Like how SMB1 for the NES is capable of things like the minus worlds where you're more or less playing levels that don't exist because the game doesn't expect you to be reading memory past a certain point, but as long as the values are valid, it can still use it to some degree. There's more extreme situations like Super Mario Land 2 for the Game boy where it's possible for the game to present it's own memory on the screen and if you understand how it works you can do things like ask the game to execute the ending sequence [0]. At it's most extreme a series of TASes was presented in 2017 wherein multiple different hardware systems were linked together via RCEs in different games to make a VOIP streaming setup from a bunch of consoles that don't actually have internet connections [1]. I'm sure there's all kinds of reasons this kind of UB is undesirable, and could be hazardous in some environments, but people have also done some really cool stuff with it! [0]: link [1]: ▶ this video