9 ms·

Forensic analysts accuse Billy Mitchell of cheating for Donkey Kong record

86 points by colinprince 4y ago

vintermann 4y ago
> The controversy over Mitchell’s records is so serious that the player has sued Twin Galaxies That's not a good measure of seriousness, since this particular player is well known for legal threats.
vntok 4y ago
> A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Fokkens analysis shows “new evidence that allegedly shows Mitchell used a high speed camera to scan video memory.” In fact, it shows “new evidence that uses a high speed camera to show the scanning of video memory.” The original formulation made no sense at all. How in hell did it ever get past reviewers and editors?
smitty1e 4y ago
I always take this sort of news as an unintended announcment of human prosperity. "Person X, who does frivolous activity Y, has conflict with competition Z". If we're so far removed from the raw struggle to keep body and soul together that we can not only play Y, but have competition Z surrounding Y, then we are truly succeeding.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  ...or we've already failed, and this is all that is left?
  - manholio 4y ago
    ...or we're on on the very edge, walking straight into the abyss, totally focused on some mindless diversion on our device's screen?
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    No, I do not think competitive games are evidence of that. Do you have a reason to think that, or were you just being contrary?
- Dig1t 4y ago
  Absolutely true, I have the same thought pretty often. It’s one of many examples that we, in the first world, all ignore or take for granted every day. We’re so far removed from the struggles of our ancestors that we’ve invented new struggles just to pass the time. We can devote entire lives to the pursuit of frivolous activities like this and it’s pretty great.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Elites have entertained themselves with soap opera drama and frivolities throughout human history, plenty of which had a body count measured in poor people. It's not a sign of civilization, or a sign of humans in general being detached from material needs. There have always been subsets of humans who haven't had anything to worry about other than social position, acceptance and their own entertainment. Other people are skipping meals to pay off medical debt.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      That said, it's curious how often some fractional subset of those "frivolities" are something genuinely important. Far back in history, the basis of a lot of science and cultural advancement was through Elites "wasting time" on mathematics, chemistry, and the like. What's interesting now is that the pool of elites in the world large enough to engage in frivolous activity is now so much larger than before. So instead of some royal scion who's very into fox hunting, we have fairly relatively poor people who are passionate about all kinds of other things. I find it hard to be too dismal about more people having the freedom to do things other than backbreaking labor that is necessary to stay alive. How many more people now are able to keep their body in shape and soul happy via "frivolous" artistic ventures or sports? And of those, how many of them refresh themselves by doing something that may ultimately seem as important as Isaac Newton's idle musings about math or Byron's poetry?
    - InCityDreams 4y ago
      >It's not a sign of civilization, or a sign of humans in general being detached from material needs. Which 'it' are you referring to in the previous sentence (or in the original comment)?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Or it's bread and circuses. Just because my local news spends 4 minutes on a story about a dog doesn't mean that nothing in the world was more important to the people watching my local news than a story about a dog.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  'King of Kong' was a fun movie, though due to admissions by its creator that they edited in a conflict that didn't exist, I no longer call it a documentary. Beyond that, it's very strange that so many have expended so much effort on this topic. It doesn't seem to be about a video game record anymore and is just another case of people who have put themselves into two different camps warring with each other simply for some kind of emotional thrill they get out of the conflict itself. In the end, we know that Billy, Steve, and whoever is the current record holder are all insanely talented at the game Donkey Kong and this at point, it reminds me of arguments over which tall building is taller, resorting to measuring from garage entrances to radio masts, when in reality, two buildings that are 500m tall and within 1% of each other are so far above everything else that the 1% doesn't matter anymore. But we like absolute clear-cut black and white labels on things, so the arguing will go on.
  - smcl 4y ago
    The movie has definitely got more people involved in this than normal, since they likely wouldn't have known about it otherwise. But cheating in competitive gaming like this is taken very seriously. Karl Jobst has covered a few scandals like Trackmania (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww7x5elophk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww7x5elophk), and Guitar Hero (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58fqNL-kvaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58fqNL-kvaI) and the original Doom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv0ZRTlIXR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv0ZRTlIXR0). In this case it doesn't help that Billy comes across as very weird and unlikeable, the movie plays this up, particularly in contrast to Wiebe (who seems pretty nice) but it hurts him more that he's been a bit evasive and turned in a few questionable submissions. And re the tallest-buildings-within-1%-of-each-other thing, that's just it. People who suck at a game and report outright fraudulent results are generally outed pretty quickly. But the big scandals - like the ones I linked above - often occur when those who are already at the very top of their game feel pressure to compete and cut a few corners to get a score or a time just ahead of what they are normally capable of achieving. And those communities are not centered around discovering who happens to be roughly in that top 1% of competitors, but around a leaderboard of ranked scores. They share tips, strategies and there are genuine friendly rivalries between competitors.
gurchik 4y ago
For those out of the loop, people have been sharing screenshots of the screen transitions from Mitchell's videos and MAME since at least 2018 as evidence he cheated. This isn't new information. What is new is that rather than simply showing the screenshots, Tanner Fokkens has dissected the code from the original Donkey Kong ROM to prove that the footage could not have been generated from the original cabinet. He then analyzed the MAME code to demonstrate why MAME renders the way it does to prove that Mitchell's footage matches a version of MAME that would have been available to download at the time the footage was recorded. This is similar to when the speedrunner OmniGamer analyzed the source code to Dragster to prove that Todd Rogers faked his world record footage and subsequent Guinness record.
- flatiron 4y ago
  I wonder if had used a MiSTER instead of MAME if he would have been caught. I don’t think it was out in 2018 though.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    Mitchell's video was from pong before 2018, the screenshot comparisons showing he used MAME are from 2018.
    - adrianmonk 4y ago
      > pong before 2018 This wins the thematically-appropriate typo of the week award.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
flobosg 4y ago
Discussion from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32755009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32755009
- jefftk 4y ago
  That source is loads better, and actually explains what the news is here: "In this new analysis, Fokkens expertly takes the existing evidence a step further, by dissecting exactly why these different transition screens appear the way they do on both the arcade and MAME platforms. This includes a line-by-line look at the graphics code within the original Donkey Kong ROM program, as well as programming instructions found in the MAME source code."
VHRanger 4y ago
I love the low stakes drama, but seriously, who cares? All this effort could have been spent on something meaningful. After the "King of Kong" documentary we have the preponderance of evidence that his record shouldn't be taken seriously and the organization maintaining the high score list is untrustworthy.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Was it just me or was that doc basically about addiction and abuse? I remember some friends thinking it made the guy look good but all I could remember is the horror of how he treated his family.
- schoen 4y ago
  Apparently there's an active defamation lawsuit by Mitchell against Twin Galaxies, so there's a very concrete reason for people to care about whether the allegations are true.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  Believe it or not, there is a several decade old community of people who care, and they don't care if other people care or not.
- dbttdft 4y ago
  Incidentally, the paper was a good read and I'm always looking for details of precisely how rendering works on 90s and earlier games.
dehrmann 4y ago
I guess everyone needs a hobby, but this is a 50+ year-old man allegedly cheating at getting the high score for a 40-year-old arcade game.
- warinukraine 4y ago
  Some people try to choose hobbies that have synergies with other parts of their lives. It think that's a good strategy not just for hobbies but for everything. I doubt that can be argued to be the case for donkey Kong though.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    I think it promotes his hot sauce business.
- comex 4y ago
  I think getting the high score for a 40-year-old arcade game is a perfectly fine hobby and a fine thing to take pride in. Certainly, if you check Twitch, record competition in single-player games draws plenty of viewership. The most popular games are somewhat less old (usually NES era and onwards), and it’s usually in the form of speedrunning rather than high score competition, but it’s the same general idea. Cheating is different, of course. But I interpret your comment as dismissing the activity itself.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    The amount of effort being put into both attacking and defending this guy, and the media attention it has received, is far out of proportion compared to the importance of the activity itself.
    - fudgefactorfive 4y ago
      One of the issues is that Mitchell is notoriously litigious and has made a cottage industry of promoting himself as "guy with game world records". He has literally sued people into submission, over this exact claim, which is now forensicly validated. See Karl Jobst for reference.
gilded-lilly 4y ago
No mention of whether the emulator is easier than the original, nor whether his score was still the high score in the emulator.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  I think it's much easier to cheat programmatically with an emulator. For example, you could play a game in an emulator and record all input, and save at each new screen. Then if you die or get a bad RNG behavior, restore from the last save (discarding all input since the last save), and continue playing until you beat the screen. Then, for the record, just replay the 'winning' branch through the CRT and record it. MAME supports exactly this kind of input recording and playback: https://www.reddit.com/r/MAME/comments/6p0g9o/how_to_record_and_play_my_input_on_mame_187/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MAME/comments/6p0g9o/how_to_record_...
  - Firehawke 4y ago
    Exactly this. And it doesn't guarantee that the code he ran was a stock build of MAME, either. It could be a version with rerecording that lets you go back and fix mistakes until you get a perfect tool-assisted run.

86 points by colinprince 4y ago

> The controversy over Mitchell’s records is so serious that the player has sued Twin Galaxies That's not a good measure of seriousness, since this particular player is well known for legal threats.

vntok 4y ago

> A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Fokkens analysis shows “new evidence that allegedly shows Mitchell used a high speed camera to scan video memory.” In fact, it shows “new evidence that uses a high speed camera to show the scanning of video memory.” The original formulation made no sense at all. How in hell did it ever get past reviewers and editors?

smitty1e 4y ago

I always take this sort of news as an unintended announcment of human prosperity. "Person X, who does frivolous activity Y, has conflict with competition Z". If we're so far removed from the raw struggle to keep body and soul together that we can not only play Y, but have competition Z surrounding Y, then we are truly succeeding.

skeeter2020 4y ago
...or we've already failed, and this is all that is left?
- manholio 4y ago
  ...or we're on on the very edge, walking straight into the abyss, totally focused on some mindless diversion on our device's screen?
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  No, I do not think competitive games are evidence of that. Do you have a reason to think that, or were you just being contrary?
Dig1t 4y ago
Absolutely true, I have the same thought pretty often. It’s one of many examples that we, in the first world, all ignore or take for granted every day. We’re so far removed from the struggles of our ancestors that we’ve invented new struggles just to pass the time. We can devote entire lives to the pursuit of frivolous activities like this and it’s pretty great.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Elites have entertained themselves with soap opera drama and frivolities throughout human history, plenty of which had a body count measured in poor people. It's not a sign of civilization, or a sign of humans in general being detached from material needs. There have always been subsets of humans who haven't had anything to worry about other than social position, acceptance and their own entertainment. Other people are skipping meals to pay off medical debt.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    That said, it's curious how often some fractional subset of those "frivolities" are something genuinely important. Far back in history, the basis of a lot of science and cultural advancement was through Elites "wasting time" on mathematics, chemistry, and the like. What's interesting now is that the pool of elites in the world large enough to engage in frivolous activity is now so much larger than before. So instead of some royal scion who's very into fox hunting, we have fairly relatively poor people who are passionate about all kinds of other things. I find it hard to be too dismal about more people having the freedom to do things other than backbreaking labor that is necessary to stay alive. How many more people now are able to keep their body in shape and soul happy via "frivolous" artistic ventures or sports? And of those, how many of them refresh themselves by doing something that may ultimately seem as important as Isaac Newton's idle musings about math or Byron's poetry?
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    >It's not a sign of civilization, or a sign of humans in general being detached from material needs. Which 'it' are you referring to in the previous sentence (or in the original comment)?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 4y ago
Or it's bread and circuses. Just because my local news spends 4 minutes on a story about a dog doesn't mean that nothing in the world was more important to the people watching my local news than a story about a dog.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
'King of Kong' was a fun movie, though due to admissions by its creator that they edited in a conflict that didn't exist, I no longer call it a documentary. Beyond that, it's very strange that so many have expended so much effort on this topic. It doesn't seem to be about a video game record anymore and is just another case of people who have put themselves into two different camps warring with each other simply for some kind of emotional thrill they get out of the conflict itself. In the end, we know that Billy, Steve, and whoever is the current record holder are all insanely talented at the game Donkey Kong and this at point, it reminds me of arguments over which tall building is taller, resorting to measuring from garage entrances to radio masts, when in reality, two buildings that are 500m tall and within 1% of each other are so far above everything else that the 1% doesn't matter anymore. But we like absolute clear-cut black and white labels on things, so the arguing will go on.
- smcl 4y ago
  The movie has definitely got more people involved in this than normal, since they likely wouldn't have known about it otherwise. But cheating in competitive gaming like this is taken very seriously. Karl Jobst has covered a few scandals like Trackmania (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww7x5elophk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww7x5elophk), and Guitar Hero (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58fqNL-kvaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58fqNL-kvaI) and the original Doom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv0ZRTlIXR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv0ZRTlIXR0). In this case it doesn't help that Billy comes across as very weird and unlikeable, the movie plays this up, particularly in contrast to Wiebe (who seems pretty nice) but it hurts him more that he's been a bit evasive and turned in a few questionable submissions. And re the tallest-buildings-within-1%-of-each-other thing, that's just it. People who suck at a game and report outright fraudulent results are generally outed pretty quickly. But the big scandals - like the ones I linked above - often occur when those who are already at the very top of their game feel pressure to compete and cut a few corners to get a score or a time just ahead of what they are normally capable of achieving. And those communities are not centered around discovering who happens to be roughly in that top 1% of competitors, but around a leaderboard of ranked scores. They share tips, strategies and there are genuine friendly rivalries between competitors.

gurchik 4y ago

For those out of the loop, people have been sharing screenshots of the screen transitions from Mitchell's videos and MAME since at least 2018 as evidence he cheated. This isn't new information. What is new is that rather than simply showing the screenshots, Tanner Fokkens has dissected the code from the original Donkey Kong ROM to prove that the footage could not have been generated from the original cabinet. He then analyzed the MAME code to demonstrate why MAME renders the way it does to prove that Mitchell's footage matches a version of MAME that would have been available to download at the time the footage was recorded. This is similar to when the speedrunner OmniGamer analyzed the source code to Dragster to prove that Todd Rogers faked his world record footage and subsequent Guinness record.

flatiron 4y ago
I wonder if had used a MiSTER instead of MAME if he would have been caught. I don’t think it was out in 2018 though.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Mitchell's video was from pong before 2018, the screenshot comparisons showing he used MAME are from 2018.
  - adrianmonk 4y ago
    > pong before 2018 This wins the thematically-appropriate typo of the week award.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

flobosg 4y ago

Discussion from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32755009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32755009

jefftk 4y ago
That source is loads better, and actually explains what the news is here: "In this new analysis, Fokkens expertly takes the existing evidence a step further, by dissecting exactly why these different transition screens appear the way they do on both the arcade and MAME platforms. This includes a line-by-line look at the graphics code within the original Donkey Kong ROM program, as well as programming instructions found in the MAME source code."

VHRanger 4y ago

I love the low stakes drama, but seriously, who cares? All this effort could have been spent on something meaningful. After the "King of Kong" documentary we have the preponderance of evidence that his record shouldn't be taken seriously and the organization maintaining the high score list is untrustworthy.

Waterluvian 4y ago
Was it just me or was that doc basically about addiction and abuse? I remember some friends thinking it made the guy look good but all I could remember is the horror of how he treated his family.
schoen 4y ago
Apparently there's an active defamation lawsuit by Mitchell against Twin Galaxies, so there's a very concrete reason for people to care about whether the allegations are true.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
soulofmischief 4y ago
Believe it or not, there is a several decade old community of people who care, and they don't care if other people care or not.
dbttdft 4y ago
Incidentally, the paper was a good read and I'm always looking for details of precisely how rendering works on 90s and earlier games.

dehrmann 4y ago

I guess everyone needs a hobby, but this is a 50+ year-old man allegedly cheating at getting the high score for a 40-year-old arcade game.

warinukraine 4y ago
Some people try to choose hobbies that have synergies with other parts of their lives. It think that's a good strategy not just for hobbies but for everything. I doubt that can be argued to be the case for donkey Kong though.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I think it promotes his hot sauce business.
comex 4y ago
I think getting the high score for a 40-year-old arcade game is a perfectly fine hobby and a fine thing to take pride in. Certainly, if you check Twitch, record competition in single-player games draws plenty of viewership. The most popular games are somewhat less old (usually NES era and onwards), and it’s usually in the form of speedrunning rather than high score competition, but it’s the same general idea. Cheating is different, of course. But I interpret your comment as dismissing the activity itself.
- twblalock 4y ago
  The amount of effort being put into both attacking and defending this guy, and the media attention it has received, is far out of proportion compared to the importance of the activity itself.
  - fudgefactorfive 4y ago
    One of the issues is that Mitchell is notoriously litigious and has made a cottage industry of promoting himself as "guy with game world records". He has literally sued people into submission, over this exact claim, which is now forensicly validated. See Karl Jobst for reference.

gilded-lilly 4y ago

No mention of whether the emulator is easier than the original, nor whether his score was still the high score in the emulator.

sdenton4 4y ago
I think it's much easier to cheat programmatically with an emulator. For example, you could play a game in an emulator and record all input, and save at each new screen. Then if you die or get a bad RNG behavior, restore from the last save (discarding all input since the last save), and continue playing until you beat the screen. Then, for the record, just replay the 'winning' branch through the CRT and record it. MAME supports exactly this kind of input recording and playback: https://www.reddit.com/r/MAME/comments/6p0g9o/how_to_record_and_play_my_input_on_mame_187/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MAME/comments/6p0g9o/how_to_record_...
- Firehawke 4y ago
  Exactly this. And it doesn't guarantee that the code he ran was a stock build of MAME, either. It could be a version with rerecording that lets you go back and fix mistakes until you get a perfect tool-assisted run.