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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

Suing is really a jerk move.

I mean it’s a video game high score. It’s impressive played on an emulator or not.. but in the grand scheme of things..

I always thought of Billy Mitchel as kinda a fun personality in small doses. In the extras on the “fistful of quarters” he brings an old woman a q Bert machine to practice on which was nice. Though he seems to have a bit of an humility problem he seemed affable.

This Lawsuit changes ones perception of that image a bit. I wonder what his reception at in person video game events will be once they resume.

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> I mean it’s a video game high score.

It's a defamation case. Liar is outed as a liar. You can imagine how this can negatively effect your entire life. Look at athletes caught for doping. Imagine you are called a doper, your records stripped, when you were actually innocent.

It's not about high scores per se.

What’s the purpose of requiring authentic arcade PCBs over emulators?

This is a deep and complicated question, but the top-line answer is it's the best way to prevent cheating (note I didn't say perfect). A big part of these classic games is how the random events are generated. It would be fairly easy to modify the game in an emulator to more often generate ideal random events, giving you an edge over people playing on the real hardware. So the community agreed that for the purposes of the leaderboards in question here, the game must be played on real hardware.

To add, the biggest deal with altering the random events for a game like donkey kong isn't that the player would know what is coming up next. Depending on the random spawns in the game, there are more points to be scored. So you could play a perfect game and score 100k less than the record. So they're chasing the perfect game during a perfect random spawn.

As an interesting example: In speedrunning, certain movement patterns of bosses can be cleared faster than others.

If such a pattern only shows up in 1/4 of the runs and you need a good combination of three or more such patterns over the course of the game, the ability to control this will make reaching a world record much much easier. You still need a lot of skill, though.

There are some excellent documentaries on speedrunning on YT: For example Ninja Gaiden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u1tVD7UEqw

It is also possible to modify a real arcade machine hardware.

And it's also possible to put some visual or aural indicators for player when to press which buttons, so the player would be just following computer's instructions. An ability to sync your actions to background music not provided by the game itself is also a possible avenue for cheating.

So the idea that somebody can set a recognisible world record while streaming from home is ridiculous. A proper procedure must involve all hardware and software provided by competition organizers and checked by independent judges.

Of course. I said it isn't perfect. It's a balancing act between preventing cheating and practicality. The requirements you laid out would result in no leaderboard at all.

Timing differences mainly. Plus emulators can be played at a slower speed and then the video sped up later.

It's not only about obvious cheating like slowing down the game.

It might be easier to do certain things with different hardware setups.

An illustrating example: If you play quake 3 at 125 fps you can jump farther than you could if the game was running at 60fps.

With a emulator it's easier to use save states and splice different parts of the run together, or to otherwise cheat. Given that Billy Mitchell has stated that he never used a emulator but the footage contradicts that, a lot of people believe he may be lying about using an emulator to hide the fact that he was cheating using an emulator.

There are two main reasons:

1) It's much easier to cheat (in many ways, adjust random generators to always be in your favour for example).

2) There can be differences (the differences are how he has been caught) -- it's common that games in emulators are faster as they don't bother implementing waits of various kinds correctly, as most games still work fine (often better, as they'll skip less frames), and it would just make your emulator slower.

While there are still some people who treat the arcade pcbs as inherently superior to mame, the general consensus nowadays (at least for DK) is that mame plays arcade perfect.

In fact TG has a separate leader board to track the mame high scores. Which is one of the most frustrating things about this whole affair... if Billy really wanted to use mame he could have just submitted his score under the mame category instead of lying and submitting it under the arcade hardware category!

The real reason is that Twin Galaxies were quite old fashioned (maybe still are?). Didn't allow emulators, glitches, various other things. It's partly why most speedrun leaderboards are kept on speedrun.com now, as the games communities get to dictate the rules, rather than the owners of Twin Galaxies.

This isn't at issue. TG has tracks for emulation and arcade. Submitting a game to the wrong track is against the rules. TG alleges that the plaintiff passed off emulated gameplay as live arcade play.

Arcade and emulated play have different verification standards. Generally you need to reset the cabinet, which shows the machine's uninitialized memory on screen, post game you need to show the board. For emulated play you typically need to provide a full recording of the game, which can be re-run in the emulator.

One difference between arcade and emulation comes down to inputs. The arcade joystick has a 4-way restrictor. When Jumpman is climbing a ladder the player can't provide left/right inputs. At a high level this impacts their ability to steer and group barrels. This is totally irrelevant apart from the highest levels of play.

Low level differences between emulators and the physical hardware could make a big difference to the high score/speedrun in theory, especially when developers take advantage of esoteric or undocumented features.

Suing is only a jerk move if he's wrong, which can only be decided in the eye of each beholder.

Billy Mitchell built his life and career around this effort. Whether he is right or wrong in his claims, it matters. We wouldn't say that a professional athlete's dispute about cheating is unimportant because it's just a game. By the "grand scheme of things" almost nothing any of us care about matters.

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