New technical analysis confirms the evidence against Billy Mitchell | Hacker News Reader

New technical analysis confirms the evidence against Billy Mitchell

perfectpacman.com

188 pointsLuc68 comments

So basically, the smoking guns are the TV being tilted the wrong way (oops!) and certain frames of video, especially in the transitions between levels, appearing as only MAME would output them, not real hardware (because MAME is framebuffer based, rather than actually simulating the electron beam, which produces some differences in timing). There's also evidence of v-sync tearing, which could only happen in MAME. Fascinating!

Yup. MAME still has an "electron beam" since that's how all PC video works, just the software buffers a full frame before letting it scan out to the monitor. Even if emulators didn't buffer, they would have to somewhat exactly match the speed of the instruction execution of whatever they're emulating (do emulators do this? I have no idea), or else for example the amount of girder rendered in each frame would be different than the real system, i.e, they will be longer in that first frame if the ROM runs faster than the real system (I think... assuming the code is just filling the tiles at its own pace and not tightly scheduled by something else).

King of Kong focused on Billy as the bad guy and Steve as the protagonist. Of course a Wikipedia check shows that all the top scores were taken by new blood to the field and neither Steve nor Billy are in the mix anymore. Kind of reminds me of Tetris, there was the old generation putzing around some imaginary glass ceiling and suddenly after the game received some spotlight the existing records were swept away by young blood

HN Story (from a couple of months ago) about the huge gains in competitive Tetris over the last few years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32196129

Passion rarely lasts. Everyone coming in builds on the experience of people that came before them.

If you haven't seen the documentary King of Kong, it's quite an entertaining backstory for these events.

Even the makers of the show admit they edited footage to craft a villain narrative and create conflict where it didn't exist. It shouldn't be used to inform your views on anyone involved but it does make for some fun entertainment.

Pretty sure they didn't talk him into wearing his patriotism on his sleeve with the loud American flag ties and such — and his villainous Trans-Am-driving coiffure, ha ha.

The guy exudes all the vibes of a narcissist. As others have said, a guy so much fun to detest.

What a great film.

This comment about ties and cars makes me wonder what I enjoy that others would have perverse fun in tearing down.

I wouldn't know. I'd comment more but I need to get back to routing these RGB fan cables...

interesting that patriotism (love of your country) is now being cast as a bad thing

I interpreted the commenter as referring to the gaudy display of symbols of patriotism as fashion, not to the idea of patriotism itself.

For another take on the danger of loving one’s country, see the Irish tune “The Patriot Game” by Brenden Behan (especially as performed by the Clancy Brothers).

The people waving their patriotism in other people's faces have, in my experience, not been doing it for the right reasons.

Funny, the wikipedia page says something different: Twin Galaxies colluded with Billy Mitchell to support his fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Kong#Emulation_con...

The referee in charge was later delisted and banned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Rogers_(gamer)

>Funny, the wikipedia page says something different: Twin Galaxies colluded with Billy Mitchell to support his fraud

Both can be true. The movie purposefully cast Mitchell as a villain based on little hard evidence, they happened to be right that he was one.

I don't see how you can accuse Twin Galaxies of collusion. Sure, they were probably too lenient on someone they had a decades long connection to, but this lawsuit is about them admitting their mistake and condemning Mitchell.

It's a reasonable accusation: for a while Twin Galaxies basically just had a few people making up numbers and their mates writing it down, without even a hint of verifying it (including a few scores which were blatently impossible to anyone who had even a slight familiarity with the game, like a game where the score only increments in multiples of five having a score where the last digit is 3).

One really important point is that while it's the same organisation name it's been bought out and there's now a completely different group of people running it (and they seem to be much more concerned with sniffing out cheaters).

Yep those are two important points. Another one is that Twin Galaxies basically sat on the collusion for a decade after the movie came out.

A lot of wannabe criminals on the internet can't see this though; they live in a fantasy where fraud and malfeasance are just fun words to argue over.

There's a companion movie "Chasing Ghosts" that I thought was much better for humanizing this particular group of oddballs.

Are you talking about this one? https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2745684/

If so, how is it connected to King of Kong, when you say it’s a companion movie, they don’t seem to have any connection at first glance.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0479879 <- This is the one.

"Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade

1982's Video Game World Champions share their philosophies on joysticks, groupies and life."

King of Kong is my goto example of a documentary that is highly manipulative, and you wouldn't know it unless you had other sources of info.

Some examples:

This is highly de-recommended. The documentary twists way too many facts:

Billy Mitchell did not avoid Steve. In fact, he met him during that event.

Billy Mitchell and Steve already knew each other - years before they had been part of another event, and there's even a photo of them posing together.

Steve wasn't trying to break Billy's record, but his own record which he had set some years prior. When his record was disqualified in the movie, the record was reverted to his own prior record.

The sad thing is he probably didn't need to cheat but he did. And of course he has only doubled and tripled down on this. It is the same thing that happens a lot in some e-sports. People who are really competitive and able to perform at the top of their game end up using hacks as a crutch, if only to give themselves a mental break. Multiple competitive streamers have been caught on stream accidently alt-tabbing in to their hacks and then have the gall to double down much like Billy Mitchell and say that they weren't and it was just there for some reason and they weren't using it.

Like the unwillingness to admit it is where it gets sad. In Billy's case the lawsuits are where it gets gross. The dangers of wrapping your entire identity around one thing I guess. I don't think anyone even cares about Billy Mitchell and his donkey kong score at this point outside of the continued circus. But I guess for him it is actually the only way to keep himself relevant.

See also: trackmania pro times being driven in slow motion, despite the guys being actually really good in normal speed (verifiably, on stream)

I'm still salty that the super trackmaster campaign from tm turbo includes times cheated by riolu!.

Oh, some gamer, not the famous aviator who was court-martialed for demonstraiting that aerial bombs could sink battleships.

That's what I was expecting also.

That's not why he was court martialed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell

In response to the Navy's first helium-filled rigid airship Shenandoah crashing in a storm in September 1925, killing 14 of the crew, and the loss of three seaplanes on a flight from the West Coast to Hawaii, Mitchell issued a statement accusing senior leaders in the Army and Navy of incompetence and "almost treasonable administration of the national defense."[48] In October 1925, a charge with eight specifications was proffered against Mitchell on the direct order of President Calvin Coolidge, accusing him of violation of the 96th Article of War, an omnibus article that Mitchell's chief counsel, Congressman Frank Reid, declared to be "unconstitutional" as a violation of free speech.[49] The court martial began in early November and lasted for seven weeks.

It's sad that a man's entire self worth is so deeply tied to a fraudulent game score.

lies. i think he has hot sauce too

In Billy Mitchell's defense, his villainy is fairly low grade and highly entertaining. He's very fun to hate on

He does remind me of a late 20th century WWF wrestling villain. He's a good player, even if its pretty clear at this point some of his scores are dodgy.

Though he did some "in person" https://www.classicarcademuseum.org/billy-mitchell-achieves-...

In the King Of Kong extras he brings someone a frogger machine to practice on, which was pretty nice. In that segment he comes across a pretty nice actually.

If you like arcade games and are in the NH area the American Classic Game Museum (Fun Spot?) has a lot of the old machines.

https://www.classicarcademuseum.org

> even if its pretty clear at this point some of his scores are dodgy.

"dodgy"? Quite the understatement there. This man has made fraudulent claims, has held fraudulent records and, most importantly, has sued people who told the truth.

Defending this person by downplaying their scores as "dodgy" is ludicrous.

My general take on anyone caring about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9YL04v-J5U

Except Billy started what malicious lawsuits against people, so the “he isn’t hurting anybody” line doesn’t go down as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/aug/25/lance-armstron...

Ah, well, he’s an even bigger jerk than I’d known.

There's some criticism of the King of Kong film that they tilted quite a few scenes to make him look worse that he was. There was some playing with timelines and implying bad behavior that didn't actually happen. The thrust of story is true, but it was definitely a movie made to make you hate Billy Mitchell instead of a piece of journalism.

IMO, documentary film should be consumed as entertainment and not as an actual document. Almost any documentary that can be entertaining enough to draw any kind of significant viewership in has to have a narrative. And narrative is often in contention with reality.

I agree but that's not what most people take away from them.

His records from the early 80's are likely legit, but his fragile ego couldn't handle not being #1 anymore.

I’ve met the dude, he /is/ a nice guy. Not a fan of the whole villain angle.

I'd agree he could be seen as a fun heel until this lawsuit. Bringing the court system into your cheating makes you an asshole.

Low grade villainy is actually even more sad. Entertaining for sure though.

It's video games. He could have been in it for the lulz.

Probably less entertaining if you're a family member of Apollo Legend.

I believe he's filed lawsuits, and once you do that you've stepped over from being low grade to being pretty bad in my opinion.

Hasn't he filed multiple lawsuits against different entities who have called him out on this?

If he was just pushing a false narrative of high scores on video games, I'd probably shrug at the whole situation. But this guy seems to be willing to die on the hill he has made for himself.

No, he also makes barbeque sauce.

There's folks who have suicided when their fraud gets detected. Truly, their entire self-worth tied up in a score.

e.g https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/08/us/marathoner-frank-meza-suic...

I used to suffer depression, and the biggest advice I got was to diversify my sources of self-esteem. It's fragile to only have one source of ego, you want to have hobbies, work, friends and family, all to support you when things go badly. Because we all have off days, it becomes a spiral when we don't have things to help us through.

I love how obsessed in a good way this person is. I wonder how many hours went in to this analysis? 60+ probably.

i'll wait for the karl jobst video /s

this is pretty awesome!

Hello you absolute legends!

This is an incredible technical writeup. Not an EE, but the logic seemed convincing and was quite easy to follow for someone with only a limited understanding of low level computer systems.

Some intelligence agency should hire whoever did this writeup to conduct similarly detailed technical analysis and write reports on things of greater importance than donkey Kong.

Sounds like an Electrical Engineer. My father is one and I can distinctly remember hearing about scanning electron beams growing up with CRTs.

I checked while writing the comment and the author is a hardware engineer so close enough.

My mom was a teacher and she argued about red, green, blue being the colors of everything to my dad. The family got a report similar to this one about pigment vs light with supporting charts and formulas.

Fun fact: Not all CRTs use magnetic (yoke) deflection. High speed oscilloscopes use electrostatic deflection instead.

https://circuitglobe.com/electrostatic-deflection-in-crt.htm...

Thanks. I grew up playing with oscilloscopes and trying to find things that would show the coolest “wave”.

Going to ask him about electrostatic deflection.

Yep, he's an expert in antenna design and some high voltage electronics that I don't understand. We've done a couple of projects together designing arcade hardware and have a really interesting project in the pipe.

Could have just asked the guy to tell the truth

Trial of the century

It's amazing that any hobby, however trivial, when interrogated and pursued to its deepest extremity, contains a microcosm of the human condition.

Billy Mitchell was vindicated by the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Ha ha, had to look that one up.

I was confused as well. I didn't think there were any outstanding controversies around Gen. Mitchell, but you never know...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell

I too was confused. Billy Mitchell is a character in the UK soap EastEnders, who has recently been falsely accused of murder.

Mitchell along with Douhet was one of the most important thinkers of military aviation. There’s a 1955 movie, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell featuring Gary Cooper as Mitchell, I thought this was what this HN post was about, not some utterly unimportant and meaningless gamer controversy.

I think you have the wrong game, this is Donkey Kong not Call of Duty ;)

He's the closest we've ever come to the US military leading a major attack on its own citizens. He was only stopped by others because of the optics.

He really, really wanted to bomb things.

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