Retrobot: A Discord bot that plays emulated games with friends over chat

Really great work, thank you for sharing and making it open source!

Edit: Erm, have you decided on a license yet? I don't see one in the repo. Personally I'm a fan of the permissive MIT license.

https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/blob/main/MIT-LICENSE.txt

I assume memory hacking, most of these memory tables for popular old games are well known.

Maybe it tries to emulate extra frames with different buttons pressed and if it doesn't make a difference it plays those frames for you?

Of course detecting "doesn't make a difference" is very difficult because most games will keep at least the current and last frame of input in memory somewhere. So you would need to be careful enough to ignore that.

@kevincox and @g_hn_liaison have it right. There's a set of parallel workers that test different button inputs. The "output" is the last frame rendered to the screen after extra few frames to let the game respond. Those button outputs are compared with an "idle" output to determine if pressing any input could change the output. If not, then continue to autoplay until an input matters.