Comment by tysam_and | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tysam_and | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

One of the things I love about console releases is about 10-15 years or so after their release is the magical period where the really strange glitches and exploits are found. That's where the fun truly begins, and basically all of it happens on accurate emulators. :D

For example, Mario Kart Wii (one of my all time favorite games, I used to time trial it for fun! Very zen but no rubber bumpers on the GameCube controller thumbpads and one of them had a piece snapped off the edge, so very bruised and hurting thumbs and such the next day) has seen loads of incredible TAS' in the last year or so, with the introduction of superhopping and a few other techniques bringing vehicles other than the flamerunner back into the limelight.

Then there's also this incredible demonstration of beating the Legend of Zelda demo in Super Smash Brothers Brawl before the 5 minute timer runs out, using game state manipulation and pointer creation from positions/objects/etc, a technique I first saw popularized in Super Mario World a few years back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jusgAEW4soo

It's incredible both the debug tools people create and lengths of research that people will go to to be able to accomplish what many consider a 'silly' goal, one that often is oddly enough extremely grounded in an active community. Speedrunning is a beautiful thing and it's one of the foundations for how and why I work with neural networks in the way that I do today.

In case you haven't seen this particularly excruciatingly cool demo before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0

I’m sure you are already aware of this video, but for those who are not: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A this video is an amazing exploration of the various ways speed runners will use glitches to their advantage.

"Now y'all might be wondering what I need all this speed for" is forever etched in my mind. PannKoek is a youtube treasure.

He recently did another commentated video, I believe maybe the first commentated one since that legendary video, on pendulum manipulation. https://youtu.be/nYDmBdUalgo

It may be a bit slow for the types here already well familiar with floating point and the like but it's still got amazingly deep content on something silly but fun.

1:08:06 (https://youtu.be/nYDmBdUalgo?t=4077) makes the part of my brain that's perennially 5 years old giggle furiously. So funny.

Thank you for the recommendation! <3 :)))) <3 :D

Gosh, I must have watched that sleep-deprived a very long time ago last night, but I will have to take another look at that. So many views. Foggy memories, I think I remember seeing this.

In any case, yay amnesia! Worth seeing again for the half-first time. ;PPPP

Yeah! it's one of those videos that I was first shown in high-school, and then fairly recently dug up and rewatched. Such a classic.

I actually rewatch this video a few times a year. I just love everything about it so much. It is a well taught physics lecture for a system of physics that was created by people.

For anyone who thinks they might enjoy "speedrunner overcomes all the odds" narrative style videos, I've greatly enjoyed the content of "ThaRixer" on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/@ThaRixer/videos

He gives a good sense of how unlikely it was for some of these glitches to be found, and how much luck and skill is involved in pulling off a successful world record.

Also if people are interested in further speedrunning videos, I very highly recommend "Summoning Salt" on YouTube!

I'm a huge fan of the underground emulator community. Such amazing things have been made in that scene - dynarecs that do things everyone said were impossible, etc.

https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/faqs/

One of my favourites is the effort to emulate the Motorola 56K DSP processor, which is widely used in many hardware synthesizers and effects units. Things have progressed so far with this emulator, that it is now possible to directly boot the firmware from many of these devices, and produce results that are indistinguishable from the original, long-since end-of-lifed, hardware.

Watching the development of this emulator from the sidelines, I was regularly amused at the competence and sheer persistence of the authors, especially when running into very hard edge cases. It seems this style of development attracts folks with the Right Stuff, indeed ..

In the last year or so of his life, Stephen Hawking's long-EOL'ed speech synthesizer was showing signs of failing, and the replacement was an emulator based in part on low-level DSP emulation code from bsnes/Higan, as the "Nintendo DSP-1" used as a math coprocessor on some SNES games was coincidentally the same processor family [1] [2]. Games using this processor had been supported by other emulators for a long time, but they did so with a high-level implementation of the Nintendo firmware calls.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Vall...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...

It amazes me every time I see stuff like this, what's it like for later consoles? Is there still a scene for exploits like these? Also can it summarized what features of a console / games that can lead to possibilities of fun exploitations?

Yep, that's what my original comment was about, in the last year there's been a huge wave, it seems like a lag time of 10-15 years or so!

In addition to the stuff I mentioned before (pointer setting and lookup, momentum abuse, etc), there's also collision edge abuse, generally checkpointing stuff is the big thing stopping a lot of exploits so how checkpoints work are really important to understand (and as a result, are very well-mapped out and are common community knowledge for a lot of these games).

There's also been this beautiful altrustic wave of colabbed TAS (tool-assisted speedruns) in the last few months where the best speedrunners all have different sections of racing tracks or whatever that they're good at, and they pass the recording back and forth until they build a run that sets a new world record or whatever.

Both of these are highly worth watching, it's a very good genre of entertainment and somehow (???) due to a fellow person named SummoningSalt has become almost a rite of passage that if you set an important world record, that you make a mini 30-60 minute documentary about it. One person was humble enough to make an entire 40 minute long documentary about their own world record (ill put the category title down below, it's something else), but only referred to everyone in the third person and was very professional, so you wouldn't know unless you saw the name, channel description, or the youtube comments.

Here's two that are very much worth the time and to me are endlessly fascinating:

Collaboration TAS (so freaking cool): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaCYxNyJzzQ

Autodocumentarian "Blue Yourself" world record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR4isHLuAko

Both are well worth the watch over a good bowl of cereal, ice cream, and/or both.

The general correlation I've seen is that games with more dynamic physics tend to provide more opportunities for exploits. Jumping, bouncing off of other objects in the environment, rapidly changing geometry (by ducking, dodging, etc.), etc. Being able to trigger "mode switches" in physics (like ragdolling, attack animations, clipping prevention logic, etc.) also helps. Complex AI is also a perennial source of fun exploits. Underflows/overflows are not as common as on older systems but you still see them from time to time.

In that vein, there's a hilarious exploit in Zelda: Breath of the Wild that uses the bullet time mechanic activated by drawing a bow while airborne. Basically, the game drastically slows down time, but the developers missed a handful of physics corner cases that cause acceleration/momentum to be scaled up by the same factor when exiting the bullet-time mode. So with some practice, one can learn to bounce off of an enemy and fly halfway across the map [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ext6yE0d394

Oh man, you just reminded me of Skyrim/Oblivion and Source glitches/exploits. Both such a trip, lol.

Here's a good "funny for the day" ;P : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6hVmn9FM7o

Reply on news.ycombinator.com