Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevinventullo | Hacker News Reader

In its statement, Twin Galaxies cites recent testimony from Dr. Michael Zyda, who was presented as an expert at the trial. Zayda's testimony concluded that Mitchell's submitted gameplay "could in fact depict play on original unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware if the hardware involved was malfunctioning, likely due to degradation of components.”

View on HN

His opinion was debunked pretty thoroughly.

https://youtu.be/Q7mE1LkkOGg?si=holUhuJKWAEFNMQA

The video you linked doesn't debunk the expert witness testimony, in the video he says he will need to release a follow up video that does the debunking.

To be clear, I believe Billy's video shows MAME gameplay. I don't believe the hypothesis given by the expert witness. But it's not a "debunking" to just say that this is an unlikely explanation. You have to find arcade cabinets that are malfunctioning due to degrading components and show that even in the worst case they don't look like MAME gameplay. As far as I know, no one has done this, they have only compared Billy's video to arcade cabinets in good condition.

Feels like at this point the burden of proof should be on Mitchell to establish that an arcade machine is capable of producing MAME-like output under any circumstances at all.

I guess it's technically possible a malfunctioning machine could output literally any string of bits.

The chances they would just so happen to look exactly how a particular emulator wrongly displays them, and do so over and over, is virtually zero.

For people reading along, the crux of the matter is that MAME and the original cabinet draw the screen in a different direction. Here's a SO explanation of the implications behind that: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8179/why-...

TL;DR MAME would have to emulate a CRT's electron beam drawing in the original cabinet's direction if it wanted to be spatiotemporally identical. The notion that a cabinet could glitch out and accidentally perfectly emulate MAME beggars belief.

Like you said, I suppose it could happen, in the sense that it wouldn't violate the known laws of physics.

But it didn't.

Seems like Mitchell could easily offer the offending cabinet for anybody to examine. But really it seems like there was never any question whether he was going to do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com