Smudging the game disc to make speedrunning 'SpongeBob' faster | Hacker News Reader

Smudging the game disc to make speedrunning 'SpongeBob' faster

inverse.com

97 pointspncnmnp61 comments

If you put tape on cartridge pin #14 of NES Platoon (or other bad connection), the game will boot to a glitched version of the ending, thus making it a zero-second speedrun.

Pin #14 is the CPU R/W pin, and if it's not properly connected, the game will be unable to write to the MMC1 mapper to perform bank switching. Platoon happens to be programmed in a way that address 0x8000 of every bank is an entry point that will run a particular level from the game. So you boot up the game, and it tries to switch to the Title Screen bank, then jumps to 0x8000. But the bank switch fails, and instead it runs code from the first bank. It just so happens that the first bank contains the program for the ending.

If the cartridge connection improves and mapper writes start to succeed, the graphics will return to normal as it continues to run the ending.

Really stretches the definition of speed run.

If I record the game to VHS, and fast forward to the end, does that count?

This was the technique used by American Dad speedrunners. Unfortunately, speedrun.com banned it after years of controversy, since fast-forwarding videos doesn't count as a speedrun.

Summoning Salt Documentary: https://youtu.be/yPvKhFXc7ck

This is brilliant

Speedrunners are perfectly capable of defining categories better than that.

If it's funny enough they'll add it as a category, track it, and then ban it in the rest of the categories. "No major glitches" is a common sort of speedrun restriction.

You aren't playing the game then. There is a difference in being creative in what actions you can take as a speed runner versus just playing back a video recording.

Ultimately glitch-assisted speed runs are not a pre-defined category. Whatever the community agrees goes. The point is to have an interesting skill-based competition whether that skill is reaction time and precise inputs or finding exploits.

break off the tab after you record it

This comment is how I find out there was a Platoon game based on the movie. Legit hilarious, and for a movie tie in game it doesn't look half bad! Like a mixture of Contra + those dungeon explorer RPGs around the time too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiXkbQ17frY

I love little facts like these. Thanks for sharing (and sounding convincing enough for me to trust it lol).

If you haven't read about the Pilot Wings coprocessor differences, it's really interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883714

I’ve been following this game’s speedrun for years; I never expected to see it on the front page of HN! This post could use a (2021), because this trick was discovered years ago. For anyone interested in speedrunning, this game has some of the most insane tech I’ve seen in any game and is definitely worth checking out.

> this game has some of the most insane tech I’ve seen in any game and is definitely worth checking out

Given the context of this forum, I'd be interested to hear more about what's so interesting about the technology!

'tech' in speed running is a reference to "technique" rather than "technology". https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Tech

Woah, I just realized (because of this comment) that I've been grouping "technique" and "technology" as a single thing in my understanding and calling it "technology"/"tech".

For example, I would describe a method to do something in a video game as "tech" but in my mind I would expand it to "technology" if I thought about it. I didn't realize that the word "technique" would be a better fit in those contexts. Looking at Wikipedia [1], it looks like the words are pretty closely related so I haven't been using the word completely wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology

Funnily enough, I had been doing the same thing and it hadn’t even occurred to me that my comment might cause confusion for people who aren’t familiar with speedrunning lol

Thank you TIL

Is there a good video you could link to that covers this? Or is it apparent just from watching a run, from GDQ or something?

Unfortunately, there isn’t an up-to-date video that I’m aware of that explains the entire run in its totality. But you should get a pretty good idea from simply watching the run. It’s a marvel to watch, especially if it’s a game you’re familiar with. SHiFT’s most recent 100% record is probably a good place to start[1]. He’s the runner mentioned in the article and he’s held the record for every category that matters for 8.5-10 years. (Fair warning, though: he tends to use strong language and he’s almost always in a foul mood.)

If you do want a run with some explanation, GDQ is probably your best bet[2]. Unfortunately, the run hasn’t appeared at GDQ since AGDQ Online 2022, but you still get a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about, even if you don’t get to see how the run has evolved since then. That one is also an Any% run, so you can get an idea of the differences.

[1] https://youtu.be/FzkgU3EI-bk?is=G1NDOumOKUhqRbOU

[2] https://youtu.be/GX7aVH8Q0gg

Thanks!

How close was it technically to Jak2? I consider that the defining technical mastery of that generation

I would consider Jak 3 to be even better than that BUT the darker art direction really hid a lot of what it was doing. Shame really.

Seems to me that hardware modification would be a banned technique.

There are usually separate categories based on various factors, like which console a game is played on (if it was released on multiple), what the win condition is (do you need to 100% the game, or just see the credits roll?), and whether certain glitches are allowed. Those are nearly always software glitches, but hardware glitches aren't unheard of :)

Speedrunning communities generally hate it when having more money leads to an advantage.

If you ban deliberately smudging/scratching the disc, then some runner with a lot of money will just buy a lot of copies of the disc, find the one that glitches the most consistently (because of pre-existing scratches, or even manufacturing defects that aren’t visible)

Allowing some kind of mod is the most equitable compromise.

They typically ban the glitch entirely. For example cartridge manipulation or "CD streaming" glitches in Zelda speedruns are banned, and if you submitted a run containing them while claiming the game did it on its own, they would probably tell you to get a new copy of the game.

My copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops that I bought from a rental store was corrupted in that sniper scopes didn't have the black scope silhouette when zoomed in, so essentially the whole screen just zooms in.

I find it so funny that somethings coded can crumble if a single bit is out of place, and others are like "No file there, no problem!"

That's kinda what happens with DNA -- a random mutation will make the resulting organism 'incompatible with life' -- or it will create a change that gives a huge advantage for survival.

or give a different eye color it not all life or death

My first "gaming" PC was a secondhand thing with a RIVA TNT2 M64. It had cooked memory from presumably prior abuse, in such a way that if I ran Counter-Strike with 3d accel on, some of the wall textures were transparent.

But it also relatively frequently crashed so I rarely tried using it for the better graphics, and at that young age never appreciated the cheating aspect of it.

The diagram showing where to smudge the disc looks so incredible, a kind of flower shape, no rotational origin. Seeing the video it makes more sense. All this is highly artisanal, the diagram is just a hint.

This give me an idea. Here's my smudge pattern that works better: (shows a diagram with blotches in the shape of Rick Astley singing).

>a core tenet of speedrunning is preserving old games, not destroying them.

That is not a core tenant of speed running. Software preservation is completely separate from speed running.

This comment made me think of pencil sharpening speedruns in the context of "preservation". Had a good chuckle. Quite a different mindset: the point is to sharpen a pencil (or 10) as fast as possible.

https://www.speedrun.com/pencil?h=In_Real_Life-Drillless-10_...

(Not to mention hardware preservation is separate from software preservation and hardware preservation is rarely referring to pencils.)

It's not entirely unrelated in that speed runs help preserve a community around the game.

A very different community both in kind and demographics. It introduces a new community to the game rather than preserving what once existed.

This is just a write-up of a video by SHiFT which can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THtbjPQFVZI.

> While SHiFT insists that the method of smudging your disc will give you enough time in a lag to beat the SpongeBob game, he adds a clear caveat that it's not worth the risk of permanently damaging your game or original Xbox console

How would reading a scratched/dirty disc permanently damage a console? That seems like a very bad issue for a device expected to read frequently swapped discs.

There's a belief in certain corners of the gaming community (and maybe other communities that deal with optical discs) that if the disc drive's laser has to "try hard" to read a disc it will eventually "burn out". Not sure if this is backed up by any actual data or facts - it sounds plausible to me that a laser might dynamically adjust its power level as needed, and that over time that might be bad for it; but it also sounds a bit like people might be anthropomorphizing the laser or something.

I would be more conserned with the laser motor wearing out. That is what killed my Dreamcast. The laser was fine but the motor to move it just gave up from too much use.

This is why I keep my optical drives' moving parts clean and well-lubricated and freshen them up every few years

What do you use to lubricate them? I've got a few PS2s that are starting to give occasional disc read errors and a little laser maintenance might be overdue

White lithium grease for the rails (but don't get it on anything plastic), silicone grease for the plastic gears, and sewing machine oil for the motors :)

This article is hard to read, it seems to repeat itself constantly and expands on nothing. The main point is that smudging the disc can help with performing certain glitches while the console is trying to run error correction but you could potentially scratch your disc to an unusable state if you are too liberal with the smudging. I'm pretty sure I've seen this same topic on HN before so this article isn't exactly reporting on anything new.

The article seems to suggest that you can damage the console itself, though, not just the disc.

Well - ketchup on your disc may drip on the the laser diode - don't you think it's hard to defend against? maybe they need lens wipers against ketchup on the disc issue.

The disc's spin pretty fast, I could see someone smudging the disc too heavily with a substance that might fling off

On some systems/drives if it detects an error that is big enough it will reset the carriage. You can here it reading and rescrubbing over and over. That can cause the carriage motor to overwork and burn out. Not sure of this system does that or not. But that would be my guess.

Exactly. And in the worst case the disk itself might disintegrate due to rotational forces, transferring some of those forces to random parts of the interior of the disc drive. Physical and higher sustained speeds and increased temperatures due to many read attempts make that more likely (but still very uncommon). This isn't entirely theoretical, I have a dead drive to prove it, although not from speed running.

there are a bunch of videos on youtube explaining it. The belief is the game streams data from the disc. Smudges cause read errors on some laser passes that don't fail to read entirely. The effective throughput goes down. This causes the games overall processing of each iteration to somehow be impacted, leading to the behavior the speedrunners use to save time.

Speed running is so bizarre to me, the rules seem so arbitrary. I struggle to see how any form of hardware level modification that results in a meaningful deviation in the behavior of the game would be allowed. At that point what's the difference between smudging your disk and using a GameShark, etc?

Similar thoughts on things like shiny hunting in the Pokemon community.

Are you also confused about kids playing outside making up arbitrary rules for their games? The point to have fun by challenging yourself in a competition with others. That means allowing things that make the competition more fun/challenging and disallowing those things that trivialize it. Sometimes that's a subjective thing.

What's 'allowed' in a speed run is decided by the community who do the speed running. Further, run leaderboards are broken into categories based around defined parameters. So, perhaps there would be a category unique to hardware manipulation such as this. For major speed running games, the rules are often very well defined and enforced.

I was telling a friend about a game I'm working on which has "hacking mechanics".

Him: So, have you ever thought about basing the hacking mechanics on Hyrum's Law?

Me: ...No, but I'm sure that if it ever develops a speedrunning community, they will do just that!

I'm not clear on what that would even look like as a mechanic related to hacking?

Intentionally sloppy code, like leaving exploits in the game. Like if perform some action in a very specific way, you trigger an overflow that unlocks an item that's otherwise very difficult or impossible to obtain. So rather than these exploits breaking you out of the intended flow of the game, it's a real game mechanic. Like having that unobtainable item unlocks a story path that changes the ending. I guess it's more like an Easter egg but it relies on typical game glitching techniques rather than extensive exploration.

In Halo 2, there was a level where if you damaged a banshee in a specific way and made it follow you down a tunnel, you could hijack it at the exact moment when a new level loaded at the end of the tunnel (otherwise you couldn't use it). Then you could fly up to the top of the level and find a modified weapon that was incredibly powerful (scarab gun). There was another secret weapon (energy sword) you could obtain by performing typical boundary breaking moves and walking on invisible walls. Normally, you'd be doing this to skip combat but the game was also rewarding you for it.

There is one game called 'hack n slash' on steam. You manipulate the 'global vars' to win the game. There is even one point where the game has you open up its data files and change things. Interesting mechanic.

I was thinking more about how Hyrum's Law specifically would be an intentional mechanic in the hacking gameplay I guess rather than it being a way of labelling the glitchy behavior speed run categories run on I guess.

Same

[2021]

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