Billy Mitchell TG Banned, Scores Removed

[Andromeda Stardust]

I did have an opportunity to play ona vs arcade cab once. The vs 8-way sticks afrom this era are a different beast from the modern square gate japanese or round gate american fight sticks.

 

The vs joystick is essentially an 8-way clover. To hit diagonals, you nearly have to disengage a hard cardinal to slide it into the diagonal pocket. This is very different from modern fight sticks, to the extent that a half circle or shruiken type move would be very difficult if not impossible to perform. The vs joystick is also not going to actuate unwanted diagonals because any deliberate push into a cardinal direction will lock the shart to that direction. As opposed to "riding the gate" on a square actuator where the shaft will hit the smooth flat wall and naturally follow it into a corner.

 

So you're nowhere near as likely to have accidents merginging onto and off of ladders with a vs stick like you would with a modern fight stick. You will however, be able to execute flawless diagonals whenever you should desire to do so.

[Andromeda Stardust]

I finally watched that "king of con" documentary.

Besides the sometimes terrible framing and aspect ratio issues, it brings out a lot of content. I hope Bill Bastable or whatever his name is will be honored for achieving the first verifiable perfect Pacman killscreen, even if the actual time cannot be recorded. No way he faked a polaroid of the arcade screen from the 80s. And Billy's a lying douche. Bunch of crooks.

[H.E.R.O.]

I remember that one. They apparently had a 'gentlemen's agreement' to all try on some holiday weekend but Billy jumped on them then mocks someone who didn't get the last nine dots emails or whatever and always puts in '..........'. Walter deserves some of the blame. He allowed these personalities to fester under his watch & he let it go for the fame & vaunted name of Twin Galaxies.

 

 

I finally watched that "king of con" documentary.

Besides the sometimes terrible framing and aspect ratio issues, it brings out a lot of content. I hope Bill Bastable or whatever his name is will be honored for achieving the first verifiable perfect Pacman killscreen, even if the actual time cannot be recorded. No way he faked a polaroid of the arcade screen from the 80s. And Billy's a lying douche. Bunch of crooks.

[mr_me]

I finally watched that "king of con" documentary.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uHeMUSo4SDg

Besides the sometimes terrible framing and aspect ratio issues, it brings out a lot of content. I hope Bill Bastable or whatever his name is will be honored for achieving the first verifiable perfect Pacman killscreen, even if the actual time cannot be recorded. No way he faked a polaroid of the arcade screen from the 80s. And Billy's a lying douche. Bunch of crooks.

The issue with Bill Bastable's perfect pacman is that he used a dipswitch on the pcb to pause the game.

[Asaki]

Doesn't arcade Pac-Man have "safe zones" where you can hang out forever, though?

[mr_me]

Doesn't arcade Pac-Man have "safe zones" where you can hang out forever, though?

yes it does Edited April 29, 2018 by mr_me

[BiffsGamingVideos]

Doesn't arcade Pac-Man have "safe zones" where you can hang out forever, though?

 

only on the first few fruit patterns. from the starting position, go up/right and stay there. If none of the ghost are facing you (can see you), then they will not find you.

 

However, what is cool is using a pattern that lets you go though the ghosts (due to a bug). If you time it out, then the center of the ghost and pac-man are out of sync and pac-man goes right though a ghost.

Edited April 29, 2018 by BiffsGamingVideos

[BiffsGamingVideos]

NEW DONKEY KONG HI-SCORE! 4,411,100! Level 1000!

 

Hey it worked for Billy Mitchell.

Edited April 29, 2018 by BiffsGamingVideos

[BiffsGamingVideos]

NEW PAC-MAN WORLD RECORD! 222,222,220. Level 1,000.

 

I guess Billy Mitchell owes someone $10,000.

Edited April 29, 2018 by BiffsGamingVideos

[+DZ-Jay]

However, what is cool is using a pattern that lets you go though the ghosts (due to a bug). If you time it out, then the center of the ghost and pac-man are out of sync and pac-man goes right though a ghost.

 

That's not a bug... well, actually it's an artefact of the collision detection, which is based on the position of the center tile of sprites. More like an inadvertent quirk. It can be exploited, though, like you say.

 

You can get a detailed explanation of how and why this happens in the Pac-Man Dossier.

 

-dZ.

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

That's not a bug... well, actually it's an artefact of the collision detection, which is based on the position of the center tile of sprites. More like an inadvertent quirk. It can be exploited, though, like you say.

 

You can get a detailed explanation of how and why this happens in the Pac-Man Dossier.

 

-dZ.

Yes but unless you are using a pattern, the collision is offset by even one pixel and you die. I've also missed earting the ghost a few times when they turned blue because it uses the same collision detection system.

 

All games have their quirks. It's really no different than jumping over the edge of a barrel in Donkey Kong, and occasionally the collision system does not award the points.

 

I did this in Donkey Kong PK 7800 and sent a PM to tep392 about it and he said he used the same or as close to the same pixels spacing to the arcade game as was possible on an Atari 7800, and he said that the real arcade game has the same behavior in certain instances.

 

In Pacman 4k, it is also possible to glitch through a ghost without a collision detect for instance, just like the arcade.

[Andromeda Stardust]

NEW PAC-MAN WORLD RECORD! 222,222,220. Level 1,000.

 

I guess Billy Mitchell owes someone $10,000.

Yeah, that's all well and good but I just played a ten month game (no eat, sleep, or potty breaks) that ended in exactly one trillion points. In layman's terms, that's one million millions!!!

 

I double dog dare Todd Rogers can't even beat my score!!! grin:

[+DZ-Jay]

All games have their quirks. It's really no different than jumping over the edge of a barrel in Donkey Kong, and occasionally the collision system does not award the points.

 

 

 

It's actually different, which is why I said it's not a bug. It is a natural consequence of the collision detection mechanism that was chosen, there is no way around it. The "fix" would be to implement a different collision detection mechanism. The designers thought the simple mechanism worked 99% of the time, and the 1% chance of it failing was an edge-case rare enough that it was not worth spending effort in doing something better.

 

It's like the "side trap" in Centipede: it's not a bug, it's the way the game works which opens itself up to exploitation.

 

You are right that you need a pattern to exploit it reliantly, since it depends on the precise position of the sprites and their velocities. These factors are purely deterministic in Pac-Man, and therefore, they can be measured and exploited.

 

 

 

I did this in Donkey Kong PK 7800 and sent a PM to tep392 about it and he said he used the same or as close to the same pixels spacing to the arcade game as was possible on an Atari 7800, and he said that the real arcade game has the same behavior in certain instances.

 

 

I believe, that the original Donkey Kong arcade game uses regular pixel collisions or bounding boxes, not grid-tile positions like Pac-Man. I don't know about Donkey Kong for 7800, though.

 

 

 

In Pacman 4k, it is also possible to glitch through a ghost without a collision detect for instance, just like the arcade.

 

Haven't played it, but if they implement the collision detection in the same way as the arcade, then it'll happen as well. My Intellivision game, Christmas Carol, started life as game engine I implemented for a Pac-Man clone, so it has the same grid-based tile positional collision detection as Pac-Man, and sure enough, people have managed to find the same glitch. You can also build patterns due to the same deterministic nature as Pac-Man.

 

 

 

Yeah, that's all well and good but I just played a ten month game (no eat, sleep, or potty breaks) that ended in exactly one trillion points. In layman's terms, that's one million millions!!!

Pacman one trillion points.png

 

I double dog dare Todd Rogers can't even beat my score!!! grin:

 

:thumbsup:

 

 

-dZ.

[BiffsGamingVideos]

Yeah, that's all well and good but I just played a ten month game (no eat, sleep, or potty breaks) that ended in exactly one trillion points. In layman's terms, that's one million millions!!!

Pacman one trillion points.png

 

I double dog dare Todd Rogers can't even beat my score!!! grin:

 

That '1' is in yellow so it must be real because no one has even sent in fake stuff to Twin galaxies before.

[BiffsGamingVideos]

"It's actually different, which is why I said it's not a bug. It is a natural consequence of the collision detection mechanism that was chosen, there is no way around it."

 

 

If it looks like a bug, smells like a bug and sounds like a bug, then it's a bug. The way around it would be to make the collision area a little bigger. Now back then programming in machine language and doing what they did it probably was really tough to do. They probably thought that shipping a product and making money was more important that a minor thing like that. They could always release a new ROM set later with bug fixes if need be.

 

I am doing a jungle adventure game right now that is 99% complete. For months the grappling hook would sometimes fly though a rock and attach on the other side. Eventually I slowed down the hook speed and it fixed it. The issue is that Unity's collision is estimated meaning it's not every frame. So if you have a high speed bullet flying it may be on one side of a wall and then the other side with no collision. It's funny because everyone at Unity said it's not a bug. They just said that is the way it is. Try telling that to someone playing the game. It sure looks like a bug to them.

Edited April 30, 2018 by BiffsGamingVideos

[Andromeda Stardust]

That '1' is in yellow so it must be real because no one has even sent in fake stuff to Twin galaxies before.

I copied and pasted thd yellow 1 last after I did all the zeros. So was going to fill it in with the proper color using the paint bucket tool but decided to leave it. After all, the color glitch in the "1" makes it look more authentic, right?

[Andromeda Stardust]

"It's actually different, which is why I said it's not a bug. It is a natural consequence of the collision detection mechanism that was chosen, there is no way around it."

 

 

If it looks like a bug, smells like a bug and sounds like a bug, then it's a bug. The way around it would be to make the collision area a little bigger. Now back then programming in machine language and doing what they did it probably was really tough to do. They probably thought that shipping a product and making money was more important that a minor thing like that. They could always release a new ROM set later with bug fixes if need be.

 

I am doing a jungle adventure game right now that is 99% complete. For months the grappling hook would sometimes fly though a rock and attach on the other side. Eventually I slowed down the hook speed and it fixed it. The issue is that Unity's collision is estimated meaning it's not every frame. So if you have a high speed bullet flying it may be on one side of a wall and then the other side with no collision. It's funny because everyone at Unity said it's not a bug. They just said that is the way it is. Try telling that to someone playing the game. It sure looks like a bug to them.

Not really a developer but if the collision is critical, couldn't it's trajectory be sampled at sub frame precision, at the expense of greater cpu usage?

 

Generally objects have very simple bounding boxes used to calculate collision. These are far less detailed than the object maps which get rendered by the video card. And occasionally invisible walls you can't pass, or areas where your player clips a terrain because the bounding geometry is simpler than the rendered geometry. This tended to be very evident in 5th and 6th generation systems, less so in the 7th and beyond.

[+DZ-Jay]

If it looks like a bug, smells like a bug and sounds like a bug, then it's a bug. The way around it would be to make the collision area a little bigger. Now back then programming in machine language and doing what they did it probably was really tough to do. They probably thought that shipping a product and making money was more important that a minor thing like that. They could always release a new ROM set later with bug fixes if need be.

 

 

 

Well, that's not really a way around it. Making the collision area a little bigger would still have the same effect. The problem is that when both sprites are at a certain speed, and in a certain position, their "center tiles" will shift past each other and miss. Like I said, it's just a consequence of the mechanism used, not something that can be fixed. The only fix is to use a bounding box or something else.

 

It wasn't that it was tough or hard to fix, it was a conscious decision to keep the elegant and simple mechanism because the cases in which it failed were so rare, they could be ignored.

 

They probably thought that the emergent behaviour of the AI which brought upon that simple mechanism (the collision mechanism is what supports the targeting mechanism for the AI) was so interesting and effective, that it wasn't worth removing it by choosing a different collision mechanism.

 

 

 

Not really a developer but if the collision is critical, couldn't it's trajectory be sampled at sub frame precision, at the expense of greater cpu usage?

 

Generally objects have very simple bounding boxes used to calculate collision. These are far less detailed than the object maps which get rendered by the video card. And occasionally invisible walls you can't pass, or areas where your player clips a terrain because the bounding geometry is simpler than the rendered geometry. This tended to be very evident in 5th and 6th generation systems, less so in the 7th and beyond.

 

It's not a sampling rate problem, it's a grid problem. It doesn't use bounding boxes in the way you are thinking. Think of it as a board game like Trouble or Candy Land or whatever: You move your pieces across the board in little squares. The square in which your piece is at any given time, is your square. If two pieces land on the same square on the same turn, they have "collided."

 

What happens in the pass-through glitch is that you are in one square and your enemy is in an adjacent square, and you both move towards each other during the same turn: you end up in your enemy's square, and he ends up in yours, thus never landing on the same square.

 

The problem is that the squares that determine your and the enemies' positions cannot overlap because they are in a strict grid (thus, not a bounding box around the sprite, but tiles on a grid).

 

It's a flaw in that the collision detection is not 100% accurate all the time; but it's not a bug because it's not a coding error nor a design mistake: it was specifically chosen for its elegance and simplicity which afforded the targeting functionality of the enemies. It is what makes Pac-Man what it is.

 

Seriously, read the link I posted above, it's fascinating.

 

Notice that Ms. Pac-Man reduces the probability of the pass-through glitch by increasing the random number entropy, which prevents you from making simple deterministic patterns like in Pac-Man. However, it still happens randomly every once in a very long while.

 

 

 

If it looks like a bug, smells like a bug and sounds like a bug, then it's a bug.

 

 

Fair enough, that's one way to see it. I just don't consider it a bug if it is not a defect in the code (which it is not), nor a design flaw (which I don't believe it is). I see it more as one more emergent behaviour of the collision and targeting mechanism.

 

In my opinion at least, if it were an unwanted behaviour, the only way to avoid it 100% is to change the underlying mechanism, which would probably yield a completely different game. There are maze games out there with bounding-box or pixel-overlap collisions, and they are very much not Pac-Man.

 

 

 

I am doing a jungle adventure game right now that is 99% complete. For months the grappling hook would sometimes fly though a rock and attach on the other side. Eventually I slowed down the hook speed and it fixed it. The issue is that Unity's collision is estimated meaning it's not every frame. So if you have a high speed bullet flying it may be on one side of a wall and then the other side with no collision. It's funny because everyone at Unity said it's not a bug. They just said that is the way it is. Try telling that to someone playing the game. It sure looks like a bug to them.

 

Hehehe, I can see how that can be frustrating. Yeah, it looks like a bug, but I understand the Unity guys saying that it's not. They probably say it is just a limitation of the engine implementation not a defect.

 

Suppose you wrote a game with lots of sprites on the screen at the same time. It would be like if I were to tell you that your game has a bug because multiplexing the sprites makes them flicker. Your answer would probably be "that's not a bug, that's by design, it's the only way we can add more than X number of sprites on the screen." And you would be right, even though the player would probably tell you that he doesn't care, that it looks like a bug because so-and-so's other game doesn't flicker.

 

That's how I feel about the pass-through glitch of Pac-Man, and I'm sure that's how the Unity guys feel about their collision frame estimates. I'm sure you can understand that.

 

 

-dZ.

Edited April 30, 2018 by DZ-Jay

[Asaki]

only on the first few fruit patterns.

Ohh, I see. I don't know much about the safe zones, I've just heard that they exist.

 

However, what is cool is using a pattern that lets you go though the ghosts (due to a bug). If you time it out, then the center of the ghost and pac-man are out of sync and pac-man goes right though a ghost.

I actually did that just the other day!

 

It makes sense the way DZ describes it, that would explain why sometimes it seems like their bounding box is bigger or smaller than it should be, because you're not actually colliding against each other, just "colliding" with the tiles that you're in.

 

I thought about programming a game that way once, but it would've been a lot of work, because I would have had to re-write everything from scratch, when it was already working fairly well the way it was.

[[d2f]Iggy*SJB]

Nerds....

 

Look, I have no dog in this whole mess, but as an unbiased bystander, I'm highly entertained by it all. I watched Jase's livestream that analyzed the BM tapes. I found it rather fascinating, really. I enjoyed watching KoK(I bought it on iTunes, so I didn't get the bonus stuff. ). I recently(okay, a few minutes ago when I saw someone mention it) found the "bonus" footage on YouTube, but haven't watched it yet.

 

The thing is, it's a movie. I never really considered it a "documentary", as it seemed pretty obvious that there was a coherent story and not just a boatload of "random footage". I do, however, enjoy watching it. I'm now, after all this brouhaha, certain that the tapes were indeed forgeries. Probably "set up" for the movie.... however, they never should have been recorded as "legit" scores if anyone involved knew they were made for the movie. Hell, it's quite possible that Billy "went along with it" to not bust the notion that the movie wasn't a legit documentary, much like wrestlers used to never break "Kayfabe" in years gone by.

 

He(Billy) SHOULD just come out and say, "Yeah, we used MAME and some of it's features to enhance the story of the movie and that it was never intended to be considered as legit. However, I made a bad decision in allowing it to go on to protect the movie itself." I would imagine that a confession along those lines would go over well with the arcade community(of which I am a part) and sooner or later all of the hate would go away.

 

I must say, that IF indeed the threats against his friends and family are legit(and he can prove that), someone needs to go to jail. That's not cool at all. I mean, feel free to have your opinion, but really? Threatening violence over it? C'mon man... that's going WAY too far.

 

As a "first generation gamer", I do respect his legit accomplishments. but I don't worship the guy. I've pulled off some pretty neat accomplishments with regards to games myself. I just never knew(back then) that Twin Galaxies(or anything even remotely like it) existed. If I had, my life would have been a lot different. I'm fine with that, though. Aside from my physical disabilities, I'm in a very good place in life. I'm not rich by any stretch, but there are a lot of people much worse off than I am. Knowing that puts silly stuff like this into perspective.

 

Too many people have gotten all worked up over this. But hey, I'm just a casual observer and life is the stage that keeps me entertained.

[tep392]

 

 

It's actually different, which is why I said it's not a bug. It is a natural consequence of the collision detection mechanism that was chosen, there is no way around it. The "fix" would be to implement a different collision detection mechanism. The designers thought the simple mechanism worked 99% of the time, and the 1% chance of it failing was an edge-case rare enough that it was not worth spending effort in doing something better.

 

It's like the "side trap" in Centipede: it's not a bug, it's the way the game works which opens itself up to exploitation.

 

You are right that you need a pattern to exploit it reliantly, since it depends on the precise position of the sprites and their velocities. These factors are purely deterministic in Pac-Man, and therefore, they can be measured and exploited.

 

 

 

 

I believe, that the original Donkey Kong arcade game uses regular pixel collisions or bounding boxes, not grid-tile positions like Pac-Man. I don't know about Donkey Kong for 7800, though.

 

 

 

 

Haven't played it, but if they implement the collision detection in the same way as the arcade, then it'll happen as well. My Intellivision game, Christmas Carol, started life as game engine I implemented for a Pac-Man clone, so it has the same grid-based tile positional collision detection as Pac-Man, and sure enough, people have managed to find the same glitch. You can also build patterns due to the same deterministic nature as Pac-Man.

 

 

 

 

:thumbsup:

 

 

-dZ.

This is an interesting debate. I totally understand what you are saying about it be a consequence of the collision detection method, and not a necessarily a coding error. But I still tend to consider it a bug. The question in my mind is whether or not it is an intended "feature". If it's just an accident that they didn't intend, then I would personally call it a bug. I not convinced they want the player to be able to pass thru the ghost. They may not have even known about it when it was first released. Who knows. It would be a fairly easy fix though. Instead of check for collisions after all ghosts and pac-man have had their positions updated, they could check for collision after the ghosts have moved, but before pac-man has moved. Bug or feature, I just consider it a quirk of the game that has been a fun part of Pac-man lore.

[Great Hierophant]

The thing I like about the pass through the ghosts bug is that there is a palpable element of risk to exploiting it. If your timing or your pattern is off, instead of sailing through the ghost, you die. How many Perfect games were ruined because someone tried failed at triggering this bug?

[VectorGamer]

Dallas' 1980s video-arcade legend rises to the defense of his dear friend, the fallen king of 'Donkey Kong'

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/04/27/dallas-1980s-video-arcade-legend-rises-defense-dear-friend-fallen-king-donkey-kong

[tep392]

The thing I like about the pass through the ghosts bug is that there is a palpable element of risk to exploiting it. If your timing or your pattern is off, instead of sailing through the ghost, you die. How many Perfect games were ruined because someone tried failed at triggering this bug?

It's worth practicing because it gives you a small chance of escaping when you get cornered.

[Dauber]

It's worth practicing because it gives you a small chance of escaping when you get cornered.

That's a strategy I always do...if I get trapped, I don't suddenly backtrack...I keep going on the off chance I get the pass-thru bug. Sometimes I've been successful.