So basically, the smoking guns are the TV being tilted the wrong way (oops!) and certain frames of video, especially in the transitions between levels, appearing as only MAME would output them, not real hardware (because MAME is framebuffer based, rather than actually simulating the electron beam, which produces some differences in timing). There's also evidence of v-sync tearing, which could only happen in MAME. Fascinating!
Yup. MAME still has an "electron beam" since that's how all PC video works, just the software buffers a full frame before letting it scan out to the monitor. Even if emulators didn't buffer, they would have to somewhat exactly match the speed of the instruction execution of whatever they're emulating (do emulators do this? I have no idea), or else for example the amount of girder rendered in each frame would be different than the real system, i.e, they will be longer in that first frame if the ROM runs faster than the real system (I think... assuming the code is just filling the tiles at its own pace and not tightly scheduled by something else).
King of Kong focused on Billy as the bad guy and Steve as the protagonist. Of course a Wikipedia check shows that all the top scores were taken by new blood to the field and neither Steve nor Billy are in the mix anymore. Kind of reminds me of Tetris, there was the old generation putzing around some imaginary glass ceiling and suddenly after the game received some spotlight the existing records were swept away by young blood
King of Kong is my goto example of a documentary that is highly manipulative, and you wouldn't know it unless you had other sources of info.
Some examples:
This is highly de-recommended. The documentary twists way too many facts:
Billy Mitchell did not avoid Steve. In fact, he met him during that event.
Billy Mitchell and Steve already knew each other - years before they had been part of another event, and there's even a photo of them posing together.
Steve wasn't trying to break Billy's record, but his own record which he had set some years prior. When his record was disqualified in the movie, the record was reverted to his own prior record.
Even the makers of the show admit they edited footage to craft a villain narrative and create conflict where it didn't exist. It shouldn't be used to inform your views on anyone involved but it does make for some fun entertainment.
Pretty sure they didn't talk him into wearing his patriotism on his sleeve with the loud American flag ties and such — and his villainous Trans-Am-driving coiffure, ha ha.
The guy exudes all the vibes of a narcissist. As others have said, a guy so much fun to detest.
I interpreted the commenter as referring to the gaudy display of symbols of patriotism as fashion, not to the idea of patriotism itself.
For another take on the danger of loving one’s country, see the Irish tune “The Patriot Game” by Brenden Behan (especially as performed by the Clancy Brothers).
>Funny, the wikipedia page says something different: Twin Galaxies colluded with Billy Mitchell to support his fraud
Both can be true. The movie purposefully cast Mitchell as a villain based on little hard evidence, they happened to be right that he was one.
I don't see how you can accuse Twin Galaxies of collusion. Sure, they were probably too lenient on someone they had a decades long connection to, but this lawsuit is about them admitting their mistake and condemning Mitchell.
It's a reasonable accusation: for a while Twin Galaxies basically just had a few people making up numbers and their mates writing it down, without even a hint of verifying it (including a few scores which were blatently impossible to anyone who had even a slight familiarity with the game, like a game where the score only increments in multiples of five having a score where the last digit is 3).
One really important point is that while it's the same organisation name it's been bought out and there's now a completely different group of people running it (and they seem to be much more concerned with sniffing out cheaters).
The sad thing is he probably didn't need to cheat but he did. And of course he has only doubled and tripled down on this. It is the same thing that happens a lot in some e-sports. People who are really competitive and able to perform at the top of their game end up using hacks as a crutch, if only to give themselves a mental break. Multiple competitive streamers have been caught on stream accidently alt-tabbing in to their hacks and then have the gall to double down much like Billy Mitchell and say that they weren't and it was just there for some reason and they weren't using it.
Like the unwillingness to admit it is where it gets sad. In Billy's case the lawsuits are where it gets gross. The dangers of wrapping your entire identity around one thing I guess. I don't think anyone even cares about Billy Mitchell and his donkey kong score at this point outside of the continued circus. But I guess for him it is actually the only way to keep himself relevant.
In response to the Navy's first helium-filled rigid airship Shenandoah crashing in a storm in September 1925, killing 14 of the crew, and the loss of three seaplanes on a flight from the West Coast to Hawaii, Mitchell issued a statement accusing senior leaders in the Army and Navy of incompetence and "almost treasonable administration of the national defense."[48] In October 1925, a charge with eight specifications was proffered against Mitchell on the direct order of President Calvin Coolidge, accusing him of violation of the 96th Article of War, an omnibus article that Mitchell's chief counsel, Congressman Frank Reid, declared to be "unconstitutional" as a violation of free speech.[49] The court martial began in early November and lasted for seven weeks.
He does remind me of a late 20th century WWF wrestling villain. He's a good player, even if its pretty clear at this point some of his scores are dodgy.
In the King Of Kong extras he brings someone a frogger machine to practice on, which was pretty nice. In that segment he comes across a pretty nice actually.
If you like arcade games and are in the NH area the American Classic Game Museum (Fun Spot?) has a lot of the old machines.
> even if its pretty clear at this point some of his scores are dodgy.
"dodgy"? Quite the understatement there. This man has made fraudulent claims, has held fraudulent records and, most importantly, has sued people who told the truth.
Defending this person by downplaying their scores as "dodgy" is ludicrous.
There's some criticism of the King of Kong film that they tilted quite a few scenes to make him look worse that he was. There was some playing with timelines and implying bad behavior that didn't actually happen. The thrust of story is true, but it was definitely a movie made to make you hate Billy Mitchell instead of a piece of journalism.
IMO, documentary film should be consumed as entertainment and not as an actual document. Almost any documentary that can be entertaining enough to draw any kind of significant viewership in has to have a narrative. And narrative is often in contention with reality.
Hasn't he filed multiple lawsuits against different entities who have called him out on this?
If he was just pushing a false narrative of high scores on video games, I'd probably shrug at the whole situation. But this guy seems to be willing to die on the hill he has made for himself.
I used to suffer depression, and the biggest advice I got was to diversify my sources of self-esteem. It's fragile to only have one source of ego, you want to have hobbies, work, friends and family, all to support you when things go badly. Because we all have off days, it becomes a spiral when we don't have things to help us through.
This is an incredible technical writeup. Not an EE, but the logic seemed convincing and was quite easy to follow for someone with only a limited understanding of low level computer systems.
Some intelligence agency should hire whoever did this writeup to conduct similarly detailed technical analysis and write reports on things of greater importance than donkey Kong.
Sounds like an Electrical Engineer. My father is one and I can distinctly remember hearing about scanning electron beams growing up with CRTs.
I checked while writing the comment and the author is a hardware engineer so close enough.
My mom was a teacher and she argued about red, green, blue being the colors of everything to my dad. The family got a report similar to this one about pigment vs light with supporting charts and formulas.
Yep, he's an expert in antenna design and some high voltage electronics that I don't understand. We've done a couple of projects together designing arcade hardware and have a really interesting project in the pipe.
Mitchell along with Douhet was one of the most important thinkers of military aviation. There’s a 1955 movie, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell featuring Gary Cooper as Mitchell, I thought this was what this HN post was about, not some utterly unimportant and meaningless gamer controversy.
