New technical analysis confirms the evidence against Billy Mitchell

[6502nerdface]

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!

[dbttdft]

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).

[darepublic]

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

[slyall]

HN Story (from a couple of months ago) about the huge gains in competitive Tetris over the last few years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32196129

[postalrat]

Passion rarely lasts. Everyone coming in builds on the experience of people that came before them.

[stoeckley]

If you haven't seen the documentary King of Kong, it's quite an entertaining backstory for these events.

[BeetleB]

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.

[Mountain_Skies]

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.

[scrame]

There's a companion movie "Chasing Ghosts" that I thought was much better for humanizing this particular group of oddballs.

[hellotomyrars]

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.

[themoonisachees]

See also: trackmania pro times being driven in slow motion, despite the guys being actually really good in normal speed (verifiably, on stream)

I'm still salty that the super trackmaster campaign from tm turbo includes times cheated by riolu!.

[Animats]

Oh, some gamer, not the famous aviator who was court-martialed for demonstraiting that aerial bombs could sink battleships.

[jefftk]

That's not why he was court martialed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell

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.

[Turing_Machine]

That's what I was expecting also.

[themerone]

It's sad that a man's entire self worth is so deeply tied to a fraudulent game score.

[lordleft]

In Billy Mitchell's defense, his villainy is fairly low grade and highly entertaining. He's very fun to hate on

[JoeAltmaier]

There's folks who have suicided when their fraud gets detected. Truly, their entire self-worth tied up in a score.

e.g https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/08/us/marathoner-frank-meza-suic...

[dvngnt_]

lies. i think he has hot sauce too

[scrame]

No, he also makes barbeque sauce.

[bruceb]

I love how obsessed in a good way this person is. I wonder how many hours went in to this analysis? 60+ probably.

[tomphoolery]

i'll wait for the karl jobst video /s

this is pretty awesome!

[Kenji]

Hello you absolute legends!

[jamestimmins]

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.

[walrus01]

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.

[wil421]

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.

[wly_cdgr]

Could have just asked the guy to tell the truth

[darepublic]

Trial of the century

[DubiousPusher]

It's amazing that any hobby, however trivial, when interrogated and pursued to its deepest extremity, contains a microcosm of the human condition.

[WalterBright]

Billy Mitchell was vindicated by the attack on Pearl Harbor.

[chanandler_bong]

I was confused as well. I didn't think there were any outstanding controversies around Gen. Mitchell, but you never know...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell

[fmajid]

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.

[ineedasername]

I think you have the wrong game, this is Donkey Kong not Call of Duty ;)

[kthejoker2]

He's the closest we've ever come to the US military leading a major attack on its own citizens. He was only stopped by others because of the optics.

He really, really wanted to bomb things.

[JKCalhoun]

Ha ha, had to look that one up.