This past weekend, Denver, CO.

Twas epic.

If you ever watched The King of Kong, you might wanna check in on that world. It's gotten a lot bigger.

Read all about the tournament here:
http://donkeykongblog.blogspot.com/p...ong-off-2.html

Wow @ Jeff Willms

Another thing I never understood about this game was the dismissal of scores on MAME or home arcade machines. They wanna put a * next to every score that isn't achieved in public at FunSpot or w/e, which is really silly because the chances of someone putting up the record score in public is very unlikely. I'm not sure if this is warranted due to possibility of hacking or if it's just old guard trying to protect territory. Probably a bit of both?

The MAME submissions are super-secure from any kind of shenanigans. When you submit a score from MAME, you send them a recording of the actual controller input, and MAME just plays it back (like a player piano). It's not video, the program is actually running the game "live." It works because a lot of the old games, even the ones that use pseudo-randomness like Donkey Kong, use the controller input to seed the RNG. When MAME starts, it emulates from the same "zero point" seed every time. So if you start MAME as a playback of an input file (ie, give identical input as when the game was actually played), you get identical output. Donkey Kong will always throw the barrels the exact same way, the fireballs will do the same things, etc., even though you'll never get the same "natural" game of DK twice. It's like stacking the deck (one possibility, predetermined) vs. shuffling it (52-factorial possibilities). Kind of neat actually.

Holy ****balls it looks like a serial killer convention.

Haha! Now that you mention it...

My favorite player is mitchell. He's a character. He's like the hellmuth of old school arcade gaming.

It's funny you say that, it's exactly the thought I had after watching King of Kong.

I love the Hellmuth/Mitchell type in sports and I don't understand people who don't. If you hate them it only makes the game better as a spectator sport. Every game needs to have players like that.

Chris, that's interesting re: game "seeded" on controller input. I had no idea it worked that way. So I suppose every game should start out exactly the same up if you hold right on the joystick, up until the point where you first either (1) jump or (2) cease holding right on the joystick?

I also remember watching a Hank Chien high score video on Youtube and thought it was ridiculous with all of the postgame testing he had to do for submission (this was on an original DK arcade machine, not MAME).

Bow down!

I was disappointed that Billy Mitchell seemed supportive of the new champion. I'd prefer to see him in the background brooding.

The only snag there is that inserting a coin counts as input, thus branching the seed, as does pressing the one player button. Trying to time both of those exactly would be impossible of course because of the speed at which the RNG cycles.

However, you CAN do what you're talking about using MAME save-states (which take a snapshot of the game's internal memory).

If you make a save-state somewhere in the game, observe the obstacles (fireballs, barrels, whatever), then re-start from your save state, they'll do exactly what they just did, as long as you don't touch the controls.

If you hold "up," or "left," or whatever on your input device and then start from your save state, they'll do something different, and that will be consistent too if the input is consistent. For practical purposes of course, the only way to be consistent is to start from the save-state with your hand already on the input (unless of course you think you can sync yourself to an RNG that's cycling hundreds of times a second). It's fun to do though. It's like the movie Groundhog Day. "Barrel goes down ladder... fireball walks left for a second, then right... Kong sneers," etc. The second you do something different, it changes.

This is getting pretty nerdy.

That was the Old Testament Billy Mitchell. We're now in the age of New Testament Billy Mitchell.