Pi to Gaming Consoles

Tool-Assisted Speedruns on original hardware

Allan Cecil

Welcome!

This presentation was given at NBLUG.org on 2012-12-10.

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Notes:
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Covered in this talk:

Emulators and Tool-Assisted Speedruns (TAS)
Original NESBot TAS to console project
Linux tools for designing a PCB
Linux tools for programming a microcontroller
Linux emulators and Raspberry Pi scripting
Demo: Gradius - how a TAS can be an artform
Pretending to be 8 controllers
Demo: SMW Total Control - how to make Yoshi eat 0xFA

Emulators

Video game emulators started appearing in the mid 90's allowing console games to be played on PC's
There are now a number of emulators for various platforms
Emulators have even been developed for current generation consoles
Many emulators run on Linux
Some emulators now emulate the original hardware extremely accurately

Notes:
Not all emulators with accurate emulation support re-recording; http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources.html has a good list of emulators that support this.

Tool-Assisted Speedruns

A Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS) consists of the specific input required to complete a game as fast as inhumanly possible
The first widely distributed TAS in 2003 was not labeled as being created with the aid of tools, leading to controversy
In time, the website TASVideos.org became the primary repository of Tool-Assisted Speedruns (with Nicovideo as a popular site in Japan)
TASVideos implemented strict labeling requirements which helped to distinguish TAS speedruns from realtime speedruns relying on human skill alone

NESBot: TAS on original hardware

The TASVideos user micro500 announced he had created a "bot" that could play back a TAS on original hardware through the controller port
The news was posted on Slashdot and micro500 created an Instructible to enable others to build their own NESBot
The NESBot worked, but was incredibly finicky and hard to use
Other designs followed, including working SNES and N64 bots

Making NESBot better

While the NESBot was functional, a more reliable solution was needed
Several methods of using a Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins directly were tried, but failed due to latency issues
Various people researched microcontrollers as an alternative, with the TASVideos user true settling on using a PIC32 from Microchip
The design involved using a lot of Linux tools to create the PCB, flash the microcontroller, and use the bot

Useful Linux tools

There are a few CAD applications in Linux including Kicad; true used Eagle, which is available as freeware and can export Gerber files that can be sent to PCB printing facilities such as OSH Park
Microchip has a freeware version of MPLABX for Linux for creating and compiling PIC32 microcontroller code
The PIC32 microcontroller can be programmed (flashed) under Linux using pic32prog and a programmer such as a PICit2
The design from true uses Python scripts running on a Raspberry Pi to drive the microcontroller

The new bot in action

Why build this?

I posted a full explanation in the TASVideos forums
My primary motivation was to create a reliable platform to demonstrate Tool-Assisted Speedruns at the Awesome Games Done Quick 2014 charity marathon for the Prevent Cancer Foundation; I will be demonstrating this project on January 5th, 2014 at 5:30 PST
While there may be a small audience interested in this board, the time it would take to make them likely would not be profitable, so my personal motivations were fairly altruistic
Many other TASVideos users shared my entusiasm and assisted in this project, including Ilari, zid', true, adelikat, micro500, DarkKobold, and others; I am indebted to their assistance.

Q&A

Questions?

Notes:
The sections above are littered with links, so feel free to navigate to those areas or search this document for the subject you need more information on. As always, a good search engine is your friend. This presentation can be reused in any way with attribution.

Enjoy,

A.C.
******

Pi to Gaming Console Tool-Assisted Speedruns

2013-12-10