The case has been shaking the world of arcade games for years, and has just experienced a new twist. American Billy Mitchell, holder of several world records in video games cap man Y Donkey Konghe is accused by a new report of having cheated to obtain some of his titles.
Disputed scores relate to the game. Donkey Kongin which Mario first appears and in which Billy Mitchell had previously faced accusations of cheating. In 2018, the Guinness World Records (known for his book of records) and the specialized site Twin Galaxies had stripped the record holder of the controversial awards for similar accusations, remember vice.
Accused of playing on the emulator
It is a technical analysis carried out by Tanner Fokkens, and republished on Tuesday, September 6, on the site perfectpacman.com, which once again set fire to the dust. The American engineer, also a gamer Donkey Kong, accuses Billy Mitchell of having obtained two of his discs not in a classic arcade terminal, but in the MAME emulator. An emulator is software that reproduces the operation of an old game on newer machines, here a computer.
But the emulator does not perfectly reproduce the operation of the game: there may be differences, for example in the orientation of the image, or in the transitions between the different screens of the game, it is these elements that the report uses to support its theory, by analyzing the images of Billy Mitchell’s games, at the time recorded on video tapes.
Transitions are displayed differently
The display of transitions between screens constitutes in a way “a fingerprint of the platform on which the game was played”, explains Tanner Fokkens in his report. The elements that make up the level (beams, stairs) are displayed as the processor places “the graphic elements of the level in video memory,” the engineer describes in an email to Vice.
Tanner Fokkens continues the metaphor by explaining that the emulator, he, “takes a picture of the entire page and shows all the words at that moment on the screen.” The different images that make up the transitions are therefore not the same depending on the machine used.
In short, “it is impossible for an unmodified arcade machine to produce the transitions shown in the Billy Mitchell videotape,” Tanner Fokkens says about Vice. The analysis is supported by five other experts, including one of the developers of the MAME emulator, two other record holders of Donkey Kong and an expert arcade technician who was also a technical assistant to Billy Mitchell.
Legal action still ongoing
The report reminds that playing on an emulator is completely accepted, and that this even constitutes a competitive category in its own right. But the records in this category and those obtained in a classic arcade terminal are not comparable, and those who try to make the former pass for the latter are “disqualified”, recalls the site perfectpacman.com.
Guinness World Records had returned his awards to Billy Mitchell, but the latter had taken legal action against Twin Galaxies, which is still ongoing. New testimonies were also presented on September 2, in which the player affirms, for example, that his doctor refused to see him due to the accusations of cheating made by the site, according to documents published by perfecpacman.com.
Source: BFM TV
