hi, I'm amos! 🦀 I make articles & videos about how computers work 🐻❄ cool bear's less cool counterpart ✨ be kind
the write-up is a good one, explains both the technical details and the context of this run. a fun read.
we imagine most people these days have at least heard of TASes, but we don't really know that. just in case, it stands for tool-assisted speedrun, a way of speedrunning videogames with scripted, machine inputs rather than a human player. it's not performance-based in the way that human speedruns are, but it has its own challenges.
I saw that one just the other night, and it made me wonder how many other games could be beaten with a similar technique. Surely SMB3 isn't the only game that used that type of bootloader routine - are there others out there that could be similarly overwritten with jump commands on boot?
It's fascinating the things that TASers come up with. Human understanding of code is getting downright magical at this point.
yeah it seems like this general technique should work on most games, there are a lot of details that need to line up but there are good reasons that they happen to do so. for example, writing the intermediate button state to the zero page is fast and convenient.
