oh no, not another girder finger..

[gridrunner]

I'd be following the whole Billy Mitchell and Twin Galaxies Saga with great interest this past 12 months. I enjoyed this recent summary video of the various details of this story here:

It's a good watch if you're unfamiliar with this story, although I guess most vaccers will be all too aware!

The canonical (read exhaustive) technical breakdown vid in my estimation is over here:

 

[Vamino]

Real life Billy's girder finger, please meet the AI version of Billy's girder finger.

 

[Vamino]

After watching various videos on this subject, to me it just seems that Billy is weaving his own web to tangle himself in.

Even with the evidence, there are still people that believe that he didn't use Mame. Emulation is that good, especially these days, that you still have to be a good player to get top scores. It's clear he's a good videogame player, but the way he has handled the situation, I don't care what he does as now I'm not interested in anything that comes out of his mouth.

He has done some good things, for example reaching out to his contacts at Nintendo regarding the Sky Skipper project. But digging in his heels claiming he didn't use mame at specific points in time has given him a bad name, the universe has various ways of crushing people egos and we are seeing that happen in real time here.

The clear fact is that Billy has been caught lying.
And once caught lying, the potential is always there to lie again.

 

[gridrunner]

After watching various videos on this subject, to me it just seems that Billy is weaving his own web to tangle himself in.

Even with the evidence, there are still people that believe that he didn't use Mame. Emulation is that good, especially these days, that you still have to be a good player to get top scores. It's clear he's a good videogame player, but the way he has handled the situation, I don't care what he does as now I'm not interested in anything that comes out of his mouth.

He has done some good things, for example reaching out to his contacts at Nintendo regarding the Sky Skipper project. But digging in his heels claiming he didn't use mame at specific points in time has given him a bad name, the universe has various ways of crushing people egos and we are seeing that happen in real time here.

The clear fact is that Billy has been caught lying.
And once caught lying, the potential is always there to lie again.

My take on this is that Billy Mitchell was and still is a great player and is capable of reaching high scores, that much is a matter of public record. I first came across him in the late 90s/early noughties with some paperback copies of the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic scoreboards. He should have been happy to have been the first to attain a perfect Pac-man and be recognised for that, but some of the more recent scores? Well, it's clear to me on the basis of what I've learned is that the King of Kong score, the mortgage brokers score and the boomers score are all derived from MAME. I just don't accept that the 'deterioriation' of PCBs can lead to artefacts that just happen to resemble so many MAME snapshot renders in Donkey Kong. It's just not possible.
Is this a case of someone whose ego can't accept that faster, younger players will come along and unseat him and so he has these scores put on ice, ready to use whenever he feels the need to re-assert himself? Is the rationale here that he knows that he is capable of reaching these scores and so this isn't cheating, it's just a placeholder? Have a watch and you be the judge!

 

[Vamino]

I'd never heard of Billy or Twin Galaxies till about 10 or so years ago.

I get the impression that the guys caught up in the twin galaxies cheating controversies started off as some mates taking turns in being referees boosting each others egos until the point they believed they were the greatest of all time. An elite group of the best gamers of all time, and over the years it's transpired that they may not have been telling the truth about their accomplishments.

To me, the Guinness book of records was something on TV in the 70's and 80' under the name of Record Breakers. A TV show with Roy Castle playing a trumpet that was created by a beer brand as self promotion/blatant advertising that was full of random crap like the guy who can eat a plate of spaghetti the fastest, or a guy who can eat the most cakes in a minute.

I'm not belittling any of the high scores on Twin Galaxies that people have put a lot of time and effort into achieving, but I just can't take Twin Galaxies and Record Breakers seriously when there are decades of unsung gamers not documented in their pages. From Japanese legends to the current generation of worldwide speed runners, gaming has come a long way over the years.