Hacker News Reader

Comment by omn1 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a nice proof of concept, but I would have tried to identify the in-game variables as in [0] and identify the state of the game from there. Maybe it would take a bit longer, but in the end one could track if a player is sliding or was using an item and so on. Grabbing video frames and doing some kind of template matching on the still images sounds a bit... inconvenient.

[0]: http://orbitaldecay.com/N64/Lesson1/Lesson1.html

View on HN

Author here. That's an approach we considered as well, but we didn't want to have to use an emulator to play the game. Still, you could potentially get much richer information with that approach, and I'd love to see a demo based on it!

[Edited for detail]

I know what you mean. Nevertheless, there are USB controllers which feel like the real thing. Mupen64plus behaves just like the original console so this might be a start. Here are some memory locations I found: https://sites.google.com/site/jamesskingdom/Home/video-game-...

If you have an Arduino, you just need to connect three pieces of wire to use a proper N64 controller on a computer: http://www.instructables.com/id/Use-an-Arduino-with-an-N64-c...

I've played Conker's Bad Fur Day using one of these and an S-Video cable plugged to the TV, and it really feels like the real thing :)

Oh, hi! I came across your site while I was working on this. I enjoyed the video of dropping a fake question block in Time Trial :)

I too was surprised that the author didn't go that route--especially considering there are hundreds of gameshark codes available to give you interesting RAM locations to monitor. There's a weight modifier code for each player which could make for some interesting analysis, also.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com