Billy Mitchell's Direct Feed Recordings are MAME Generated

[JCHarrist]

fellas, i was in ottumwa in 2009 when that video was filmed. i talked at length with the owner of that cabinet. it was a restoration, not originally red, and it did not have an authentic donkey kong board in it. it was either a double donkey kong or a multigame. pointing at this and saying "see the arcade looks like mame" is moot. that is not an original board.

Must be a DDK because that is 100% an arcade transition. MAME would never draw a single ladder at the top like that.

[Josephjo]

Must be a DDK because that is 100% an arcade transition. MAME would never draw a single ladder at the top like that.

From the same event is that the DK Jnr attract mode that Barra is playing in this clip??

[JCHarrist]

Must be a DDK because that is 100% an arcade transition. MAME would never draw a single ladder at the top like that.

From the same event is that the DK Jnr attract mode that Barra is playing in this clip??

Haha, yes, I do believe that is DK Junior

[marky_d]

I think it's running D2K

[JCHarrist]

I think it's running D2K

I think you're right. That's the foundry board. Not the vines.

[SHLONKY]

so i hear billy is trying to sue apollo legend now?

Not been around for a couple of weeks due to work, but it seems billys still playing the ignorance game?

[Adam_Mon]

  
  "Lawyer up!"

[SHLONKY]

im nearly upto date with whats happened lately....i see a magical capture card has appeared into the story which confirms my original post that the footage was originally recorded via pc and not vhs!

im not confident it was the PC thats said to be used in carlos video! However, the software looks the same, but the pc looks more modern than in mr childs video, and the capture device looks smaller in carlos video (and a different colour).

The Gigaware company however opened in 2009, and the vhs device shipped with arcsoft showbiz 2 on the disc, which does look like whats on that pc! I cant find a release date for the vhs converter though, but showbiz 2 came out in 2008.
The gigaware converter can still be easily found new today, and carlos box does look very nice for a 18 year old device thats been used a few times! And if it had been in mr childs possession id expect it to look like that receipt and not new!

[Rev John]

Would more work on this that could offer some statistical analysis like identifying variance or z-scores as well as looking at boards by type (e.g. barrel, rivet, elevator, pie) be of interest or do you think this is not worth the effort?

I'm a big fan of statistical analysis. So, in general, I think it's a worthwhile effort. In regards to Billy's scores specifically, I think it's probably a dead end. Every WR or PB is an outlier, all the top players have some kind of outlier in their top games (Robbie and pies, Dean and barrels, Wes and springs, John and rivets, etc.). So, it's easy to find "something" if you look hard enough. I imagine it would be incredibly difficult, but to get any sort of meaningful statistical analysis of Billy's games, you'd have to quantify the odds of him surviving every decision he makes in his games. As it stands, it doesn't pass the eye test.

Thanks for the feedback, and I do agree just a single outlier is not even close to sufficient to make any sort of claims re: Billy's scores.  Having said that, if the notion is that MAME was used to construct some of these scores, I do wonder how the random nature of a legitimate game would not be altered in some way. Though again, it may be very difficult to find how it is altered in a way that is statistically significant.

More specifically, the approach I had envisioned was to avoid the need to quantify individual decisions by focusing on the degree to which some board scores were outliers.  Analyzing these outliers in a vacuum is certainly doomed to failure for lack of context, but in comparison to the rate of outliers of peer games of the era we should be able to address that need for context. 

With all of that said, I do lack domain knowledge specific to DK so I may not be aware of specific challenges that you have already encountered in your previous efforts (like those from your link).

edit: I do want to add the specific concern you raise about WR games being outliers by definition, is, I believe, addressed to a large degree by focusing on 1m+ point games as so-called "peer games" all of which, I would think, could be considered outliers.  I concede the pool may need more refinement, but I do think that refinement is possible.

There is one way to do a statistical analysis which would help identify MAME abuse scores -

The way the 300/500/800 point system breaks down means that a player gets an average 525 points for a blue barrel or pie, and an average 450 points for a fireball.  The scores are determined at 'random' within the game and are not at all controllable by the player.  If you counted the number of blue barrel/pie smashes and fireball smashes in a game played on an arcade machine, you should get close to the expected averages for each smash category.  For example, a typical arcade machine player might get slightly higher than average on pies but slightly lower than average on fireballs over the course of one game, but in general still close to the averages.  These averages are independent of gameplay, it doesn't matter if a player likes to smash lots of pies for example, their average score per pie should still be roughly the expected average.  If a player was abusing MAME and replaying for favourable scoring, I would expect that their smash scores would be generally higher than the expected average for each of the 3 smash categories.  If for example they consistently scored more than the average in each category, maybe over multiple fake MAME video-tape submissions, it would look like the fingerprint of a cheater.  You would have to get stats on each smash in a game though and whether or not 300, 500 or 800 was scored.  You could then calculate how many standard deviations away from the mean someone was and how likely such a feat was.

There was a chart posted on Twitter showing that Billy Mitchell achieved a high proportion of his score from hammer smashes.  I note that he had a good proportion of smashes on rivets, where you can only smash fireballs which overall score less than pies and blue barrels, yet his overall smash average (his "smaverage"?) was still pretty high.  Unfortunately that chart didn't have an exact breakdown for number of actual blue barrels / pies / fireballs smashed so that average scores could not be determined for each.  Maybe Billy Mitchell is so awesome that his method of playing means that the fireballs line up for the slaughter (averaging over 3 fireballs smashed per rivet hammer), but he cannot be so awesome that, for example, he tosses a coin and gets heads 60% of the time.

[Firebrandx]

I'm posting this here since it's got technical information important to the thread. My apologies for the duplicate response (I had posted it in another thread defending Billy), but this is important new information:

The latest Billy defenders panel tried to use the defense that MAME doesn't show the girder 'finger' or 'tale' until version 0.116, which was well after his videos were submitted. Unfortunately for them, an anonymous tip came in that you can in fact get MAME to display the same anomaly going all the way back to 2001. The trick is to enable cheats, and then change the timing. In versions 0.56 to 0.84, this can be done with the the CPU0 setting and changing it to 99%. Here's the earliest version I was able to run on my computer:



However, here's where it gets interesting: In August 2004, MAME version 0.85 came out with a new cheat feature: Refresh Rate. In versions 0.85 all the way to version 0.115, you can set the refresh rate to 60.600 and get the EXACT same 'finger' to show up:



So what's the significance of 60.600 refresh rate? It just so happens to approximately match the arcade DK's refresh rate. As I said, this feature came out in August of 2004, which is well before Billy's tapes surfaced.

Next, here's a photo spread showing some excerpts of Billy's tapes and comparing them to both MAME's 'finger' and how the original hardware looks on that transition:



Keep in mind this doesn't even take into account the myriad of other issues with Billy's tapes matching MAME transitions. This is just one of many. Lastly, now consider that Billy in the latest defense panel FINALLY admitted the board swap video was faked. That right there, even if you ignore all other evidence, is grounds for permanent banning on TG. It's a confessed attempt to deceive the public on a world video game record accomplishment. No matter how much he throws Robert Childs under the bus for it, he was IN that same video, and knew it was a lie. How can Billy defenders even defend him after hearing that confession? It's over for the man. Absolute checkmate.

-FBX

[gstrain]

With regard to the TG dispute on this issue, at 03-17-2018, 05:18 PM Jace Hall posted on the TG dispute thread:
   

We are less than 10 days away from rendering a final decision.

[jdllama]

Gonna drop this here:

Billy admits the Boomer video was staged, although it was at the request of Robert Childs (who is now an idiot and a liar, which are not my words but Billy's).

[Sock Master]

We've seen what the transition frames in MAME look like if we adjust MAME's timing parameters (adjusting the CPU speed or the refresh rate) in the TG thread and it showed that the transition frames still do not look like frames from DK hardware.

I was curious to see what it might look like if we were to change timing parameters on DK hardware to see if that could possibly make DK frames look like MAME frames.   I reprogrammed DK's own drawing code to mathematically model the way DK hardware renders video and then made the program run through a range of timing adjustments.

Here are the results.  Keep in mind that this is simply a mathematical simulation and I used MAME to do it.  It was only meant to satisfy my own curiosity.  It does reproduce results very similar to that of actual DK hardware and I think it makes a good visual aid to demonstrate how DK hardware rendering is different from the way older versions of MAME render video.   Even if a DK PCB were hacked to run very different timing it still doesn't render frames that look like MAME.  It can't for the same reason that older versions of MAME won't render frames that look like DK hardware even if you adjust MAME's timing parameters.  They both have very different methods of composing the video and give different results

[WCopeland]

Robbie explaining that we have only seen the evidence from one side.

There is no reasonable evidence that has yet been presented from the other side.
Everything currently presented by the other side has been torn to shreds.

[LMDAVE]

Gonna drop this here:

Billy admits the Boomer video was staged, although it was at the request of Robert Childs (who is now an idiot and a liar, which are not my words but Billy's).

I can't imagine anything other than a decision being made that Billy submitted tapes played on MAME given all the facts and proof out there now (even more with Jeff's new rivets sequences). It still blows my mind that there is a mind set that the people bringing these facts forward are not experts, and that Triforce (who self-admittedly knows zero about Donkey Kong and how the game renders) is trying to become the spokesman for defending Billy.

I don't know if Billy's friend Robert Childs was aware that Billy was totally going to throw him under the bus after facts proved that boardswap video was fake. No one, including Billy, came forward with that info until it was 100% proven.  Major character flaw in all involved right there.

But, given where this is going now and the amount of facts and proof out there, and couple that with Billy trying to detach himself from what his friends stupid decisions were, whats to stop him from just saying something like. "They must have set up a MAME machine without me knowing. I don't know MAME from Arcade, I just play the game." Nothing will surprise me at this point now.