Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 194 posts

Re: After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

#71

Post by singlow »

throw7 wrote: post #66

Is there a definitive definition of "glitch"? To me, it's just a bug...

I think its a subset of bugs. A glitch usually is not fatal, allowing the program to continue in a possibly degraded/altered way. In games it most often refers to a bug that allows for some unintended behavior that may be advantageous for certain desired outcomes, although it also can be just a visual artifact or it could get you stuck. But I wouldn't expect it to be used to describe a bug that caused the game to shut down or end instantly.

Re: After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

#72

Post by mgerullis »

JohnBooty wrote: post #52
johnisgood wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if this "kill screen" were to happen at, say, level 30 due to bad code? Would it still be considered "beating the game"?

Well, it's definitely a judgement call. I think most "serious" Tetris players can get to 30 easily in a short amount of time, right? Like 15-20 minutes? It'd be hard to think of that as a legitimate "ending." Whereas a run to level 100+ or whatever for this kill screen is a major achievement. Took people 30+ years to get there. I don't know, though. It's all subjective. If you want to think of a hypothetical lvl 30 c…

Um, it wasn’t until 2011 before the first person achieved level 30, as the video mentions fairly early on

Re: After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

#73

Post by ejona86 »

fractal161 wrote: post #55
kirjavascript wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can and we have achieved Arbitrary Code Execution in NES Tetris. The setup is horrifyingly complicated and precise though, involving getting some near-impossible scores and entering specific names in the highscore list, then reaching the crash on the same frame that the internal values for random number generation happen to represent a jump instruction to said highscore list (and we get lucky and various registers…

However , I'm like 90% sure that this can be made easier using p3/p4 controllers through the famicom expansion port. In particular, Hydrantdude and I found a consistent enough setup using the single at 1489 lines (pushdown gives you a 50% chance, and I think). This setup would even allow crude human-possible ACE. Right now we're limited to small payloads (I made a proof of concept that activates the unused two player…

Size-optimized, RAM-only mods. Sounds interesting...

Re: After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

#74

Post by xtracto »

danielvaughn wrote: post #65
anticorporate wrote: post #63

I only ever knew the version of Tetris that shipped with the Windows Entertainment Pack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Entertainment_Pack >. Since this version was made for 16-bit Windows, it was no surprise that they used a 16-bit integer to store your score. What was surprising is that they used a signed 16-bit integer, meaning that after you passed 32,767 points, your score would roll over into the negati…

I played Minesweeper almost every day during the summer in the 90's. I got so good at it that I eventually whittled down my time to a mere 17 seconds on the largest puzzle (expert). At that point I figured I couldn't get any faster, and moved on to a new game. Years later, I was looking at the Guiness Book of World Records and noticed that the record for the expert minesweeper is something like 25 seconds. Of course,…

xyzzy !

Re: After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

#75

Post by nvarsj »

sixQuarks wrote: post #67

Wow, practicing for 3-4 hours per day! I feel like they’re gonna be regretful for spending that much time on this later in life. I spent way too much time playing battlefield 1942, had fun but way too much time wasted.

Time enjoyed is not time wasted.

Re: After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

#76

Post by rkagerer »

crdrost wrote: post #45
hannofcart wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I knew Tetris. I guess I don't. I'm just humbled by how little I understood of the comment above.

Quick glossary: DAS - "Delayed autoshift," the delay is between when you press the button and when the long keypress starts to register as multiple clicks, auto-shifting the piece to the sides. So this is kind of a software-based "convention" that everyone knows, you open your word processor, you press the down arrow, it goes "down" one line and then waits for a quarter-second and then starts going in a more fluid mo…

Adding one more thing about CRT monitors for younger folks here... they had better refresh characteristics than early LCD monitors (which had lag due to their more complicated electronics/processing).

Re: After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

#77

Post by Retr0id »

rkagerer wrote: post #76
crdrost wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick glossary: DAS - "Delayed autoshift," the delay is between when you press the button and when the long keypress starts to register as multiple clicks, auto-shifting the piece to the sides. So this is kind of a software-based "convention" that everyone knows, you open your word processor, you press the down arrow, it goes "down" one line and then waits for a quarter-second and then starts going in a more fluid mo…

Adding one more thing about CRT monitors for younger folks here... they had better refresh characteristics than early LCD monitors (which had lag due to their more complicated electronics/processing).

They still have better refresh characteristics than LCDs, on paper, although the practical difference becomes negligible.

Re: After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

#78

Post by itchyouch »

danielvaughn wrote: post #65
anticorporate wrote: post #63

I only ever knew the version of Tetris that shipped with the Windows Entertainment Pack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Entertainment_Pack >. Since this version was made for 16-bit Windows, it was no surprise that they used a 16-bit integer to store your score. What was surprising is that they used a signed 16-bit integer, meaning that after you passed 32,767 points, your score would roll over into the negati…

I played Minesweeper almost every day during the summer in the 90's. I got so good at it that I eventually whittled down my time to a mere 17 seconds on the largest puzzle (expert). At that point I figured I couldn't get any faster, and moved on to a new game. Years later, I was looking at the Guiness Book of World Records and noticed that the record for the expert minesweeper is something like 25 seconds. Of course,…

Funny story. When my friend started playing minesweeper, I would go to his computer and clear out all of his scores by editing in my scores as "beating" him.

Being super competitive, in order not to lose to me, he became a fiend at minesweeper, being able to do solve the beginner series in under 20 seconds. As he would get better and better, I would continue to beat his high score until he had the beginner down to somewhere around 7 seconds.

I changed it to 6 seconds.

He beat it to 5 seconds.

I changed it to 4 seconds.

At that point he was like, WHAT IS GOING ON? And then I showed him how I could just edit the scores. Boy was he dissapointed. But it goes to show how far we can push ourselves if we know that it's "possible."

Re: After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]

#79

Post by ndiddy »

refulgentis wrote: post #57
TheRoque wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some old games are infinite, and don't have a proper end, then can roll infinitely. So as a result, you can play as long as you wish, until you reach the hardware limits, which is called the kill screen, and might be the closest thing to "finishing" a game when it's infinite.

I don't understand, what hardware limit?

In this case, the hardware limit is CPU time. NES Tetris will give you more points for clearing lines the higher the level is. For example, on level 0 clearing one line gives you 40 points but on level 9 clearing one line gives you 400 points. This is implemented in the code by adding the base number of points to the score in a loop where the counter is the level number: https://github.com/CelestialAmber/TetrisNESDisasm/blob/2bd89... NES Tetris is written with the assumption that its main game code won't run for more than one frame. When the player reaches a high enough level the "add score for cleared lines" code will take too long, and the processor will get interrupted for the start of the next frame while it's still adding the score. This causes the game to crash.
Post reply on HN