What tools were used to analyze & challenge the records for Dragster?
I was reading an article on Polygon which was talking about a longstanding record for an Atari Game called Dragster. In the article it was talking about how people challenged the record by using "tools" to dispute how the record would be achieved without cheats.
Would anyone have an idea what tools they could be referring to? They talk about analyzing the code. The link in the article takes you to a spreadsheet which lets you change values. Also is this a typical practice for challenging records in video games?
I've added the article below for reference:
https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/29/16944736/atari-dragster-game-world-record-banned
Best Answer
They're describing tool-assisted speedrunning, aka TASing. A TAS uses an emulator, allowing a player to make frame-perfect button inputs, simulating absolutely perfect play, and allowing any errors to be rewound and redone quickly.
In the case of Dragster, we already know that perfect, down to the individual frame level (shifting and accelerating at the exact best possible moment), results in a time of 5.57.
The 5.51 time submitted by the player in question has no known way to reproduce, has never been able to be reproduced by anyone even with a TAS. Omnigamer has provided a spreadsheet indicating exhaustively what different combinations of input results in which times.
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