my first post to this board. :)

I'm a bit concerned about some of Renzo Vignola's recent recordings... they come up clean when I check them, but they're still very suspicious.

In Metal Black he keeps up a constant stream of fire throughout the entire game. Even when no enemies are on the screen and there's no reason to fire, he is still firing regardless. In Sonic Wings it's the same thing - he is firing as soon as the level starts, and he keeps firing all the way up until the end of the level. There is no reason for a player to keep firing after the boss is destroyed... and it looks like he knows the game well enough to know when the boss is destroyed for good.

There is one thing that these two games have in common - when the fire button is pushed, it doesn't fire one shot but rather several shots at once. So if he has some sort of pad where the repeat rate for autofire can be set rather low, then he will be able to fire a constant shots without more presses than humanly possible.

Please tell me I'm not the only one that finds this fishy.

-BBH

-- Anonymous, January 21, 2001

Answers

welcome, to the often ignored but much appriciated editors board! I've checked both recordings out and although they look like autofire, he definitley is NOT using a fast one, and it also doesn't look like he's using a computer generated one because the presses aren't constant enough.

There's some little known options to analinp that let you control what kind of bursts analinp reports on. By default Analinp reports two kinds of bursts -f4 -p3 and -f9 -f10. These are generally very fast burst. the first counts bursts of 3 presses (off/on/off/on/off/on) in which the timing of each on off state can be no more than 4 frames (i.e. 4/60th or 1/15th of a second.) The second counts burts of 10 presses where each on off state can be no more than 9 frames per second.

Both of these bursts can't be found in renzos recordings, but i can still found some slow bursts and lots of them -f20 -p5 . There is also a collumn in analinp that tells the "chronicness" of the presses by measuring variance between presses, autofire signatures jack the lowVar highVar down below .20 for the fast default bursts. Renzos variance for the slow bursts are very high, so i can make a good guess he's just pressing with his hands and doesn't get carpel tunnel...

[ -f Maximum_Frames_Per_Press_In_Burst ]
[ -p Minimum_Presses_Per_Burst ]


c:/mame/ analinp -f20 -p5 c:/mame/inp/inptmp.inp|m
Analinp Version 2p

-------- analinp Report --------
p = 5 f = 20
Bit# frames:on/off Presses BPresses Bursts highVar LowVar Speed%
43 35827/27968 3978 3854 40 2.21 1.108 28.4%
44 17112/46683 791 12 2 0.51 0.778 52.3%
45 19182/44613 803 6 1 0.33 0.556 51.9%

c:/mame/inp/inptmp.inp
-------- End Of analinp Report --------


-- Anonymous, January 23, 2001

Hmmm. I talked with BenJos on IRC about this a bit too, and he couldn't find any concrete proof of autofire being used... of course, I'm still familiarizing myself with analinp so I'm going by what I'm actually observing in the recording, which is what tipped me off. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's still going to be nagging at me...

Oh, something else... Skito, you confirmed newcomer NoMercy's darius2d recording, but he is definitely using autofire... analinp reports it and it's pretty obvious from watching his shootings bursts in the recording. Same thing for darius2. He's really not getting off to a good start here, as I also attempted to watch his Guwange and Dangun Feveron recordings... neither one of them work, I'm assuming he didn't delete the NVRAM file and having a .nv file that contains the factory settings doesn't work. Since it's my scores he's [allegedly] beating, I'm going to send him a polite mail regarding these things because he seems to be a good shooting game player, and it'd be a shame to lose one of those.

-BBH

-- Anonymous, January 23, 2001

yeah, we should probably tell this to all confirmers.

THe confirmed state means just this "plays back to posted score" nothing more nothing less. I think there still should be banned recordings that can be either confirmed or not confirmed, but right now that's not possible in the database. yeah go ahead and zero out the score if he's used autofire, i completely didn't check it :)

-- Anonymous, January 23, 2001

More to add as usual: fixing my typos

yeah polite mail is cool to newcomers before you zero out the score :) especially if they have the skills and only cheat because it's more fun...

-- Anonymous, January 23, 2001