I watched this live last night on the AGDQ2015 stream, it was insane. It's always interesting to see what can happen when a buffer overflow occurs.
As a side note, this strikes me as a great charity event, and I would recommend that people who love old games and watching software being abused should watch it.
They programmed Snake and Pong within Super Mario World by pushing an overwhelming data down the controller port using 8 connections (if I have that right?!). That is some serious hacking.
Yes, they use a trick to make the video game jump to the controller input buffer and execute data from it.
But this year they took that to the next level. Instead of programming snake or pong they made a fully functional Super Mario (from NES) run inside Super Mario World.
In case anyone else had trouble locating it, the relevant portion of the linked Twitch stream starts at about the 36 minute mark. I couldn't find a time anywhere, but realized I could binary search it from the fundraising total listed in the screenshot on the second page.... Now that I've said this, someone will no doubt point out a really obvious thing I missed.
Cecil told Ars the TASBot team's initial plans involved showing some sort of live webcam data through the SNES, but since the controller ports could only reliably pass about 3.8 KB/s to the system, that wasn't exactly workable.
That's still ~30Kbps, which is more than some early videophones used (working over an analogue POTS line)... and having seen how far the demoscene has gone with limited hardware, I don't think low-bitrate, low-resolution video would've been impossible; just maybe a bit too much for them to do. Either way, this is quite impressive already so I'm not complaining, but the limits are still a bit further yet.
They mention that they couldn't get 3.8Kb/s for displaying video, I wonder if they could employ a similar technique used for 8088 Domination http://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post-... to cheat a whole bunch and get enough bandwidth for "full motion" video.
Rom in the game emulation world means 'game image'. Along side that, it also refers to the appropriate memmap of the console as the rom executes.
edit: You are a pedant. Your non-comment was insulting and added nothing to the conversation. And yes, I would have said the same thing in real-life. And I have.
I'm simultaneously glad and horrified to have read that. Horrified because I'm frantically thinking through the last 20 or so conversations with my friends in the pub to see if I did an annoying "Well, actually...", but glad because I'm going to consciously avoid doing this in future.
As a side note, this strikes me as a great charity event, and I would recommend that people who love old games and watching software being abused should watch it.
https://gamesdonequick.com