King of Kong’s Billy Mitchell Gets Kicked Off the Donkey Kong Leaderboard

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Video game player Billy Mitchell, who once held the top score in Donkey Kong, is being disqualified from the leaderboards. Some consider his scores “fraudulent” because they were attained through MAME, which registers differently than on arcade hardware. Thanks KD5ZXG.

"While clearly MAME, there is no way to tell exactly how these games were performed," writes Young. "It's possible they were recorded in one shot. Given the play style in Billy's videos, it's more likely that vanilla MAME's INP recording feature was abused, in which a person can re-record an INP as many times as they wish to craft their desired performance."
 
Oh Billy... you crafty cheater. Also in Mame you can use some third party software to physically slow down the emulator too so that the normal fast paced runs at a much more reasonable rate.

That said, every time I see that dude I'm thinking Uncle Rico, guy who is just stuck in the past.
 
Arstechnica has an updated piece which explains the details. It's not simply because he used MAME (which is actually allowed, when disclosed and done as required), but it's actually because of fairly damning evidence of him cheating:

Former Donkey Kong world record holder Wes Copeland has presented new statistical evidence that he says suggests Mitchell's 1.05 million point game was patched together from multiple emulated plays. Drawing data from the KongTrackr analysis app, Copeland says Mitchell's run derives a significantly higher-than-average ratio of points from smashing enemies with the hammer.
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Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...ard-strips-billy-mitchells-high-score-claims/
 
Skirge01 said:
Arstechnica has an updated piece which explains the details. It's not simply because he used MAME (which is actually allowed, when disclosed and done as required), but it's actually because of fairly damning evidence of him cheating:



Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...ard-strips-billy-mitchells-high-score-claims/
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Even without that it is my understanding that it simply being undisclosed MAME is enough to disqualify him. MAME has different submission and validation requirements, requirements that were not able to be completed by Mitchell's submission.
 
Derangel said:
Even without that it is my understanding that it simply being undisclosed MAME is enough to disqualify him. MAME has different submission and validation requirements, requirements that were not able to be completed by Mitchell's submission.
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That's a good point and is my understanding, as well.
 
Ermmm. First time I've ever seen or heard of this guy. Is this dude portrayed by Peter Dinklage in Adam Sandler's film Pixels? Because that character cheated as well. The similarities are striking, also refers to himself in the third person. Well, maybe not in the vertical plane but everywhere else it's him?
 
Catboxer said:
Nerds!!!
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ogre-nerds.jpg
 
Who cares about this. I want to hear more about the Dragster world record drama going on at TwinGalaxies.
 
I honestly thought that they were gonna say it was because he molested\took advantage of Mrs Donkey Kong or something of that nature......

What, its not like it hasn't been happening everywhere else with people being erased from things they were part of because of some nonsense without it even having any proof or investigation of any kind. LOL
 
TimberVD said:
Ermmm. First time I've ever seen or heard of this guy. Is this dude portrayed by Peter Dinklage in Adam Sandler's film Pixels? Because that character cheated as well. The similarities are striking, also refers to himself in the third person. Well, maybe not in the vertical plane but everywhere else it's him?
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Go watch The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It's a great documentary although a bit outdated now. It even has a hero to fight this villain. Helped me respect how much work goes into getting the high scores for these classics.
 
In the documentary, King of Kong (really a great flick) wasn’t it pretty obvious Billy Mitchell was cheating when he sent in that video with the obviously tampered with score.
 
Draax said:
In the documentary, King of Kong (really a great flick) wasn’t it pretty obvious Billy Mitchell was cheating when he sent in that video with the obviously tampered with score.
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Yeah something about the dude needing to be there in person to get the score, where as Mitchell just needed to send in a shitty VHS tape
 
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sfsuphysics said:
Oh Billy... you crafty cheater. Also in Mame you can use some third party software to physically slow down the emulator too so that the normal fast paced runs at a much more reasonable rate.

That said, every time I see that dude I'm thinking Uncle Rico, guy who is just stuck in the past.
Click to expand...
There are various methods within the emulator to slow it down, no tools required. Sadly to this day these features are still necessary to run certain games near intended speeds (for example SF2:HF aka Turbo) in MAME. +1 for Uncle Rico
 
Kinsaras said:
Go watch The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It's a great documentary although a bit outdated now. It even has a hero to fight this villain. Helped me respect how much work goes into getting the high scores for these classics.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I had to laugh hard when the "challenger" submitted his score to TwinGalaxies; and they guys from there showed up at his house, stated taking his DonkeyKong machine apart without permissions. The guys wife was yelling "WTF are you doing! Get out of here!"
 
Dang, I'm seeing more and more stories coming up with fake high scores. Kinda neat that we're taking this so serially. :)
 
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