VIDEO: What The Heck? Nintendo PlayStation Console Brought To Life!

Description: Looking like a cross between a CD-ROM drive and a Super
Nintendo console, the Nintendo/Sony CD-ROM protoype unit was thought lost until a
chance discovery a few years ago. Proof of Sony & Nintendo's ill-fated team up in
the Sony logo in the console's lower left corner.

There's a missing link that connects Nintendo's Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), its successor the Nintendo 64, and its rival console the Sony Playstation: the SNES-CD, also code named the Play Station. The console was supposed to be launched as an add-on for the standard SNES, as well as a stand-alone hybrid console by Sony called the Play Station. The partnership between Nintendo and Sony crumbled, so Sony developed their own solely CD-ROM based console, the Sony PlayStation.

About two years ago, one of the original Nintendo Play Station prototypes was found after it was purchased in a bankruptcy auction of the assets from a software company. The protype was tested, and while the top-loading test cartridge of the unit worked, the CD-ROM drive didn't work, nor did the audio output. Vlogger and console model Ben Heckerdorn, aka Ben Heck, got his hands on this prototype unit in July of last year, and did a meticulous disassembly, tear-down, documentation and reassembly. He was able to get a lot of information on the inner workings of the system and was able to determine that while the Super Nintendo part of the console still worked, but the CD-ROM drive was completely self-contained and seemed to require some sort of boot disc to access the audio output or anything else on the CD. A little while later, gaming enthusiast site Retro Collect announced that an anonymous source sent them the necessary boot disc.

With the final piece of the puzzle in place, Ben Heck got to work, and with a little bit of hard work, a little bit of luck and a lot of engineering analysis, he was able to get the prototype working and even ran a homebrew game on it. Check out the whole video here:

Gotta Go Fast: How Speedruns Unlock Awe

Description: Altered screenshot from NES game Ninja
Gaiden: close-up on the eyes of a man in ninja mask
saying "Holy crap!"

Speedrunning is the act of playing a video game to completion as fast as possible. Born in the late '90s during the era of first person shooters like Doom and Quake, speedrunning has given rise to enthusiast communities across the globe, wikis, you tube channels. twitch subscriber channels, and long-running charity events. The most prominent example of charity benefit speedrun events is the twice-yearly Games Done Quick week-long marathon; GDQ has collectively raised a little over six million dollars for charity over six years.

While the question "What interests you in speedrunning" is likely to have as many different answers as there are people answering the question, author Carolyn Petit has a pretty interesting take on why she watches speedruns-- they have given "the soul of the game" back to her. She explains:

Speedrunning reveals to me just how little I know and understand about the games that I thought I knew and understood so well, games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Speedrunning reveals to me that almost every game is full of secrets; not the kinds of secrets that designers place in games for players to find, but secrets that the designers don’t even know about or intend, secrets that are the game’s own, things borne out of the process of its creation.

She has a great example of what is quite possibly a word-record-breaking Super Mario Bros speedrun in her essay, too, so give it a look.

DIY Kill-Bot: A.I. Plays Dark Souls PVP

Description: A screenshot of a giant headless rock creature (golem) kicking an
armored knight square in the butt. Heehee, butt.

The Dark Souls series is known for its punishing difficulty in single player mode (and making it even worse for pirates who accessed it early) and its cut-throat competition in player versus player strategies. One user on gitHub going by the handleMetal Crow decides to combine his love of programming, his passion for playing Dark Souls PVP and desire to have an AI do his bidding into making his own bot that can play Dark Souls PVP and shared it with the world.

What's really interesting to me, coming at it from a non-technical viewpoint, is how much of this project was complicated by the fact that for all the strategy talk surrounding Dark Souls, the system is a closed system, making it sort of akin to trying to peer into a sealed black box. As he explains, he had to pretty much reverse-engineer the game:

In order to have the AI do anything, i needed to be able to feed it data about the game state. The simplest and most direct way of doing this is would be to have it watch various variables in the game code, such as the enemy's x and y location, and then use that with the AI logic. However, since the game's code isn't open source, i needed to reverse engineer anything i wanted to use.

Ok, so maybe that doesn't sound that surprising, right? Just point a program at a game, observe it crunch some numbers, and you're done? As it turns out, writing a bot to play against a human is really tricky-- and not just because us humans can be highly illogical. Nope, Metal Crow had to teach the bot to avoid backstab damage, and he had to create a sort of neural network to do it. He explains:

{In PVP]...the primary combat isn't standard attacks, but the backstab metagame. This is a beautifully complex mechanic, which allows players to instantly damage another player if they manage to get behind them and close to their back. Unlike standard attacks, an AI cant dodge this very simply, because it is executed instantaneous, there's no windup the AI can see and roll away from. The backstab metagame with humans revolves around identifying if a person is about to go for a backstab, then dodging it or countering it ahead of time. Unfortunately, even though I can easily identify backstab attempts when I play, I cannot for the life of me translate it into discrete logic. Its just something I know from experience, I cant really explain it. However, it is vital the AI be able to detect and dodge backstabs, so I needed to figure out a way to teach it.

So how well does it work? You can watch a teaser video of it in action below: