IT Blog | Mr. HiTech Tech Blog

Switch flipped — Behind the scenes as a speedrunning robot breaks in to modern consoles. Kyle Orland – Jan 11, 2020 12: 15 pm UTC A sneak peek of the Super Mario Maker 2 gameplay that TASBot will show off, live, on stock Nintendo Switch hardware and software this weekend For years now, the TASBot team has shown time and again that tool-assisted speedruns—which can feature superhuman input speeds powered by frame-by-frame emulator recordings—can actually work on unmodified console hardware. Thus far, though, TASBot’s efforts have focused on defunct retro consoles from the Atari 2600 up through the Gamecube and Nintendo DS. This weekend, TASBot will finally take its talents into the modern gaming era, showing off expert-level Super Mario Maker 2 gameplay on an actual Switch during the livestreamed Awesome Games Done Quick speedrunning marathon. And this time, the TASBot team is taking pains to make sure no one else can copy its method—to hopefully avoid Nintendo’s potential legal ire in the process. Flipping the Switch The effort to let a Linux computer take external control of a Switch game began a bit inadvertently back in 2018, when the TASBot team attempted to partner with the AbleGamers charity. Their goal was to create an Arduino interface that would allow inputs (and pre-recorded input macros) from any controller to be re-mapped into input signals for any console interface. While that AbleGamers effort eventually fizzled out, it did lead to a generalized Linux-to-Switch controller interface that was published on GitHub. At the same time, other efforts like CommunityController’s “Twitch plays Nintendo Switch” were using similar concepts to let a Twitch chat room take control of live Switch gameplay (a la 2014’s “Twitch Plays Pokemon” phenomenon). While these kinds of efforts were fun for random tinkering, they utterly lacked the frame-perfect precision necessary for a successful replay of a pre-recorded, tool-assisted speedrun. “We saw massive inconsistencies,” TASBot maintainer Allan “dwangoAC” Cecil told Ars about TASBot testing on the Switch in 2018. “Replay device precision was impossible… TASBot is a player piano—he’s playing back a predefined sequence of button presses—but if he doesn’t know when to send those button presses, it’ll never work.” A circa 2016 version of TASBot shows off his new NES control display P4plus2 carries TASBot down the AGDQ hallway to his big show in 2016. TASBot circa 2019 sits at the ready in the GDQ practice room A visualization of the setup that let TASBot pump arbitrary video through an SNES and streaming audio through an NES. Brian Mulligan TASBot sits next to MASHBot, which can actually tap a stylus on a Nintendo DS screen. Last minute adjustments before TASBot’s 2019 AGDQ performance. By 2019, multiple TASBot team members were working in parallel to try to solve this seemingly intractable Switch timing problem. One branch of effort even tried to insert a “shim layer” onto a hacked Switch console to force the external input timing to line up with the in-game timing, but “we didn’t get far because it’s against
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