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# Okay, fine: this robot is better at videogames than any of us
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/tasbots-nimble-fingers-play-games-inside-other-games/
- Published: 2015-01-09T14:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T17:13:43.000Z
- Description: This year’s Awesome Games Done Quick charity event started on Sunday, and one team has already used a bot to put Twitch into Pokémon Red, and Super Mario Bros. into Super Mario World. Usually, a Tool-Assisted Speedrun can only be accomplished with an emulator—the button-presses have to be frame-perf
- Author: Daniel Fries
- Tags: News, awesome games done quick, pokemon, robotics, Super Mario, super nintendo, twitch, twitch plays pokemon, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

This year’s Awesome Games Done Quick charity event started on Sunday, and one team has already used a bot to put Twitch into *Pokémon Red*, and *Super Mario Bros.* into *Super Mario World*.

Usually, a Tool-Assisted Speedrun can only be accomplished with an emulator—the button-presses have to be frame-perfect, and at 30 or 60 frames a second, that’s way too fast for regular humans. The TASBot—mounted on an R.O.B. unit, of course—is a modified Super Nintendo controller designed for accomplishing Tool-Assisted Speedruns in the real world. The bot is attached to a computer, and inputs a list of pre-written button-presses with the necessary timing.

These two hacks work by breaking into the games’ raw data and re-writing it, giving the player total control. The *Super Mario World* hack covers the screen in projectiles, the types and positions of which are used to rewrite the game’s internal code. Last year, the team showed off a hack that let them play *Pong* inside Mario, but this time, well … take a look:

The *Pokémon Red* hack works because the game resets its memory at some point during a save, and if the game is turned off at the exact right moment during that reset, the hack can take advantage of a memory overflow that makes the game think the player has 255 pokémon and 255 items, their values made up of the game’s data. The hack can then re-write them with normal button presses, and turn them into the data necessary to run a Python script off of the computer (here a Macbook) that’s giving the TASBot its instructions, at which point, the crowd goes wild:

AGDQ lasts from January 4th to 10th and is broadcast on Twitch [here](http://www.twitch.tv/gamesdonequick?ref=killscreen.com).