This weekend marks the start of the annual Summer Games Done Quick charity video game speedrunning event. Check out the Summer Games Done Quick website for all the details and a schedule of speedruns that start this Sunday July 26th.
One interesting part of the event are tool-assisted speedruns, or TAS, which use hardware pre-programmed to play a video game with super-human abilities. For example this TAS Pokemon Red run exploited memory overflow bugs to reprogram the game to display Twitch.tv chat that was sent over the controller port. Typically hardware like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are used to build these TAS devices as they’re well suited for connecting to the controller port of an old video game system.
This year the TAS speedruns are scheduled at the very end of the SGDQ event on Saturday August 1st and include classic games like Mega Man, Sonic Advance, and Ikaruga. It looks like it will be a great event, good luck to the speedrunners and TAS robot!