Check out the annual Awesome Games Done Quick video game speed-running charity event that’s going on now! You can watch live on Twitch.tv as players try to play games as fast as possible all in the name of raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. In past years the event has raised over $1.5 million dollars for charity, and numerous new video game speed running records have been smashed. Check out the full schedule of events and watch & donate on the Games Done Quick site.
One very interesting part of the event is the TAS, or ‘tool-assisted speedrun’, block of games. These speedruns use emulators, programming, and other tools to manipulate games and make superhuman speedruns possible. There’s an interesting crossover with the maker community as hardware like the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc. are used to play back controller input on real consoles. Sometimes the TAS runs go well beyond just completing a game too, for example the video above shows the manipulation of memory access bugs in Pokemon Red to completely reprogram it to display Twitch.tv chat!
This year the TAS block of games starts in the afternoon (eastern time) of Saturday January 9th and includes events like:
TASBot vs Humans — Mystery Game
TASBot plays Brain Age
TASBot plays Super Mario Bros. 3
TASBot takes Total Control of…
It’s sure to be another amazing year for Awesome Games Done Quick, good luck to all the speedrunners! And be sure to check out Adafruit on Twitch.tv for fun creative and hardware streams like the Desk of Ladyada.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
