Originally published at: Watch an A.I. tear through 237 levels of NES Tetris, exposing its bugs and glitches before finally killing the game | Boing Boing
…
7 Likes
Oh good, glad he got it on video.
I didn’t feel like having to do that myself again.
19 Likes
“To understand a thing is to know the manner by which it might be destroyed.”
- Foreman Domai, “One Tool, One Thought”
4 Likes
I guess I’m a true child of the NES (despite not owning one), because I still find shifting color palettes an exciting sign of progression.
3 Likes
Watching this video crashed my laptop.
4 Likes
It’s endearing how funny he finds the phrase “glowing spaghetti”.
I thought it was interesting that the glitched color palettes still looked like color palettes, which is not normally what you see when random memory is written to an RGB display. It turns out, this is because NES palette entries aren’t RGB, they have two bits of luminance and 4 bits of what is basically NTSC color signal. So a random walk through NES color space tends to produce something that looks like a color scheme to a human.
4 Likes
I noticed that some bugged color schemes have black blocks with white 3d highlights, and some color schemes have solid color, with no visible 3d-highlight. Are there any black/black blocks?
Perhaps the game picks the highlight color by incrementing the brightness of the background color? Since there are only 4 available levels of brightness, the brightest colors would then not show a highlight. According to my cursory googling, the NES can produce “blacker than black” pixels, so you might also get super-black tiles with merely black highlights. On an emulator that would appear as solid black tiles, but on a CRT it would potentially mess up the TV’s horizontal hold, since analog TV uses “blacker than black” to mark the spaces between lines and frames.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
