TASBot projects

The best place to see more about TASBot is the official TASBot wiki but this page has some random scattered details of things I’ve done. I am a senior staff member for TASVideos.org as an Ambassador of the site as well as an active player and promoter of Tool-Assisted Speedruns.  I’ve created several runs of my own over the years which are listed on my TASVideos.org homepage. I am the keeper of TASBot who plays games on real consoles for charity.

In January of 2014 I first participated in the Awesome Games Done Quick 2014 charity marathon helping to raise over $1M for cancer research as described in the original post thread.  I was extremely proud to act as the project manager and presenter for the project, which resulted in the first widely publicized arbitrary code exploit on the SNES.  My favorite coverage of the project was an amazing ArsTechnica article which does a great job of explaining what we did.

Each year since has led to new and interesting projects and coverage, such as AGDQ 2015 with another fantastic ArsTechnica article from author Kyle Orland covering things like Super Mario Bros. programmed inside of Super Mario World, and Twitch chat live streamed into Pokemon Red (the latter of which is covered extensively in PoC||GTFO issue 10). Between the various GDQ events we have helped raise a staggering amount for charity and it represents the largest undertaking I have ever had the privilege of being part of.

I am still continuing to work on a project alongside ais523 (Alex Smith, the current maintainer of the esoteric programming language Intercal) as well as other folks in the NetHack community to complete a Tool-Assisted Speedrun of the game NetHack in exactly 2,015 2,004 or possibly even 2,003 in-game turns, although the project is an on-again, off-again interest for all involved and has been ongoing for well more than a decade now.  You can find more details in a complete turn-by-turn description of the entire run.  The project includes a unique wrapper to allow rapid snapshot resets of a virtualized Linux environment which may have applicability for other, unrelated uses in automated testing.