PU (Pendulum Undoing)

April 2, 2023 11:37 PM

Pannenkoek is the person who's been doing the A-button Challenge in Super Mario 64, and along the way has made a number of extremely geeky, but also informative, videos on Mario 64's internals, that explain a number of computer science principles along the way. You know, the person who brought M64's Parallel Universes (PUs) to our knowledge. He has a new video, on crashing the game in Tick Tock Clock by walking into a corner at the right moments (1 hour 12 minutes), and in this one they speak!

And here are a number of those interesting videos (by no means complete) that they've posted in the past: The Art of Cloning (17m29s) - Walls, Floors and Ceilings parts One (37m23s), Two (32m5s) and Three (37m26s, all three together being a pretty through explanation of how Mario 64's platforming system works) - Blinking (eyes, 8m40s) - Floats (9m23s) - Pause Buffering (8m7s) - Pitch Conversation and Yaw Velocity Conservation (15m15s) - Sleeping (Mario, 7m25s) - Random Number Generation (12m37s) - Wall Hitboxes (6m50s) - Releasing Objects (5m18s) - How Holding Objects Really Works (12m1s) - Units, Speed and Sense of Scale (4m41s)

posted by JHarris (15 comments total)

Ha, you scooped me on this one, I spotted the new video last night as well.

The only thing I would add — as if the hours of Mario 64 minutiae already linked here isn’t enough — is Bismuth’s video essay series on “The Complete History of the A Button Challenge”, which includes Pannenkoek’s work and others.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 6:38 AM on April 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Hyper Speed Walking to Parallel Universes via Scuttlebug Raising discussed previously on MetaFilter.
posted by straight at 1:19 PM on April 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

This man’s job is finding entertaining ways to break a video game from 1997. I wonder how much this makes him now. Probably an absurd amount.

This is such a weird future.
posted by egypturnash at 6:08 PM on April 3, 2023

I'd expect he doesn't earn a great deal from these videos, Youtube's aLgOrItHm is biased against people who don't post regularly, and this is PannenKoek's first long video in quite a while. He also doesn't interrupt his videos for sponsorships, which is the method a lot of prominent youpotatoes use to get past Youtube's monetization issues. I think he just does it for the love of it? I have no way of knowing though.
posted by JHarris at 6:21 PM on April 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have no idea why this stuff is so compelling, but—empirically—I can listen to nerds talk for hours about insane strategies to use Squish Cancelling and Slow Bully Battery to transfer sufficient momentum for Mario to travel 52 Parallel Universes so as to gain 10 pixels in height without pushing the jump button.

"...this is important because when Mario tries to move out-of-bounds his speed is only conserved if he's on the ground. If he's in the air, the speed is immediately set to zero..."

"...when the displacement is applied, the rotation is very small but the radius is so large that Mario is moved upwards substantially, enough in fact to end up above the star platform—in a parallel universe, that is. Because for Mario to get displaced so much, he needs to have PU speed and move into a PU (Parallel Universe). Now the question becomes, how can Mario be on a rotating platform on one frame and in a PU on the next?

This is where things get complicated. To get our answer, let's break down the twenty-six hour task step by step..."
posted by straight at 10:18 PM on April 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Nobody asked the crucial question: How many A-presses does it take to beat Super Mario 64? For years, that question lay dormant..."
posted by straight at 10:19 PM on April 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I did not see Phase 3 coming, also, I knew about this issue, but I've never seen it explained so well.
posted by flamewise at 12:03 AM on April 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think it's notable that this is Pannenkoek2012's first commentated video in many years, because the ratcheting pressure he felt from making high quality commentated videos (like the famous Watch for Rolling Rocks video) essentially made him burn out of it. He's been posting un-commentated, shorter videos on his alternate channel sporadically over the last few years. I was really surprised to see this video come across my feed and I'm glad he felt up to making it because his videos are really fun for such a technical deep-dive. I hope he feels good after having released this video, and not just exhausted.
posted by conorh at 3:08 PM on April 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Same here. I didn't know why he had mostly switched over to the un(spoken)commented ones. I've really only been a fan during the uncommented age. I think those are some of his best work, Walls, Floors and Ceilings is brilliant.
posted by JHarris at 6:13 PM on April 4, 2023

I think the reason all this stuff about Mario 64 in particular is so crazy is that almost everything going on in the game is competing for the very, very limited computing resources available on the N64 hardware and the 64MB of data storage on the game cartridge (I think Mario 64 is only 9MB total).

By the next generation—Mario Sunshine on the Gamecube—there were lots of elements that were using trivial amounts of resources compared with the game as a whole. I don't think they had to worry so much about how many bytes were used to keep track of Mario's position or carefully reusing a single sprite for all the smoke effects or budgeting the total number of lines of dialogue.

But with Mario 64, they were constantly using weird hacks to save resources on every single element of the game. So there are all kinds of strange exceptions and glitches to discover and take advantage of at almost every moment of the game.
posted by straight at 11:47 PM on April 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

You may have something there. I'd like to point out the work of Kaze Emanuar, who for a couple of years now has been poring over Mario 64's code and optimizing it heavily. M64, as the launch title for the system and the first 3D platformer Nintendo had ever made, contains a huge number of hacks and things that could just have been done later. Kaze has gotten the game running at nearly 60 FPS, and is working on full hacks taking advantage of their many engine improvements.
posted by JHarris at 5:07 AM on April 5, 2023

I'm sure Kaze Emanuar's optimizations represent impressive amounts of hard work and ingenuity. But he's also got (1) hardware that's probably 50 times more powerful than Nintendo had when they made Mario 64, (2) software tools that are also much, much more powerful, and (3) almost thirty years of advancements in programming techniques for creating 3D games. All that has got to give him enormous advantages in finding ways to optimize that code.
posted by straight at 12:41 PM on April 5, 2023

It does, certainly, I hope nothing I said was taken as saying Nintendo was deficient in coding the game. Some of his speed improvements come from optimizing more for size than speed, in order to keep more memory in the cache. Nintendo was really new at 3D programming at the time, so animated models like Mario are constructed out of intersecting shapes instead of skinned models. The platforming code was build up from scratch through experimentation and iteration.

Nintendo did what they could with the tools they had available, and it worked, and that was enough to produce a game that was widely heralded at the time as an incredible advance. Kaze's work builds off of their work, but doesn't negate it.
posted by JHarris at 9:05 PM on April 5, 2023

oh dammit i'm days slow on posting this, curse you JHarris
posted by cortex at 10:39 AM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's more that stuff like what Kaze Emanuar is doing—or like people creating Commodore 64 demos using hardware and tools that are godlike in comparison to the C64—delights me like reading a Vernor Vinge novel where a godlike intelligence can stuff more of itself in a human cranium than we would believe possible.
posted by straight at 11:42 PM on April 8, 2023 [1 favorite]