Spent about 20 minutes today talking to old emulation folks (i.e. people who were around during the mid-to-late-90s during the initial start of the emulation boom) about this. I wanted to see what other people's opinions were vs. my own, and it seems I'm not the only one who looks at it this way.
My opinion: very cool/unique, and kudos to the degree of dedication involved, but it borders on insane. You really have to watch the first 4 minutes or so to get a full understanding of all the absolute nonsense involved to accomplish said task (I about lost it when I saw the use of a multitap and taped-up SNES controllers). Now, I happen to know who the guy (SethBling) is -- he participated in a panel talk at TwitchCon last year that I found very neat/fun and I have respect for him and what he did. Honest -- two thumbs up. But that said...
What really irks me (as in
this reaction) is the fact that he had to rely on someone who could write 65816/SNES code, the p4plus2 fellow, to implement the flappy-bird-like feature. Let me be more specific:
an assembly programmer had to write assembly code for any of this to work. It couldn't have been done without it.
So with that in mind, I'm having tremendous difficulty understanding why Seth went through all the ridiculous pain when he could have just had p4plus2 modify the code in an SMW ROM. This would've taken probably an extra 15 minutes (since SMW happens to be one of the all-time hacked and reverse-engineered games), and all the nonsense would've been removed from the picture? The only difference is this would have required a SNES copier, EverDrive, SD2SNES, or whatever -- rather than just non-modified hardware and no flash carts.
That's the part I'm having trouble grasping: this wasn't done just "the hard way", but "the most crazy/insane/ridiculous way", when doing it the easier way already existed (and to some degree had to be done anyway, re: p4plus2 having to write the code to begin with).
So while this was pretty amazing, I would say the more impressive -- and super neat -- project is what's at 5:37 in the video. When I saw this, I immediately thought of the
San Andreas Deer Cam, which I still consider to be one of the funniest and neatest things in a long while (and Rachel Simone Weil agrees). I like to imagine that project, rather than as a "mod", generates joypad/controller input in a random fashion (rather than through some scripting language or mod). But I think it's just a mod script that does the work.
That's all from me for now. And remember: this is just my opinion (though apparently shared by several old emulation people), which means I'm just as wrong and right as anyone else. Thumbs up to those who have a different opinion/view of it too. No debates or arguments from me. :-)