[HN Gopher] Show HN: Tool-Assisted Speedrunning the Boring Parts...
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Show HN: Tool-Assisted Speedrunning the Boring Parts of Animal
Crossing (GCN)
I recently dug my Nintendo GameCube out of storage to revisit the
first Animal Crossing game. Things were mostly as I remembered, but
the game's heavy reliance on a clunky on-screen keyboard quickly
wore my patience thin. Unwilling to accept this subpar experience,
I did what any rational person would do and ordered a rare, Japan-
exclusive, keyboard/controller hybrid on eBay, then used a
Raspberry Pi Pico to 1. listen for keypresses and 2. send simulated
controller events to the GameCube, automating typing in Animal
Crossing at a Tool-Assisted Speedrun level. Of course, this
oddball controller's keycaps didn't map perfectly to Animal
Crossing's in-game character set, so I watched a 10 hour FreeCAD
tutorial at 2x speed, then modeled the 7 keycap profiles to create
81 custom, 3D printed keycaps, taking care to include even the most
esoteric Greek and Old English characters that Nintendo chose to
include in the game. And then, having solved my original problem,
I decided to sniff out some new ones. I used my homemade TAS device
to automate the entry of customizable "Town Tune" melodies, took
advantage of a cracked encryption algorithm to give on-demand
access to (almost) every item in the game, and, in a Club-Mate-
fueled haze, whipped up a Python script to convert arbitrary images
to the game's 32x32 pixel custom design format. Even at superhuman
speed, those 1024 pixels took about 3 minutes to input, but that
didn't stop me from extending the concept to video - playing Rick
Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", Bad Apple!, Shrek, and even a
short gameplay video of DOOM very, veryyyy slowly (about 7.5 hours
to render 30 seconds of footage at 5fps). Then, realizing that
DOOM at 0.0056fps probably wouldn't be the most "playable" thing in
the world, I set out to get some kind of video game running within
Animal Crossing, and ultimately landed on Snake. Since it only
needs to update 1 pixel for every frame of animation, I was able to
get Snake running at around 1ish* frames per second (for technical
reasons, it runs at a variable framerate). Maybe not the most primo
experience the modern gaming world has to offer, but without a
doubt, _technically_ a video game. It even has its own, in-memory
high score ranking (so far I 'm undefeated). The code and design
files are distributed for free on GitHub[0], and a
build/demonstration video[1] is out now on Youtube. [0] -
https://github.com/hunterirving/pico-crossing [1] -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw8Alf_lolA It started as a
"quick, simple project", then quickly ballooned into 7 or 8 "quick,
simple projects", but I had a ton of fun putting it all together.
Thanks for checking it out!
Author : hunterirving
Score : 30 points
Date : 2025-06-12 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| geoffpado wrote:
| I've never played the original Animal Crossing, but this is neat!
| You're basically hacking quality-of-life improvements into an old
| game running on original hardware.
| dilDDoS wrote:
| This is so cool and impressive. I loved the original Animal
| Crossing but also feel like the clunky keyboard input hasn't aged
| well. Thanks for sharing!
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