Billy Mitchell cheated on his 3 most recent World Record scores.

You all know this guy as the manipulative villain from the excellent documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I'm sure many of you have followed his video gaming career prior. Well sensational new evidence has come out that Billy Mitchell used MAME to produce three of his 1 million+ scores, including the 1.047 million score presented in King of Kong to steal Steve Weibe's thunder.

I would like to preface all of this by stating that none of what follows is NOT my original work. Disputes and evidence regarding the validity of Billy's controversial 1 million+ scores has been building over at the Twin Galaxies forum since August of 2017. You can read about the earlier concerns and right through to the latest, damning evidence here: http://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/176004-Dispute-Jeremy-Young-Arcade-Donkey-Kong-Points-Hammer-Allowed-Player-Billy-L-Mitchell-Score-1-062-800/

The following images that I will be posting was posted on the 2nd of February by Jeremy 'Xelnia' Young, scoreboard moderator at Donkey Kong Forums and originator of the original dispute thread at Twin Galaxies forum. You can read his original post dropping the evidence here: http://donkeykongforum.com/index.php?topic=2055

MAME 0.115 and below

MAME 0.116 to 0.121

MAME 0.122 to 0.126

MAME 0.127 to present

The evidence against Billy Mitchell comes down to how MAME generates the Donkey Kong boards frame-by-frame vs. how the original arcade board generates the image. Without getting too technical, above you can see the board generation in various versions of MAME slowed right down.

What is important to note, particularly with the historical versions current during the time of Billy Mitchell's World Record submissions, is that boards are generated piecemeal, with some girders popping in, then all of the girders + ladders AND THE PLAYER ENTRY POINT, then everything else.

What follows is a genuine direct feed recording of Donkey Kong board generation, and a genuine Donkey Kong arcade machine recorded at 60fps with a camera phone.

Genuine direct feed recording.

Video camera recording 60fps.

What's important to note here is that the frame is generated from the top right of the screen (and as the screens in the arcade cabinets are rotated, the real 'top' is on the right hand side, and the real 'left' is at the top) to the bottom left. Generation follows the scanlines of an actual CRT monitor, with girders appearing first from top-right to bottom-left, then ladders top-right to bottom-left, then finally everything else top-right to bottom left. Note in particular that the player entry point is the VERY LAST thing to appear.

And now Billy Mitchell's submitted footage:

1.047 million (submitted in King of Kong).

1.05 million, 'performed' at the Mortgage Brokers convention - he was supposedly playing in another room with no one watching and a double direct-feed taking to a projector in the convention room and a VCR recording.

Billy Mitchell submitted both of these as footage recorded as a direct feed from a genuine Donkey Kong arcade cabinet. Clearly they match the board generation of the older versions of MAME, particularly the player entrance appearing before the bonus score box.

The original post goes on to compare the board generation of the other levels in Donkey Kong (Pies, Springs and Rivets), which is all equally as damning, but I won't post here. What I will post as the final image is a still-frame comparison of all the submitted evidence:

Further corroborating this evidence are several questionable circumstances around these submissions. Firstly, getting a direct feed recording from a Donkey Kong arcade machine is notoriously difficult to do. Chris Gleed is the first person to document the process (http://donkeykongforum.com/index.php?topic=1413), and consequently the first person to prove that they actually did make a direct feed recording from the Donkey Kong PCB, and likely the only person with a working Donkey Kong direct feed. Billy Mitchell has publicly stated that he has no idea how Donkey Kong boards work.

Secondly, the only corroborating referee of Billy Mitchell's 1.062 million score is Todd Rogers, who has recently been disgraced and had all of his records expunged from Twin Galaxies and banned for life from submitting new ones after it had come to light that his oldest and most famous record in Dragster was impossible to achieve, and that he had made many other questionable submissions to Twin Galaxies.

And then there's the part where Billy Mitchell has performed no 1 million+ score in live conditions, and that direct feed recordings have been banned as valid submissions since before Billy Mitchell's 1.062 million score.

Donkey Kong Forums have removed all of Billy Mitchell's questionable scores from their scoreboard, leaving his live performance of 933,900 as his highest score. It remains to be seen what Twin Galaxies' response will be, but the evidence seems insurmountable, and they have shown with Todd Rogers that they are willing to bring down a legend completely.