I may have propagated the idea that the console itself was at fault as we tried Gradius on a top-loading NES first and it failed at which point I stated that it may have been the console as I had only tested with front-loading consoles. We later swapped to the front-loading NES and it failed there as well. With as much testing as I've done since AGDQ 2014 I'm fairly convinced that it had way more to do with the interference from everything else around the controller cables, the console, the Raspberry Pi, and the replay board itself.
Regarding the name, I had a discussion with several people on IRC about this. When true released his board he called it
true's NES / SNES Replay Device. I subsequently hacked together a Lego case and put it on ROB
and dubbed it ROBBerry Pi. Then, due to being frazzled because of last-minute issues and being in front of 60,000 people I proceeded to do an absolutely horrible job of introducing who TASVideos was, who I was, and what the name of the bot was. Later,
GDQMonitor and
Masterjun's SMW executes arbitrary code submission both referred to the combination of true's replay board, the Pi, and ROB as "TASBot". (As an aside, there was
previously an unrelated project named TASBOT but no new development appears to have happened on it in over a year.)
TASBot as a "person" has become something far larger than I ever imagined. There's fanfic out there about GDQMonitor (apparently a girl) and TASBot
having an ongoing relationship. The
SDA community seems to
refer to TASBot about the same way the Nico Nico Douga community references
TAS-san (
TASさん, known as
"Mr. TAS"). I know true has never particularly felt comfortable with calling his board "TASBot" and at this point I think the name transcends any particular replay device. I've come to think of TASBot as the combination of ROB holding a controller or board and participating in his favorite pastime, playing games perfectly in front of a TV and a loving audience. What could be better?
A.C.
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