It keeps coming up again, so let's be clear. You don't need to be an expert, just trust this:
There is no "allegedly" in whether he broke the TG rules. The recording was 100% definitely MAME. There is no way the screen would draw like it did on orignal hardware. To my knowledge bimmy still denies this, which really puts his character into question.
Whether he was "cheating" is questionable if you don't consider breaking above rules cheating on its own (TG has famously shitty rules anyway). There's a suspiciously high amount of 800-point blue barrels in his run, a number that's decided entirely by completely unpredictable RNG (aka great game design) - this suggests the usage of savestates to manipulate said RNG. There's no proof he did this, he could have just been unrealistically, extraordinarily lucky. In combination with the unreliable nature of everything else surrounding this, it's hard to imagine this wasn't the reason for using MAME and subsequently covering up.
The funniest thing about this is how completely irrelevant it is.
Can he beat that score legitimately nowadays? Yes he can. Does the score even matter in the grand scheme of things? No, it's not even remotely competitive compared to how actually talented players are 0wning Donkey Kong now.
Did Billy Mitchell even hold the world record for Donkey Kong when the King of Kong "documentary" was filmed? No, he did not. He just got the focus of the movie because he's an infinitely more entertaining character than Tim Sczerby.
Robbie Lakeman just took back the world record no less than 4 days ago, and that's a lot more interesting.
BrianC wrote:
It's perplexing how sites don't seem to be keeping track of JP DK records (and trying to find them in a search only brought up US records). Some of these "world" records are a joke.
JP DK suuuuuurcks for competitive play. It's a shorter game, so that's a huge point in its favor, but it's the only point in its favor. Donkey Kong scoring is all about the barrel stages, and if I'm not mistaking the game-breaking ladder bug was never fixed Japanese ROMs?
Check out the actual DK WR runs (ie. not bimmy mitchell nonsense) and call them a joke again. The game itself has its issues, but the amount of skill put into getting every available point out of it is incredibly impressive. I think you'd agree.