Meet MASHBot, the touchscreen-tapping, Nintendo DS-playing robot

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Since making its public premiere at 2014’s Awesome Games Done Quick marathon, TASBot (the tool-assisted speedrun robot) has repeatedly amazed audiences by performing seemingly impossible in-game feats. Using nothing but pre-recorded electrical signals sent through a game console’s standard controller ports, TASBot has done everything from beating Super Mario Bros. 3 in under a second, to running Twitch chat through a standard SNES, to coding an SNES version of Super Mario Maker on the fly.
But no matter how amazing TASBot’s performances are, there’s still a group of naysayers out there that argues that the robot’s direct connection to the controller port makes the whole thing inauthentic, somehow. 'Every single YouTube video I post, there's at least one guy calling us haxxors and saying we are filthy cheaters,” TASBot team manager Allan “DwangoAC” Cecil told Ars at the recent Awesome Games Done Quick charity marathon (AGDQ). “No matter how many times we explain that it's not a ROM hack, people assume that we've hacked the game, when we haven't, in the sense of changing its ROM.'
So this year, in an effort to prove the doubters wrong, Cecil and the TASBot team set out to create “a replay device that’s the most insane thing we’ve ever done,” as Cecil put it on stage. Rather than just sending signals through the controller port, MASHBot (the Machine-Assisted Speedrun Hardware robot) can actually manipulate the controller itself (in this case, a Nintendo DS touchscreen), without any human intervention.
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