Creating the longest possible Ski Jump in The Games: Winter Challenge
After spending way too much time getting side-tracked with investigating the copy protection measures, it is time to return to the actual reason I started looking into The Games: Winter Challenge to begin with: The quest to create the optimal ski jump and see how far you can push the game.
One of my initial questions was already answered, namely whether it’s possible to jump farther than 100 meters, a feat that I never managed as a kid. One of the hidden copy protection measures of the game limits how far you can jump when they are active, and without them I jumped farther without too much trouble:
I’d like to think that I’m just better at video games than I was as a kid, but realistically I likely could have achieved this decades ago without the artificial limitations the copy protection adds.
But the big question of “how far can you go?” still remained. I see two possible avenues for going about answering it. One is to build some form of harness to allow individually controlling the inputs the game receives, advancing one frame at a time and using savestates to try many different input sequences to see which produces the best result. This is how most tool-assisted speedruns for video games are created, using special emulators which have those functions built-in. However, this method has some drawbacks. For one, it is limited by your understanding of and creativity within the game: if there is some hidden mechanic you don’t know about, you won’t be able to exploit it. Also, if there are too many different possibilities to try, it can be very tedious to try them by hand, and doing it programmatically can be fairly slow because you need to emulate the whole game millions of times.
