Anti-cheat for tournaments?

[Jamsu]

sorry everybody i'm gonna bring up a controller topic

Not too long ago Hax$ made this video showing off an interesting controller mod he and his team made.
From what I can tell, the controller mod is basically a micro-controller board that fits into the shell of a GCC and is soldered onto the GCC circuit board to fix things such as dashbacks, and make things like shield dropping and perfect angle wavedashing significantly easier by tweaking joystick values.
This is pretty cool, but I'm not here to discuss whether Hax's controller mod should be legal or not.
If easy shield dropping and perfect angle wavedashes can be implemented into GCC using the soldered-on microcontroller, then unfair and that-definitely-should-not-be-allowed-in-tournament things (think pivot uptilt, multishine and auto SHFFL macros) could just as easily be added. Maybe we should start doing something to prevent this from happening?
It would be pretty easy to detect unfair macros by just looking at person's controller while they play, but tournaments are eventually going to need a way to detect controller mods like the one shown by Hax$ if they ever do become tournament illegal. TOs are definitely not going to open up every single player controller before they enter tournament to check if they have something soldered on to the main circuit board or not.

How should we check for these types of things in tournament?

I was thinking about maybe using something like this to check for mods, where instead of shield drops the box would somehow check for micro-controller based mods instead, but I have absolutely no clue how that would work or whether or not that could even work with my shallow knowledge of electronics.
i have no idea where i'm going with this

 

[Dolla Pills]

The easiest way is to just unscrew the controller back and look for a micro controller. In the case of the Arduino, it relies on using the 5V rumble line on the controller, so I'm sure some hardware could be developed which doesn't feed it the 5V and tests if the controller still works

 

[Jamsu]

yeah i guess you're right. unscrewing the back of the controller doesn't take too much time.

 

[-ACE-]

Honestly that's completely impractical.

If you're making ADDING CODE the STANDARD.... Then yes, I agree there should be some type of anti-cheat. The opportunity has always been there (to cheat via hacks), but it has never been a big problem. The potential for it to become a big problem would be immensely magnified once you make the uploading of code commonplace. The anti-cheat would most likely have to be a software that checked to make sure only acceptable codes are uploaded.

If not, it would be entirely too easy to upload a different code to your controller that gave you an unfair advantage, and as long as you are smarter than that one pichu player from Ohio, you'll get away with it.

This would mean hacked melee would have to be standard, does it not? And isn't vanilla melee the only one that doesn't freeze (and has the fewest glitches)?

There are several obstacles with this idea. It doesn't help that hax wants to make perfect wd easier (which isn't legit) solely to push his product, the b0xx (which should be banned as it has no stick, imHo).

 

[iAmMatt]

If the controller has macros or anything that modifies the mechanics/software of the console/game, its illegal. Unless a tournament is just starting out, setups should only be accepted from trusted players. To avoid something that happened with "A Pichu", TOs should assign setups for each match. If a player insists on using a particular setup and only that setup, they should be dqed

 

[Dolla Pills]

It doesn't help that hax wants to make perfect wd easier (which isn't legit) solely to push his product, the b0xx (which should be banned as it has no stick, imHo).

Same with the part where he changes it so that you can shield drop by pressing down more easily (which also gets rid of the ability to shield angle down?). I didn't understand that one at all

But I thought the purpose of OP's post was that if Arduino mods are banned, how do we check if someone is using one at all? That's a different and much simpler issue than testing people's controllers to make sure they don't have any sketchy code. In the latter case I don't know of any method to do this and I think there are many ways that you can cheat without it being "obvious" at all (Hax said it'd be obvious but I find that to be highly questionable).