What I was really hoping for was to get some comments from developers on this issue:
Is it generally feasable to detect 'game state' for games by reading memory or CPU register state of the emulation? For example, can I tell where all of the ghosts, dots, power pills, etc, are in Pac-man easily from the emulated state?
What about for slightly more complex games, e.g. 1943, where there are a non-fixed number of 'sprites' on the screen at a time?
What about reading the video hardware directly? Can one look at, e.g., the tilemap and the tile-based video memory of Pac-man to deduce game state?
I just want to know whether it is feasable to use these techniques; otherwise writing an A.I. to play a game will involve detecting game state from pixels, and that is alot harder.
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