Automating Hyper Light Drifter's 800 Dash Challenge on the Nintendo Switch

I do all of my gaming these days on a Nintendo Switch (with the exception of Zachtronics games on my Linux machine). Lately I've been playing Hyper Light Drifter, a gorgeous retro-styled action adventure game that its creator calls a mix of 2D Zelda and Diablo. The game is challenging, but plays nearly perfectly. Except…

There is one optional challenge which calls for you to dash 800 times consecutively in a confined space. This requires you to button mash with precise timing while directing the character in a circle to avoid bumping into any walls. It's brutal, and discussion spaces related to the game are filled with stories and complaints about this challenge.

After many failed attempts and probably tens of thousands of button mashes later, I decided there was probably a better way. On the PC version, many players have decided to simply cheese the game by abusing the keyboard controls or even using a program to automate the entire feat. Doing this on the Switch is a bit trickier, though.

Luckily I remembered encountering this blog post in which Bertrand Fan managed to write a program to win rupees in Zelda for him. Building on the earlier work of dekuNukem and Jason DeLeon to reverse engineer parts of the Nintendo Switch, an inexpensive USB development board can be made to emulate a Switch-compatible controller. With that hard work out of the way, programming it to emit pre-determined sequences of button presses is relatively simple.

Making the minimal necessary number of changes to the code, I was able to adapt Bertrand's Zelda script to complete the dash challenge for me. The resulting code is pretty ugly (there's no good reason why dashing 800 times should require 800 lines of code), but considering it's only meant to be run once I have no reason to improve it.

Getting the timing right was the trickiest part. Bertrand uses a little DSL to sequence his button presses that looks like this:

typedef struct {
    Buttons_t button;
    uint16_t duration;
} command;

static const command step[] = {
    { B,         5 },
    { NOTHING, 150 },
};

This will be interpreted as instructions to emit the B button for 5 units, followed by a pause for 150 units. But what are the units of duration? It turns out that they're simply the number of times the main loop should repeatedly report the same input to the console. Since the USB polling frequency is 8 ms, and each USB report is echoed 3 times (for reasons I don't really understand), then 5 units of duration is approximately equal to 5 * 8 * 3 == 120 ms. Similarly, 150 units is 150 * 8 * 3 == 3600 ms, or about 3.6 seconds.