ok so while this does mean he used an emulator or some such faked cabinet this doesn't prove he never got the scores though right? Or is there evidence which shows the scores are all faked too?
There's strong circumstancial evidence that he used the playback feature of MAME to craft the record.
Here's the thing, people in the know have been suspicious of his Donkey Kong scores for a very long time. There were things that didn't seem right, and, privately, some people expressed their doubts. From the top of my head, there were at least three things that were a bit strange:
a) His playstyle was very risky for a world record attempt.
b) The scoring of the barrels, which is random, was heavily weighted into his favour (Something like 90+% percentile)
c) The record had no sound.
This was not enough to challenge Mitchell's score. After all, being lucky does not make a run invalid, one can get the same result just from playing over and over. But it's strange and now that it has been proven he used MAME, it seems extremely likely his luck and risky playstyle are the result of using save states.
Similarly, the lack of sound doesn't seem particularly important but it's actually key. You see, MAME sound emulation is not that good when it comes to Donkey Kong. It sounds very different at certain points, to the point that people used more accurate "samples" of the sounds than the MAME default. And even then, there's a hardware quirk that MAME doesn't emulate: When the game boots, it plays all sounds at once.
So yeah, it is more than reasonable to assume that he faked the score, not just tried to pass a MAME one as if it were an arcade game.
The whole "only original hardware" thing seems kind of dumb tbh.
Emulation often differs significantly from the original, specially in some titles. Hence the arcade and MAME tracks are kept sepatate.
All scores should be done in a live event, not a videotape sent in the mail.
This would prevent everyone but a small pocket of Americans from competing and, hence, make the competition pointless. In fact, the reliance on live events and the extremely localized pool of competitors is what allowed most fake scores to exist. Mitchell wouldn't have been caught without a tape.
The current rules for recording a game seem more than enough to determine the validity of a score. I see no reason to distrust them and many reasons for allowing recordings to be accepeted.
