Let's say that I'm performing an Any% speedrun of this game. If I were to tape down the dash button (the B button on NES) for the run, would that make said run a tool-assisted speedrun?

This isn't a joke; I'm genuinely curious as to what the answer is.

I don't think it's allowed to to tape the b button down, it's not being tool assisted, but I think you have to press the b button with your thumb.

First of all, I highly doubt that taping down the B button would be to your benefit at all, regardless of what level of play you are at. But to answer, taping down a button shouldn't classify a run as a TAS, but I don't know if it's legal or not. A mod will have to let us know.

A lot of tricks require you to operate the B button pretty precisely, so it would get in your way sooner or later. I'd be interested to participate in AGDQ 2019 with my flextapebot tho

Personally I've seen someone clamp down on a button for Paper Mario to basically make it is so you dont have to sit there for the first 10 or so minutes of intro where all you do is hold B for the text. As far as using it for gameplay in smb1 I dont really have a problem with it if you did that. But I cant speak for every mod. I'd just say I would advise against it though since that kinda takes away from the spirit of playing this game.

I'm not a mod, but for me as long as it is flex tape it's allowed by Phil.

I'm personally not a fan of it.

Ok. We should make Phil a mod then!

To ease any doubts, no, I'm not actually going to do an SMB1 Any% speedrun with the B button taped down. The route's hard enough as is.

However, while it has been determined that it would be legal for me to do such a thing, I still haven't really seen an answer as to if it would be classified as a TAS. Think about the name: "Tool-Assisted Speedrun." Technically, this theoretical piece of tape is a tool I would be using to assist in completing the run. (Yes, that's my reasoning for why it might be classified as a TAS. If it sounds dumb, be sure to let me know.)

I see your reasining

Livesplit is also technically a tool, and we use it to track how fast we're going, and as such it can influence our runs. But it doesn't make the run a Tool Assisted Speedrun

Oh, that's a good point. I didn't actually consider that. Huh.

Personally I would say no, since you're using a physical object to assist you. He does have a small point about using splits though. In the past, I also considered taping down the B button, but never did.

Technically it's controller modification I'd say. I think I would reject a run that had it.

As for splits, sure I guess they help, but what about chat on twitch even then? Like technically, chat can help quite a bit too (let's say they could identify framerules by the coin flash: me). It gets into semantics a little bit.

I just wouldn't classify splits as a "tool" necessarily when there's also a way to identify the same thing in-game,

It goes brings lot of things to my mind though.

For example, let's say I hooked up two NESes to play smb using 1 controller output to two TVs... one uses romhack and one uses the original cart. Could I do this to know subpixel values that tells me every specific of whether I executed things correctly?

How about if I made a device that just moves my fingers to press the inputs like a TAS? :D

PS: If you tape down the "B" button, you can't press "start" on the title screen to start the game.

Question: How to make live split start at -8.74?

Go into Edit Splits and where it says "Start timer at" change it from 0.00 to -8.74