Where can I learn about "cheater" boards?

[Miles]

When I was a teenager running around the woods with an A5, everyone was talking about electro guns with "cheater" boards. My friends and I would hear a timmy or shocker fire off a burst and proclaim that guy is 100% cheating. I never fired a gun that used a cheater board, and don't really know how common those boards were back in the day.

Are there any good resources to learn about them?

[Ecapnation]

They weren't that common.

In most cases only proteams has actual code activated cheater boards. I own one timmy with a team only board but don't know the cheat activation.

What you've come across is likely a virtue, tadao or was board with it's rof and denounce tweaked

[Painthappy]

There were actual cheater boards and also a lot of talk about them but no real proof. Most of the boards in question would have been a board with a ramping feature. This gave you more shots per pull and only activated after a certain amount of pulls. I felt like a lot of this started in the Shocker 4x4 Turbo days that had a built in ramping feature that was activated when you shot 5 bps and was simply accessible via a switch on the outside. So someone could use it, turn it off, with a flip of a switch and be done.

The pro circuit did supposedly have its share of issues as boards and modes got more complicated. Refs then started checking the guns prior to the tournament. We would literally hand the refs our guns, they would inspect and shoot it, hand it back for playing. How many instances were real and how many were the other team complaining? No idea.

For the average player, psp, millenium, and nxl modes on boards all have ramping features. I can change my modes on one of my guns/boards by pressing buttons on the back on the grip frame. Since I don't know how to lock it, I can accidentally switch modes in the middle of a game. I'd have to check but I'm pretty sure that's on my DP Fusion elite gun.

[Daltech]

First 200 balls off the break went out at full auto ramping. Then the programming changes back to 12.5 semi or whatever. That’s the cheater board. So you could get someone on the break but later the ref couldn’t recreate the cheat mode. Cheater board is an urban legend. It’s pretty smart to be honest and I’m not upset by professionals pushing the boundaries. It’s the players job to win and the referees job to keep it fair. We all know nobody in paintball is a coder or nerd…

Changing the firing mode during game play or by pushing buttons mid game is just cheating. I try not to, but have been guilty of it.

[Grendel]

Some of the "cheater boards" had expanded memory allowing two different firmware to be loaded;' one that met tournament rules and one that didn't allowing the player to switch between them on the fly. The most interesting ones were where Bluetooth capabilities were added so a teammate off the field could change setting from remote then revert it back to "normal" when the game was done. There was a lot of attempts to liberally interpret the rules and adjust the settings/firmware to make use of the loopholes in the rules. This by far is the most common cheater board per se but most of the time were operating in the "grey area" of the rules at the time. This prompted more rules to close that loophole making the rules more complex causing new loopholes. When I first started judging tournaments the rules were on a couple sheets of paper (with examples and explanations). By the time I quite judging tournaments the rule books were many many pages long.

[iamthelazerviking]

Virtue boards had that "breakout mode" which was definitely different follow rules

[cockerpunk]

there are many tall tales of cheater boards, but i have yet to come across someone who actually admits to having personally used one, or cuaght someone using one. there are tall tales of magnets in gloves, Bluetooth activation, or my personal favorite was chrono cheating by velocity ramping (the faster you shoot the longer the dwell, and thus the faster FPS). the topic is long overdue, and with the amount of bragging about other cheats in paintball (wiping etc), its not like there is a stigma around it, so 20 years later im surprised by the lack of evidence of it actually happening.

far more common was two other ways to cheat ... adjustable debounce, and good old mechanical bounce.

all microswitches need to be debounced, as inherent in there operation, one trigger event is actually, when sampled fast enough, multiple events. smart parts i believe tried to make a legal case these were legal trigger events, and thus "turbo" mode was legal, but it was quickly banned.

anyway, so basically when you write the code on the board, you need to program a debounce setting, typically a timer, that when the switch sees an event, to disregard any events, for X miliseconds, and then if you pick up another event after that, then add a shot to the buffer and fire when the cycle is complete. in this method, its really easy to debounce a switch and make it legal, and thats what most people did.

the first folks publicly to talk about having that timer be adjustable, was wicked air sports. WAS as they were known. WAS boards had an adjustable timer for the debounce. so you could make them legal, but you could also make them marginal, or straight full auto with the debounce turned way down. lots of other companies followed suit, it was basically a standard parameter on the boards at the time. the stock bob long board did it, etc.

and then there was the matter of mechanical bounce, sometimes referred to as M-bounce. E1 cockers are really well known for M-bounce, which is basically the kick of the gun, actually being enough to set off these extremely light triggers. this can be a straight up safety issue, as guns can literally go out of control. you could set many guns up to do this, i remember cockers, impulses, and timmies all being pretty easy to mbounce with a low enough debounce setting, a non stock microswitch, and getting those trigger stops just fucking right, and you could start the gun shooting and never have to touch the trigger again, hand it to your friend, its still going etc etc.

anyway, between software debounce settings, and these mechanical tweaks, everyone was playing on the edge. naughty dawgs in particular were well known for having extremely fast guns in the NPPL back then.


anyway, id be interested in hearing some actual evidence and/or first hand accounts of those true cheater boards. the fact that they dont show up for sale, and ive never herd someone actually confirm either using something, or catching someone, in sport that is full of folks bragging about cheating, makes me doubt their true veracity.

and the fact that most paintball players, esp pro paintball players, are just not that technically brilliant, and tend to pretty chill surfer types ... im just skeptical. people love to brag about how smart they are at cheating, and i just dont see a ton of that frankly.

happy to be proven wrong though.

EDIT: i should say, when i say cheater boards, im not talking about little breakout modes that time out etc, im talking about on the fly mode changes, mode changes due to something other than button pushing/obvious player input, and velocity ramping

[EvilCreature]

Where we were it was Angels that you could launch into 15ish bps just by hitting the butt of the tank with your hand. Trigger was to hold down to stop shooting. I kinda missed that era myself, but many credible stories of super mechanical bounce abound.

[gabe]

It's good to see you back in paintball! I've been re-watching your old gun tour videos for ages now.

[The Last Snood]

Paintball Ruined My Life on youtube made a video that goes into it a bit. Maybe not as much info as you want but a nice video regardless.

"The Illegal Guns That Transformed Paintball"

[DarkApollo]

Came here to drop the same video.

[cockerpunk]

also what is known as ramping, is not really what ramping is. ramping now is more like turbo mode. achieve X trigger pulls per second, and then the gun will shoot Y BPS. and its a threshold in most cases. you just go to a certain trigger speed, and the gun basically goes into full auto.

but true ramping, was much more clever. it was shot pull once per second, you get 1bps. pull 3 times a second, get 3bps, pull 5 times a second, get 6 bps, pull 7 times a second, get 9 or 10bps, pull 10 times a second, get 15 bps, pull 15, and its going as fast as a halo will feed it

that makes it much harder to detect. because no one can count there trigger pulls, and so when you slow down to be able to count, its legal. but when the fingers are going too fast to count, the gun is extremely fast.





looking back, and having looked a fair amount of high speed videos of triggers in my time back in paintball ... i think it was extremely rare, and is extremely rare to find someone who in game, accurately, and effectively, was able to shoot more than about 10bps, on a truly legal gun. and basically all but impossible to shoot 15+. basically, unknowingly, even players who thought they were legal, were probably not legal. some form of bounce was helping them at those trigger speeds.

[EvilCreature]

I agree with you on 10 bps being a reasonable cap on what most anyone could do. Yeah, there were those with super skills, but everyone and their mother claimed they could shoot 15-18 bps legally and I just didn't buy it.

[Chuck E Ducky]

The virtues boards work increase semi ROF by percentages.

I have shot older DMs with custom flash that when the trigger was pulled in a certain combo it would spike caped ROF soon as you stopped shooting it would go back to standard rule sets. Ref picked up on it you could hand it to them and it would shoot within the rules. Several NJ D1 and D2 teams were running them at the time. They would all shoot the same timed shots at the box before a point then tear teams up off the break.

PE boards shots to sustain could be lowered in custom settings by a few seconds. You could also have ramp lock in a trigger pull early. This on the other side of the field off the break made a massive difference. Your paint is not only closed together but the lane is up and tight earlier. So a team could make a spot in practice every time under practice settings only to be shot out buy the early ramp. It’s very difficult to catch as well. Basically you set your board to “custom” settings mirror the PSP rules but lower shots to sustain by one change 3 shot to 4 and lower the shots to ramp. Having the board set to step makes it kick in instantly as well.

The marker will kick in ramp quicker stay in ramp longer and shoot 4 shots on a trigger pull when in ramp.

Hard to catch by ref while 10 markers are popping off. You can hear and test for ROF and Velocity. Not so much on the early activation / 4 shot it takes a sharp ear. Pro field refs might catch it. But not in divisional no way. It’s a Gross Major if you get caught.

Not something I was ever interested in. But I knew people who played like that for years and never got caught. I played front mostly so I wasn’t shooting much off the break. It was never worth the risk.

[Sneak Miester]

I had a kila board in my Promaster
i played a local tournament and impact ref the event, I had Bart get a ref to check my gun twice thinking I was ramping. They could’nt get it to ramp lol

stock board
kila board below the stock board

[coyote]

20+ years ago I was playing at a local field where Ironmen and KAPP factory were practicing.

I literally watched one of those players teaching a team mate how to use the "trigger tricks" (his words) to access different firing modes on the fly.

I had local friends with special programs on WAS boards as well.

This was exceptionally rare. Most of these upgraded boards lived in Alias Generation Timmies, Matrixes, and Angels. I played with an A4 with this sort of software. I wasted a lot of paint going Ricky Bobby with that Angel.

Most guys got their ROF from bouncing triggers though.

[fullofpaint]

Speedy boards from AdvantagePB (later became Virtue) were legit cheater boards with hidden functions. Benji came across a DM5 with a speedy chip and we figured out the activation code for it. You pressed the buttons and pulled the trigger in a certain combo that was unique to your specific board and it would activate parabolic ramping. Hold the trigger a couple seconds to cancel it before the ref gets to you. Here's the manual for the Shocker version. I think he posted a video of it if someone wants to dig through his FB for it.

Virtue's Gangster mode is sort of a cheat as well. Would default to full auto on the first trigger pull after turning on the board, then upon trigger release defaulted back to ramp or semi. So you'd power the gun on right before the start of a match, blast full auto off the break and then back to normal after. But that was just regular fire mode, wasn't hidden or anything.

There's some pics on PBN somewhere of the glove and mercury switch setup on an OG NYX Matrix, but I'm not gonna go looking for that haha.

[Myrkul]

Being a big ICD fan, I've used the vaporworks chaos boards quite a bit.

I always set them to 11 BPS semi, zero ramp or anything else.

I swear they add shots. The local Pro-shop has a bit of experience with them from back in the day as well, and he also swears the chaos boards like to sneak extra shots in.

This recently became even more obvious to me as I've been working on an ICD collection for another member here, the stock boards say they are good to 12 BPS, but "somehow" 12 BPS full auto on a stock board "sounds" slower then 11 BPS semi auto on a chaos board. Not sure what exactly the magic is, but it's DEFINITELY there.

[Chuck E Ducky]

The boards back in the day were not as accurate some guys still set there BPS limits just below ROF caps to compensate for that so they don’t get penalties. Know anyone with a virtue Clock? It will tell you BPS and confirm your suspicions.

[Trbo323]

all microswitches need to be debounced, as inherent in there operation, one trigger event is actually, when sampled fast enough, multiple events. smart parts i believe tried to make a legal case these were legal trigger events, and thus "turbo" mode was legal, but it was quickly banned.

This is the one I was thinking about. SP actually put that into production even though they were the only one who counted those as separate events.

In a little bit of a way it lives on today. Let's say you have your board set up for 8bps but you are pulling the trigger at 10bps. The marker will fire at a consistent 8bps even though your finger is not hitting the trigger at the exact time to fire at 8bps. It's basically "storing" shots to be used at the exact time to keep the marker firing at 8.

A few years ago there was a bit of a movement for tournament ball to go to "true semi" where if the marker fires and you pull the trigger again before the next shot can fire in order to keep you under the bps cap, then it discards that trigger pull and waits for the next one. It makes it so there is not nearly the very repetitive and consistent rof on the field. There's little interruptions and breaks in the steam of paint because the player can't pull the trigger at exactly 10.2 bps forever.

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