Submitted by Have you ever played a video game and wondered what rules you could bend? What’s behind the flagpole in Super Mario Bros, can you skip a dungeon in Legend of Zelda or beat the BubbleMan with his own gun?
Sometimes the game authors themselves leave cheat codes that implement interesting game rules like flying, all weapons etc. Game genie codes and glitches like cartrigde tilting can also provide a ton of fun. But what if the game you like has no exotic codes, and the only game genie codes you can find online give you infinite ammo? You break the game yourself, of course!
So, someone discovered you can debug and change the code of games… Something we’ve been doing for ages on C64, PC etc. I mean, it’s a nice read, but the author is bringing it like a great revelation.
Hi,
I’m the author of the article. Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the introduction might sound a bit pompous, but I assure you that is purely because I find it difficult to write meaningful introductions and summaries.
This blog post entry is more about how I discovered 6502 debugging (as you pointed out), and decided to write about the experiences in attempt to introduce more people to it. Thanks to modern tools, debugging old games has never been easier.
Yeah, no kidding. I guess I can thank him for the flashback to 1983 but otherwise he’s seriously late to the party. And even that even sounds like an understatement.
Muh ?
http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/22/7871437/super-mario-world-glitch-c…
Semi-OT but… I wonder if anyone has ever hacked the Super Mario Advance games on the GBA to remove the annoying character voices. I love those games, but can only play them with the volume muted.
Edited 2015-05-05 01:00 UTC
I’ve never played much Super Mario Advance games, but that sounds like something not very difficult to do. Might be tedious, if there are many voices to remove, though.
Slightly offtopic: Am playing with Megadrive/Genesis assembly programming for the moment. Am in the extremely early stage of writing the libraries/drivers (first up is VDP: Video Display Processor). Lots to be learned yet. Need to program a 8BitBMP-to-Genesis convertor (on the PC/Windows side) some time as well. It’s always a pleasure to code directly against the hardware, or to be more precise, to write the drivers/APIs combo the way you want them to be, and then use them to your heart’s content. Would really like an Everdrive to run on real hardware, but they’re slightly too expensive IMHO. End of babble.