Slashdot Mirror
Finding Cheat Codes For A Living
selan writes: "The Baltimore Sun has an article about the guys from GameShark who spend their time digging up cheat codes. 'For hours on end, hackers here squint over thousands of lines of numeric coding that translate to great feats of accomplishment on a video game.'" Good work, if you can get it.
Why don't they simply press up-down-up-down-left-right-A-B and get themselves infinite cash?
What's the big deal with this? You can sometimes find stuff with strings or a hex program.
Looking for cheat codes in games is just about as useful to the society as train spotting. In other words, these guys are slackers.
when you play Tiger Woods Golf, you get a hole in one every time
Tiger Woods game: $40
Gameshark: $60
Realizing that you spent $100 to watch a golf game play itself: Priceless.
I remember, as a young lad, wondering how anyone ever came up with the cheats that were published monthly in my favorite ZX Spectrum (and later Commodore Amiga) magazine. I just assumed that somewhere, someone would get the infomation out of the programmers by sleeping with the despectacled geeks. Oh, how innocent I was when I was younger...
What they are doing is illegal...
Sad, isn't it?
you can prob find all sorts of stuff. remember that backdoor in Quake that lets you root other machines in online play......
perl -MIO::Socket -e 'IO::Socket::INET-new(PeerAddr="some.windoze.box:1
I remember the original Game Genie for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Much fun was had having infinite lives and all the money you could want in RPGs and fun things like that.
Of course, when you can beat the game without even trying, the fun goes away.
Looks like they'd be handing themselves out to dry every time they bypass a copyrighted game's system for acquiring health, weapons, points, etc.
Remember, if we use cheat codes to make our games easier, then the terrorists win.
Who came up with the idea of cheat codes (Easter eggs) in Video Games? I have always wondered why a company/programmer would leave the inserted cheat codes in their game when its released. I can understand for testing purposes that they are helpful but why for the consumer? And if they leave them in, why don't they just tell you what they are? Obviously they are not making any money selling the cheat codes to Game Shark.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
"'...For hours on end, hackers here squint over thousands of lines of numeric coding that translate to great feats of accomplishment on a video game.'" Good work, if you can get it.
I'm not sure I agree with that one. Personally, squinting over thousands of lines of hex code for hours at a time does *not* sound like good work.
Maybe the great working is playing the games for a living... looking at bare hex/assembly all day sounds a bit too much like debugging other people's code to me. (Which is only fun if they are around to make fun of...) And god help these guys if the DMCA nazis get a hold of them... "We liscenced you the game, we didn't say you could look at it."
"As time went on, we became e-commerce guys," says John Hays, 37. "These codes are serious business and it's big, huge money. And it's fun for us.
I am not exactly sure how they make "big" money on this...maybe there is a side of marketing that I am not thinking about but when is the last time you saw anybody pay for cheat codes?
Personally, i use google.
Too Funny :o)
Now you:
Buy the game
Buy the strategy guide
Get all the cheat codes
Get bored because it's no fun anymore
Repeat cycle
To each their own...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
For providing the means to absolutely RUIN on-line console games like Phantasy Star Online.
You've provided a valuable service to the gaming community!
I was kicking my roommate's ass in Project Gotham, so to make himself feel better he got cheats off the web so he could pretend to have completed more levels than me.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. RUSH
Age of Conquerors (the Age of Kings Expansion)..that will let you cheat on www.zone.com in Death Match rooms. Yeah, I know people have come up with trainers, but they do not work on Multiplayer mode when you are playing on the zone, the damn game developers or Microsoft, I don't know which one, do some sort of a check on the size of your dat files which holds game data during game play, i.e. like 10000 gold, 20000 food, 10000 stone etc etc, and if your file size is greater, it is what is called a "Sync Error" ... and now with AOC it tells you who caused the SYNC ERROR..well if these dudes can actually write something that will give me infinite resources and not sync out...I will think they are doing there job, until then, they are worthless
Game Genie/Game Shark codes...
Trainers either, for that matter.
When I was about 15, I mowed lawns all summer in order to afford to buy NES cartridges. One of the 'cartridges' I bought was a Game Genie adapter.
Once I had done all the 'special effects' on the games I owned, I realized that any of the difficulty-altering codes took all the challenge out of the game.
Sure, it was fun to always have the elusive Hammer suit in SMB3, but at the same time, if you don't have to work hard and stay alive all the way through World 6 or 7, then you don't really appreciate it as much and don't play so carefully in order to keep it.
Now days, even the graphics altering abilities of such devices or programs aren't that impressive. There's very little you can do graphics-wise to a 3D, immersive game that doesn't break the game play. One of the few legitimate uses I've seen for this is to allow the player to play as characters that he wouldn't usually get to... such as Bowser in Super Mario 64. Even then, the animation and clipping is broken, hurting the play experience.
Some trainers do have positive uses. Here, I'm thinking about the trainers that exist for games like Roller Coaster Tycoon that allow the player to more or less play in the 'Free Form Building' mode that everyone agrees is missing from the game.
The conclusion that I've drawn from these observation is that trainers usually detract from gaming... at least for people who are interested in playing. If a game needs a trainer in order to be enjoyable, such as RCT... then there's something wrong with the game.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Good work, if you can get it.
How is "squinting" over thousands of lines of code good work? Basically the job we are looking at here is looking at code for hours and hours so you can find that one number that make a character immortal or whatever. Now I don't know about everyone else, but I prefer to writing my own stuff rather than spending hours reading over someone else's work (which has to be reverse engineered to read, so goodbye comments, formatting, etc.)
Like I said, this may just be me. But personally I can't see the attraction of a job that involves reading code when you can get one writing it.
-Xenopax
I always saw cheat codes as a way to further the experiences of a game and I think they work great as a reward for finishing the game. I always find it fun to go back to a board using cheat codes that took forever to complete and wreak havoc.
I think the optimum setup is when they are intergrated into the gameplay, so you don't have to go through hoops in order to get them to work.
I've often wondered why more developers don't utilize them as a feature of the gameplay.
When i was a child, i dreamed of growing up to be a video game designer(didn't everyone in my generation?). When i got a little older, it was the cheat codes that fascinated me. I was never too fond of using them myself(except for the ones that corrected OBVIOUS errors in the game[that damn heat guage in excitebike... bye bye with the gamegenie]), i always preferred the original degree of challenge of the game. But still... there was a certain allure to hacking into somebody elses code, figuring out how it works, and sticking in your own little "improvements". The heart of a reverse engineer.
In reality, many slashdotters are able to(and perhaps already have) done this sort of thing for themselves in their spare time. The thing that amazed(and still amazes) me was that someone would actually be willing to pay people to do this. capitalism is a CRAZY thing i guess.
anyway, i really enjoyed this article.
Nice work if you can get it.
lysergically yours
I was about to respond with the knee-jerk "cheat codes are for losers", when I remembered all the times that I resorted to god mode, walkthrus, saved-game modifiers, secret-room revealers, etc. just so that I could see if it were possible to get past a particular bottleneck in a game, and from there figure out how to do it without cheating. That's how I got to the end of Quake I and the insanely difficult Marathon mod Marathon RED. I can empathize with this guy's experience completely. Of course, if you always play by cheating, then what is the point, really?
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
Last christmas I got my little brother a GameShark for his N64. I ended up monopolizing it the entire christmas break to hack on Mario Kart 64. While I only came up with 3 codes, and have many programming challenges at my job, it was the most enjoyable hacking experience I've had in a long time. There's just something about trying to get inside the heads of the game programmers, finding clues to indicate how they coded a particular feature, persevering by spending a couple hours looking over numbers, and finally finding a result that impresses even your non-geek friends.
Increase/Decrease for power bars
Add/Sub for number of lives
Flag toggles
So the MAME and Genie cheats force certain RAM bytes to a desirable value...
The guys at Game Shark are a bunch of morons and slackers. The Guys at the Game System Code Creator's Club (cmgsccc.com) were the real brains behind Game Shark's codes. Once Code Master (Creator of the GSCCC) left Game Shark, they have been slacking.
Without a cheat code, how do you get to Diablo under 5 minutes ? ... ?
... ?
How do you beat Diablo with a Level 1 Paladin and a big and nice 4hits points dagger
How can you test that the green monster will follow you, that the AI is good
Without the codes, all the testers would have to make that 85 hours playgame in order to get to that last scene they have to test, then be killed within 5" because that monster is Really a boss...8)
+ Without cheat codes, I would !NEVER! have finished Doom2.
I'm not even sure it's possible to finish it without cheating...
So, here's the answer : cheat codes are mostly for testing the game.
In the old time, you screened the Hex and looked for change (everytime you got hit, a handle changed,...) and, after "much" Try and Crash, you got what you wanted (EF FF in strengh and Stamina...)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I think cheat codes are great. You know you get to a certain point in any game where you get bored or fustrated because it gets too hard. That's when you use the cheat codes. At least you get to see the rest of the game when otherwise you would have just put it away.
In the days of the Sinclair Spectrum or in the US, the Timex TS2048 the programs came on tape. Initially (especially for games by Ultimate-Play The Game [now RareWare]) the tape would contain a small BASIC loader, which then loaded the binary game code and executed it.
One of the skills was to load the BASIC program, break it (stop it running) and find out where the binary game code loaded. Then you'd possibly manually load the binary and start looking around at the code. Using your trusty Z80 opcode-list you'd look for places where counters were decreased (lives reduced?). You'd also look for places where initial values were set (number of lives/amount of energy). These were pretty easy to do at the start.
Once you knew the location, you could create a modified BASIC loader containing POKE statements. These would modify the contents of memory after the binary had loaded, but before it was executed. That way you could change the number of lives, or amount of energey or whatever..
Then things got a bit tricker. The developers would embed some machine code into the first line of the BASIC program. This special code would load the binary code, but using a different (non-standard) speed. This was the advent of the 'turbo-loader', the bane of most spectrum owners. With higher speed loading came the delicate balancing of the volume and tone controls on the tape desk. Get the controls wrong and the game would refuse to load.. or worse, the game would load all the way to the end, but crash either dumping you to the '(c) 1982 Sinclair Research' initial screen, or show flashing coloured blobs (sorta the equivalent of BSOD).
The other problem with turbo loaders was that you couldn't just load the binary on its own, you needed a special loader. Each game developer had their own set of routines for storing the binary data on tape. Some had cool things like counters, music or animated loading screens whilst you wait for the game to load.
People would 'decrypt' the developers loader and create their own programs to load the turbo-loader games and then hack them....
Anyway, I'm rambling..
..suffice to say, this isn't new. More complex, harder, maybe? More fun... hmmm. There's a big difference between doing this for a job, and doing it to get a namecheck in a crappy Sinclair Magazine!
So let me get this straight.. You're reading a book ... about using a device ... to automatically play ... a computer simulation ... of an activity that can't exactly be called a sport?
That's about as close as you can get to being an inorganic life form.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
"another way would be to store -1 or something"
Congrats. You just described the "Sudden Death" Issue.
Look, this is life points you speak about. -1 means you are dead for a few seconds.
I know. I tested for quite a long time and -1 in life is almost always fatal.
Just as the old trick of having "EF FF" in life is better than having "FF FF".
"FF FF" usually ends up with your player @ -65 465 in life , instead of +65...8|
Shocking to see the effect on vampire weapons 8) (Diablo 1 Players welcome 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I would not say that some methods were all that innocent. Although this might not be all that good for the brain cell count.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
A bit of social engineering could really up the value of the Gameshark and similar. I know I've often put some queer things into my own games and removed them at compile time, or in the last minute rush, left them resident without adding a way to activate them because I never got them past management/legal. If someone had been nagging me just after shipping, while I still had my map file handy, I'd have been more than happy to share the location of one nifty thing or another. I'd wager many other developers are just like me.
Get a hold of the publishers and they may see implementing leakable codes as a way to get a second bump in the sales chart.
Do a little digging and get a hold of the programmers themselves, and they may share things they put in for their own joy and benefit. A little push or some free gear, and they may even put bonus flashy extras in there as a side project.
Back in the 1970s I had a friend who would get her jollies by using the POKE command (if you don't know, you're too young to ask...) on some defenseless PACMAN clone (written in PET Basic in those far-off days) to make the ghosts do weird things like following the maze walls or reversing the normal chase-flee cycle. It was sometimes quite fun, in a watching-paint-dry kind of way. The thought of hacking a game so as to give the impression that one was playing and winning did occasionally occur to us, but it seemed so lame we didn't bother. We were both programmers, dammit (we both still are) and actually playing the game was for users. Plus ca change.
Cheat codes are usually put in by coders for debugging purposes and sloppy Q&A practices or, perhaps more sneaky, left in intentionally to drum up additional interest in the game. Winning the game becomes less the point, knowing how to cheat and where to find specials is the paradigm.
"Dude, I just came up with the greatest keyboard sequence to reveal a cheat code!"
"Yeah? Alright! Let's design a game around it!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't know about that. Can you imagine replaying levels over and over again, in some sort of hellish attempt to try something else. Over and over again, that must get old, no matter how much 'fun' it is. That must really suck after a while...
Sort of like recompiling a new kernel with every minor relea... oops, never mind.
There's still plenty of gamers like me who still like playing classic NES games even today... I'm one of those fascinated at the Americanization of many of the games first released on the Famicom. For instance, in Japan, Contra had (in comparison to the US version) double the size of both of its ROMs and a non-Nintendo memory mapper that allowed the game to include extra cut scenese and special effect like trees rustling in the wind on the background of level one.....
;)
A while back, I discovered the joy of making Game Genie codes when decided to make my four-score famicom compatible (e-mail me for info)... I lost (and still need to replace (if you are from Japan and can help me out, email me!)) my copy of Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu, and needed something to test my converted adapter on. Knowing that the Famicom version of Super Dodge Ball had 4 player mode, but that it was removed from the NES version because of incompatibility, I simply spent some time to make a game genie code that would allow a four player beanball game on the NES.... "GEUOLZZA"
Click here for a screenshot of it.
I kept going too....
How about coed Super Spike V'Ball? (it uses unfinished/prototype characters that were not completely removed before production.)
That's "AEXGXYGE", or "AAKGNTGE" if on the same cart as NES World Cup....
I've even made a code that unlocks 3 player games in Stinger.
Any, I find this stuff loads of fun. All of it will be up on my site some day, when I get a little more time and a digital camera to show off the construction of my modified four score.....
So, to all those trolls whining about cheating and gamesharks being no fun, nyaaaaah to you. There's no way I'd ever play as Wolverine on THPS3 if I didn't make my PSX memory card reader
-rah
(ahgaray atyay ahgaray otday omcay)
2) Game Shark (according to the article) does not use the cheats made by the companies, although, I suspect that if they are reverse engineering it, they could view the cheats. But what they do is write/edit the RAM (memory) at given moments to enhance a feature. Let's say that in memory location 255, the game Mortal Kombat stores the maximum health of player 1. What the GameShark does is, instead of letting the game store 100% there, it writes in 500% (let's say) which gives you more health. Or another way would be to store -1 or something that the program doesn't expect.
Does anyone remember the good old C64 games, where you cheated by resetting the machine, issuing a few POKE commands and restart the game using a SYS command? That utilized the exact same tecnique - POKE stored a value in RAM and SYS started executing the game.
Usually, however, these POKEs didn't rewrite RAM locations where the number of lives were stored. Instead, it replaced the actual machine code that decremented the life counter. So instead of doing:
dec $5463
The game now did:
nop
nop
nop
Which uses the same number of bytes of RAM.
There even existed hardware devices (called cartridges) that enabled you to automatically scan the memory for the locations of life counters and such. Once the life counter was found, the game code was patched in the way outlined above.
Ahhh, those were the days!
-65 465 should probably be more like -32768 (assuming consoles use 16 bit ints like computers)
One question that I might ask is...when these guys go home, do they play more video games?
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
I remember hand-coding a hex-displayer thingie in search for that elusive '35h' byte for Manic Miner. DEC (HL), the opcode was. Got it right first time as well.
The cleverest loading trick, IMHO, was coded by David Jones for the game 'Spellbound'. (Released on Mastertronic Added Dimension for 3 quid!)
Basically, he'd edited the internal representation of the basic loader so that it started the programme 3 bytes on from what the loader appeared to say when looking at the code. e.g. although it claimed to start executing from memory location 31000, it actually started at 31003.
To all intents and purposes it looked just like a a standard "load the code from the tape and execute it" loader, except the 3 byte offset made all the difference. Those first three bytes contained a call to a separate bit of code which displayed a 3D starfield effect and the message "Hello Hacker! Fancy meeting you here!"
A simple, effective trick that was easily bypassed, but fun to do so nevertheless.
*sigh* Memories.
I just got one of the new GBC Gamesharks, with the snapshot feature. Creating Snapshots is easy, but when you go to load them back into the game, your Gameshark's memory is wiped, and it ceases to work. You have to ship it to Interact *AND* give them $10 to fix it.
For a product that lasted 10 minutes, Thanks, but no thanks. I returned two of them... might repurchase in the future if they get their act together.
Don't just take my word for it, check their message boards.
If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be respected, sit down and shut up.
Back in the DOS days, there was a program called "Gametools" that worked like a Game Shark for PC games. It was a whole lot more useful, though, because you could easily come up with codes yourself by searching through memory for interesting values as you played the game.
(You could also use it to write cracks for your software. Some day, this kind of software will probably end up being illegal.)
These days there are SoftICE and GDB, but programs are getting a whole lot bigger and more complicated. It's just not as fun...
Do they consider:
up up down down left right left right B A Start
A cheat code?? Love those old NES games!
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
I cannot believe that the mod community hasn't been brought up. There are some games (namely id-based games) that have extremely long lives because of the mod community.
People make new maps, player models, enemies, etc. to create new experiences within the game. Without cheat codes, level creation would be near impossible.
Game developers use cheat codes to debug and test the gameplay. If they took the cheats out before release, there would be no mods for the game and the lifespan would be much shorter.
I believe someone mentioned in another post, but they worked in a few Konami games on the NES. My only experience was with Contra.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Is anyone seriously suggesting that designers don`t release the cheats systematically to extend a product`s life.
I wonder what these guys would say about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and how it applies to their business.
This is another example of the DMCA having the ability to stifle innovation simply by existing. If I were the guys at gameshark, I would be worried about potential lawsuits simply for going through game code.
It's rediculous!
Ace
It's a little difficult though...
First, move through the game without dying more than the amount of initial lives you have.
Second, defeat the end boss.
Victory!
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
No. More like "Good work, if you're a freakin moron".
I mean, is that would you guys *seriously* aspire to? - arsing around all day looking for video game cheat codes??? And you wonder why you're still virgins? LOL.
Wasn't the PET the computer you could POKE a certain memory location with to get it to catch fire or something?
To all you folks without lives that are whining about how game codes destroy the value of games. Forget that noise. I work for a living and the last thing I want is to come home and become even MORE frustrated because the PS2 is designed for the reflexes of a 12 year old on crack.
I think every game should ship with cheat codes. After a long frustrating day of work, if I'm going to spend $60 on a god-damn game, I want to be able (and as the customer, this is a feature I god-damn demand) to go right in and load up my character with every conceivable weapon and just whoop ass.
It's either that, or bringing my AK-47 to work.
The DMCA covers copy protection. It has NOTHING to do with this. In fact, here's a subsection of DMCA *maintaining* the right to reverse engineer in this way:
`(f) REVERSE ENGINEERING- (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
Please, for the love of god, read the text of the DMCA before ever mentioning it again. It's fairly short and to the point.
Text of DMCA
-
For anyone that cares, there's a huge archive of Game Shark codes at CheatZilla.com. That site has been around for years, and (at least for SNES and Genesis codes) can convert between various code formats for you.
http://www.warrenrobinett.com/adventure/
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
I discovered this over the weekend playing Chronotrigger on the Snex9x emulator. There's a feature called "Search for new cheat codes" that lets you view the game memory at different addresses. Some of the things I tried would be to search for a chunk of memory with a value set to X, where X was the number of gold pieces I had. Then update it to 1000000, and bingo, my character was rich. Pretty neat stuff, although not quite as fun as just playing the game.
In the only game that matters, it's easy. Just type "X", and you're in explore mode and can go on forever (but can't get a high score or ascend).
hawk
I find it kind of amusing that this articles constantly mentions the programmers "hacking into the game system" as if they are gaining unauthorized access to some machine on the Internet. When will the press use this term correctly?
void women (int money, time_t time);
thanks for the clarifaction, but please nobody else feed the troll, and for the love of your deity of choice, please mod this down
Our favorite 8-bit NES side scroller! +30 lives!
...and you can get it if you try!
God I love Frank Sinatra. Was this an intended quote?
a previously unpublished one for james pond 2: robocod (mega drive version at least)
;]
it occurerd when trying to do another cheat, but hitting the buttons in the wrong order. i assume this is what these people do for a living.
originally i assumed it came from playtesters who found bugs, but didnt report them, and then sold the rights to the cheat afterwards
I guess its easier for the game shark people to swim through the game code than the game genie people, who have to fly through it!
And when exactly did the Sony Playstation start shipping every unit with a copy of strings and a hex editor?
When the GNU/Linux kit was released. On the PlayStation 2 Linux kit DVD-ROM, you find binaries and sources for many GNU packages. I'm not sure if strings is in there or not, but it would be straightforward to put it there.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Due to the unrelenting power of Murphy's Law, new viruses would almost invariably come popping in at around 5:00pm on Friday afternoons, meaning a good additional 10 or 12 hours until early Saturday doing -
- Figure out what the hell the thing is trying to do (overwrite all image files? Remove system files? Poop on overthing in the system?)
- Figure out how it reproduces.
- Figure out how to identify it.
- Figure out how to get rid of it.
- Figure out how to repair the damage.
- Code up a definition.
- Test on every possible permutation
In other words, loads of pain. What makes it bearable is the periods in between where you can actually do some software. But day in, day out of looking at dumps trying to figure out what makes them tick? I think I'd rather saw off my own appendages. Slowly.-"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." - Arthur Dent
I've discovered a cheat code myself. While poring over the Super Mario Bros. hex code, I found the sequence "04 03 02 00 24 05 24 00 08 07 06". My previous experiments had confirmed "24" to be the game's code for a space character, and that world -1 was actually world (SPACE)-1, that is, 36-1. I realized that these codes matched the codes for the game's warp zones. After changing the 02 to 24, I was able to make the pipe at the top right of World 1-2 that normally takes the player to 2-1 to take the player to -1. The code is (in BASIC) POKE $87F4, $24 or (in Game Genie) GXNAGY.
Details on how I accomplished the hack
Will I retire or break 10K?
I work for a major console game company. The simple truth is cheats help make a product more interesting and so they are put in. Yes some are inplace for testing but they are intentionally left in and some are added just for fun factor. They are then anonymously leaked....
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
Now though they do things a little differently they used to with respect to loading memory, it still doesnt matter. Unless game makers start ENCRYPTING all of their code (not just pieces as they do now for copy protection), the dmca simply doesnt apply.
As many have mentioned earlier, these types of devices give replay power and could possibly even sell more games by giving people who suck at games a chance at beating them. Why would any game company be against that?
Anyway, 26,000 words is tiny for a legal document.... I found the DMCA an easy read compared to many other copyright documents...
-
Which someone else has mentioned: the 'mod' community. I'm exceedingly fond of Heroes of Might and Magic, which always ships with a map editor. I've made and released three maps for it myself, and played and reviewed a good many other amateur maps (and a good amateur map leaves the professional maps for dust!). And as a mapmaker, testing out maps, I use cheat-codes frequently. Gotta go see whether that new little corner works like it should, which means going here, doing this, and then going there. I could spend 2.5 hours playing the map to that point, or I could tap in a few cheatcodes and take a total of 8 minutes ...
... except, of course, in that you download it from a website (http://celestialheavens.com/WoG/) rather than buying it from a store.
Of course one does full honest playtests as well. But the cheatcodes vastly accelerate much of the testing and polishing that needs to be done to produce a top-notch map.
Heroes of Might and Magic 4 is probably going to come up next March. And I'll be buying it immediately - which is a new thing for me. I wouldn't be doing it if it weren't so practical to make maps in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - I wouldn't be playing the game any more. I'd probably only realise HOMM4 was out there about a year after it was released.
This is partly because most of the professional maps are suitable for multiplayer - and the AI is no match for a human. Nor is 'story' an important component of a multiplayer map - but it adds a lot to a singleplayer map!
The second expansion of HOMM3 brings the total of professional maps to about 87 (I think). By contrast, www.astralwizard.com has more than 400 amateur maps, of which more than 50 have been rated at 8+ - better than professional! And www.archangelcastle.com had more than 700 maps last time I looked.
And then there's the unofficial expansion 'In the Wake of Gods', which (to return to the topic of poring over numbers) was created by amateurs doing some reverse-engineering sort of stuff in their spare time. And as someone who's analysed game-play and mapmaking, I *can* tell that it's not a professional effort - but it's not *obviously* so
Rachel
If you want to try right away what is to look for memory addresses and modify the behavior of the game, try zsnes. Its cheat menu allows to set a break on the game (pressing escape) and look for a value. It can also be set for looking values that increase or decrease or stay the same over the span of breaks. Cool stuff. It does convert the "realtime hex patch" to game genie or action replay codes, so it's a safe guess to say it's close to how it is done.
Jeez, with all this talk about 'remarkable programming skill' and 'squinting over thousands of lines of numeric coding', it's obvious to me that none of these people have ever actually used the code-finding tools. If Interract has the same level of tools on todays platforms as they did on yesterday's (PS One and Saturn), then this is a piece of cake. Any 8 year old could make cheat codes with these tools and 30 minutes of instruction. I used to own one of the Datel parallel port boards. Basically, all you had to do was press a button on the connected computer to dump the contents of the console's RAM, then you get your guy killed in the game, then dump the memory again to determine which numbers changed. You keep doing that over and over a half dozen times to narrow it down and *voila* you've found the memory location that controls the number of lives. Just stick a 0xFF in that and you're done. The 'code' was simply a memory location and the value to poke (there were extended codes that would do the pokes conditionally too, but it was just as simple). Making codes wasn't hard, it was just hard to get the game home quick enough that you were the first one to post the code to Datel's and Interract's sites (Yeah, their in house codefinders didn't do it all - I found the first Crash Bandicoot codes for them!). I find it hard to believe that their tools make it anything but easier to find codes today.
It isn't at all hard to remove debugging code like that.
You just have to change a few defines and recompile.
Let me demonstrate with this pseudocode / C hybrid. The way to allow cheats is like so:
Now to remove the feature from the game entirely so that it cannot be used, you would use a fairly different idea ...
If you wanted to test the clipping in only one part of the level you'd want to be able to toggle the clipping on and off, so instead you'd code it like so (and still have the ability to compile it out).
Don't under estimate the power of cpp! (the C pre-processor).
Waste the fucking day squinting over meaning less dribble so some zit faced punk can sit inside all day with 30 lives playing Contra
The funniest part now is when I realized this "punk" was my brother!
"Wireless : LAN
You have no sense of humor whatsoever, but thanks for the karma. ;)
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
I, with the aid of my father, managed to adapt a floppy disk driver to work with my Spectrum. It was a 5.25", 360Kb.
And then I had fun for months working to hack the games that came on tape and rewrite the loader and copy them to disks...
I dont know about you out there, but spending my day infront of code aint my idea of a good job.
I'd rather be a game tester.
Ultima Underworld came out. My friend and I would play that game all day and all night. Than one day we found the cheat code on a BBS (something like typing "spam spam spam humbug" in the command line) for getting anything we wanted in the game - INCLUDING fireplace tiles, grass tiles....pretty much ANYTHING that had a picture in the game you could carry around with you! Many hours of fun were spent trying to see what all of the combination of numbers came up with......
Sorry,
When reading Hex, you usually have to code IN REVERSE to allow the stack to get the data in the proper order (sorry for bad english...)
=> if you use EFFF (read it that way) it means FFFE when in the stack, caus' the darn thing must be read from left to right, except for Numeric Values, that are read from right to left...
And people keep asking what's so fun in coding 8))
>I realize that breaking into systems is
>not 'hacking.' I suppose you misunderstood what
>I had previously stated: the way that the
>article uses the term 'hacking' in the context
>makes it seems like they are gaining
>unauthorized access into these gaming systems
>(considering this is what the media usually
>considers hacking to be).
Ehhh... I bet your face got a little bit red with that original reply. I see what you're saying, though. "Hacking" + "into" + "a system" usually involves a machine "a system", which the hacker has gained more access to than was intended.
e.g. Hacking into the Pentagon.
"Hacking" + "a noun" usually means monkeying around with "a noun" until it does what one wants it to do, although it isn't supposed to.
Many of the early Atari Easter Eggs (such as the Adventure dot) were created by the programmers as ways of getting credit. Warren Robinette received no other credit for his work on Adventure besides what he himself put in as an Easter Egg.
Similarly, in the world of film, the Mouse Mania short that Mike Jittlov did for Disney has a number of "Easter Eggs" in it, giving credit to the various people who helped him on the project (and whom Disney wouldn't officially credit).
Apparently there seems to be a conflict in this topic. The workers mentioned are people who work for Gameshark. A cheat code is purposely built by the game creators for use in the software. And also they will end up releasing the codes themselves either distributing them to websites themselves or through code books or strategy guides. What Gameshark does is create hacks for games, and pretty much reverse engineer the game itself.
Thank You, Adam Brown