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.
The majority are for QA purposes, and lots of them are so embedded it's hard (or useless) to rip them out before the code is released.
Also, don't forget - how much fun would it be to get a game like RTCW and push a button for God mode right out of the box? Booooorinnnng.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
1) Companies insert cheat codes because like you said, they use it to test the games. The Second reason is that it is always a thrill by the player to find out about these cheat codes, either through a purposely well placed 'leak' by the company or by themselves. Thirdly, companies do make money on cheats. Some companies sell "player guides" that are filled with help and cheats on games. If there weren't any cheats, there would be no market for these player guides.
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.
Here's why that would work: Let's say that the program says:
With this, the player would never die.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
You're all idiots. It's UUDDLRLRBA. Also note that select and start are not part of the code. Once you press UUDDLRLRBA, you can do whatever you want -- press left again, press select six times, hold the B button, whatever.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Easter eggs and the cheat codes that Gameshark uses are two different things.
Easter eggs are intentionally put into a game by a developer. The cheat codes used by game shark are simply a way of finding out which adresses in the RAM hold what particular values, and changing them, for example the address that keeps track of how much gold I have, and changing it to a maxed out value.
----
One of us needs to stick ones' head in a bucket of ice water.
- Hobbes
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...
its UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A!
For anyone who actually plays those Konami games.
Never did the infinite lives thing, but savegame hacking I have done. Basically note down your 'cash' (gold, energy, credits, whatever). Save the game, and quit. Load the save file up in your favourite hex editor. Look for the 'cash' as a hex value. Usually the bytes will be reversed (something to do with the processor architecture IIRC - x86 are 'little endian' meaning the byte order is reversed). Replace these numbers with FF FF - 65535 of 'cash'. (If it shows up as -1 then you need to change the first F to a 7 because they're using a 'signed' number) Even better if you have a leading 00 00 you can replace these too - the game designers anticipated you earning more than 65535 of cash. replace with FFs or for a nice round number 00 40 42 0F will be a million (sad I remember that). It worked nicely on Sim City 2000, and Command and Conquer as I recall. May not work _quite_ so well on others.
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.
Actually, that cheat would only get you 10 times of what you put in, e.g. in Contra you get 3 * 10 lives. So if they planned to waste 2 weeks on cracking any particular game, they'd end up spending 20 weeks on it if they used that code.
They're smart enough to avoid that scheduling pitfall, unlike some web designers I know...
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.