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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.
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
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.
Dunno about the Spectrum. I had a Commodore Plus-4, and the standard infinite lives procedure was something like this:-
(1) Find the lives display on the screen
(2) Moisten a bit of paper and stick it over the place found in step (1) [because step (2) requires two fingers]
(3) Run/Stop-Reset into the built-in TEDMON (oh I loved it)
(4) Clear the screen, place cursor under bit of paper placed in (2), whack down an '@' character (PETSCII $00)
(5) S C00 FE7 0 (finds the '@')
(6) S 0 FFFF for the address found in (5)
(7) You should now be able to find the routine that updates the lives display... The rest depends on how it works... You are usually pretty close though.
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.
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
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!
"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
Interestingly, Phantasy Star Online, a popular space adventure in the online gaming circuit, is not one of Interacts's primary targets. John Hays says that's because of the "moral issues" involved with providing cheat codes for players in head-to-head online gaming.
"We could do it, but we don't," Hays said.
Are they lying? Or are Phantasy Star cheats found elsewhere?
m00.
What's the big deal with this? You can sometimes find stuff with strings or a hex program.
And when exactly did the Sony Playstation start shipping every unit with a copy of strings and a hex editor?
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.
Who needs GameShark? There are plenty of tools out there that let you find codes on your own like ArtMoney and GameWiz32. Like most games these are for Windows, but both work very well. There are lots of others if you are prepared to look, but I found ArtMoney to do all I needed, which was actually circumventing a forgotten password lock rather than a lives cheat, but what the hell.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
I always (well almost) used the game genie to make the game harder. Did you ever play smb1 with moon gravity? I had already beaten the game several times over, but moon gravity made the game a whole new experience. Sure you could jump higher once you figured it out, but your control was wigged out. Many times I would take a flying leap right into a pit. (WHEEeeeeeeoooooossshhii).
How about Tetris? I find a perverse pleasure in playing the "B" game with a high number of blocks already on the screen then trying to work them down to the bottom. The only problem is you only get 10 lines to do it in. With the game genie you could change it to 40!
I wasn't trying to cheat as such, just change the mechanics of the game, for better or worse, and make a different playing experience. It should be noted that I didn't have a game genie, I just borrowed one on occasion.
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
We used to do it on the Beeb by poring over hex dumps, looking for the magic sequences of 6502 assembler (the novelty quickly wore off, and we wrote a program to do the search for us shortly afterwards :-) Ahhhh, wonderful memories. The BBC Micro was
an amazing hackers machine. Much more so than the
Spectrum or C64, by virtue of the fact that it
had in inbuilt assembler/disassembler and hex
dump. As for sleeping with despectacled geeks,
I sadly conformed to the stereotypes, and wasn't
much interested in that sort of thing at the
time. Of course,
things have changed somewhat since then :-)
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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
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!
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.
Wasn't the PET the computer you could POKE a certain memory location with to get it to catch fire or something?
Good for you. In my personal experience, the game is fun for about 1% more time, after finding cheats, etc. It's pretty much trivia at that point. A good game design (and this is a real area for discussion) keeps the game interesting for a very long time, wheras I'm under the impression that "cheat codes" and other specials are part of the product now, and expected.
Imagine your friends dismay, while playing a board game, such as Monopoly, revealing you found a remarkable cheat code for the game, which, if you wiggle your ears and stand your playing piece upside-down, you get Boardwalk and Park Place. It'll actually become an entirely different game. Interesting, perhaps in ways yet to be uncovered (as in finding your friends are as good at finding hidden cheat codes as you or showing you the door), but is the new game really fun, or is it the Discovery that's really the fun and interesting part?
NetHack, arguably one of the most engrossing first person games ever, was a blast while learning how it worked. Less so when I found the massive cheat code list on the internet. Wish I hadn't, there's a lesson there somewhere.
FWIW, I've been working on the old Scorch game lately and toying with putting out my own version, with considerable changes in gameplay, designed for a very long overall game. We'll see how it goes with coding among other holiday activities over the next few weeks. Don't expect any cheat codes ;)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hence the term: Spoiled.
Life, like games, without challenges, ceases to be interesting.
While playing Wolfenstein 3D I got to a floor where there was a maze with guards stationed at certain intersections. It was possible to walk through the maze without being seen, but I usually went for the direct approach, going to a hidden weapons, ammo, and medical stash and just duking it out. With considerable number of guards coming running at the sound of gunfire it took a few tries to find a way to survive the gun battle, but I did and that was more rewarding than slipping quietly through the maze.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://www.warrenrobinett.com/adventure/
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.