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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.
Why don't they simply press up-down-up-down-left-right-A-B and get themselves infinite cash?
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...
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.
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."
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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)
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...
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.
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
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