Slashdot Mirror
Game Boy Zelda Comes With Source, Sort Of
Jamie found a fun story about a 90s Zelda Game Boy ROM that shipped with the source code- not so much on purpose, but more because the linker padded out the last meg of ROM with random memory contents, which happened to include game source code.
Or you could, you know, manage your memory properly.
Am I missing some reason that you can't just pad with 0s or 1s? Why bother with random data?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
"X-Men - Wolverine's Rage" (MD5: b1729716baaea01d4baa795db31800b0), which contains Windows 9x registry keys and INF files, "Mortal Kombat 4 (MD5: 7311f937a542baadf113e9115158cde3), in which you can find some small source fragments, "Gift" (MD5: e6a51088c8fea7980649064bd3a9f9ff), which will tell you that the developers had some Game Boy emulators installed on their system, or the "BIT-MANAGERS" games "Spirou" (MD5:5aa012cf540a5267d6adea6659764441, Turbo C, MAP file, source) and "TinTin in Tibet" (Game Boy Color version, MD5: 8150a3978211939d367f48ffcd49f979), which, amongst other things, contains references to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance (!) SDK ("C:\Cygnus\thumbelf-000512\H-i686-cygwin32\lib\gcc-lib\thumb-elf\2.9-arm-000512, "/tantor/build/nintendo/arm-000512/i686-cygwin32/src/newlib/libc/stdio/stdio.c").
The term DOSsed is sufficient.
it was filled with things in ram, most likely because malloc was used to get the ram needed to link the image, and they didn't bother to clear it, calloc would have cleared it for them
> This emulation craze is fairly recent.
What? I really mean it what?
I remeber running sonic (megadrive) on a low end pentium (133) back in the day, albeit with no sound.
I also remeber using various earlier emulators on my amiga before that (speccy and such).
Maybe you have a differnet definition of recent than me though.
+----------------- | What is the question!
I think you're giving MS-DOS too much credit when it comes to memory management. Basically, it was single-tasking so you could just use whatever memory you wanted to.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
"Maybe you have a differnet definition of recent than me though."
No, he just apparently has a different definition of "craze" to you. Being the only person in your state to emulate a megadrive on a low-end Pentium without sound doesn't mean that's when the emulation craze started. That was just you pushing the boundaries of what was available at the time. The average gamer wouldn't have understood you back then if you said the word "emulation" to them.
Only in recent years have so many people been emulating earlier consoles and arcade games on their home PCs, with pretty faithful representation of the original experience.
It's not even zeroed.. it doesn't exist.
When you first malloc memory you get a page of memory that's set copy on write and backed from a special page in memory with nothing but zeroes in it. It's only when you first use the memory that physical memory is actually allocated.
I remember a big craze back when I was in highschool. About 10 years ago. Almost all the kids were into it. We played mostly NES and Gameboy games. I remember Pokemon being a huge hit. I actually think it was more popular back then than it is now. You could play games on your computer that were only 1 generation behind the current technology. Now the emulation hasn't really kept up with the advancing consoles. The bests emulators you can find are Playstation and N64, which are very old systems by today's standards.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.