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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.

7 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Avoiding the malloc() by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Or you could, you know, manage your memory properly.

  2. Partially Not Not true by hxnwix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now the site is Wordpressed When slashdot brings down a site running Apache, we call it slashdotting, not Apache-ing. When slashdot brings down a site running wordpress, we call it slashdotting, not wordpressing.

    the original doesn't have any of the code in question Are the other games mentioned also trainered?

    "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").
  3. Re:Avoiding the malloc() by simcop2387 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  4. Re:Avoiding the malloc() by Carrot007 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > 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.

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  5. Re:Malloc clears? by mikael_j · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

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    Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
  6. Re:Avoiding the malloc() by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  7. Re:Malloc clears? by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.