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Game Boy Zelda Comes With Source, Sort Of

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hate-when-that-happens dept.

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.

5 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. so... by hitmark · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    what can be seen as a life saver om hardrives (that by default, "deleted" files are still there but not part of the file system) can be a troublesome issue in ram?

    oh wait, not zeroing a hardrive can be bad, if one sell of a old one...

    --
    comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
  2. Re:Beatmania Best Hits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

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  3. Did someone forget to show up for work? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    No new story in almost the past eight hours. I realize it's Sunday, but sheesh.

  4. Exposed by WindFish · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Is there a draft? I feel exposed. (See my username.)

  5. The Bible by rice_burners_suck · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    heh heh. That is very, very cool. I wonder if the original game cartridges that shipped in those good ol' days actually contained the source code to the game, and whether or not the folks making the darn thing knew about it.

    All this talk about source code reminds me of a certain theory I once heard relating to the discovery of closed source code. The five books of Moses are the first five books of the Holy Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Some believe that this text, in the original Hebrew, was created 974 generations prior to the creation of our Universe, that it is the blueprint for the Universe (that would be something like source code, I suppose), that the entire purpose of the Universe is to carry out the word of this text, and that it was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai after the exodus from ancient Egypt. It is further believed that this text (the original Hebrew, that is) contains all knowledge. Of course, it doesn't just spell everything out to you in a verbose manner. If it did, it would be a million billion trillion quadrillion zillion googolplexes of chapters long, each chapter comprising about a billion pages, each page printed in a type 1 font on a 8.5 lightyear by 11 lightyear sheet of paper, with margins of 1 nanometer on all sides, single-spaced. Nope. It's terse and encoded in ways that we, as humans, haven't discovered yet. Well, if we'd bother to read the darn thing, we might figure out a thing or two. But that's besides the point. Suffice it to say that, assuming we knew how to decode the information contained therein, we could then access the library of all possible knowledge.

    Now let's talk about a certain operating system produced by an unpopular group I'll call the Borg, for brevity. The entire source code to that system is kept secret by the Borg, undoubtedly because knowledge of it by the wider population would undermine the futility of resistance to assimilation into the Borg collective. Another statement can be made about said source code: It is a subset (and a tiny subset at that) of all knowledge. Well, since the source code to this operating system is a subset of all knowledge, and since all knowledge is, as we've said, contained in the aforementioned five books of Moses, then all you have to do is figure out the encoding, write a program that decompresses this library of all knowledge (we'll call it gunzipmoses), and then simply decompress this source code from the rest of the material. To think that the Borg are so careful to keep their source code secret, yet it could be downloaded from the Bible, is almost as funny as this Zelda thing having its own source code in random padding in the game's image.

    Bet that makes you wanna go out and read the Bible now, doesn't it?

    And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

    - Revelation 22:1