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.

Comments

Deja Vu

[hlomas]

News Post Comes With Article, Sort Of

Not true

[Megane]

Now the site is Wordpressed (like Slashdotting, only the other way around) and you can't get to it, but one of the last posts before it died pointed out that this was from a trainered version. That's where someone adds cheat code to a ROM. As it turns out, the original doesn't have any of the code in question. Dissassembling for the purpose of adding cheats is a completely sensible explanation of the code that was found.

The moral of the story? Start with a known clean dump (look for the "[!]" tag) before assuming that the introns were in the original game.

Re:Not true

[stoolpigeon]

well he did say it was from digg- no need to be redundant.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[simcop2387]

thats what calloc is for, it'll clear it for you, malloc just gets it.

It happens

[Diomidis Spinellis]

This used to happen more often than one would expect. In the 1980s I found portions of Ashton Tate's Framework II source code in "blank" sectors of floppy disks containing printer drivers. Those were the days where:

• each application came with its own display and printer drivers,
• people were using floppy disks to move around source code, and, worse,
• other people had enough free time to trawl "blank" sectors for interesting tidbits.

Re:It happens

[PCM2]

A company I worked for once participated in the beta test program for Adobe Illustrator ... I think it was version 7. We were primarily a Mac shop, so we were using the Mac versions of the CD-ROMs they sent us. One build they sent us had a funny property... when you put the CD-ROM in the drive, the Trash can would turn full. Oh but wait -- before you old Mac people start going "ho ho ho," there wasn't actually anything important in the Trash can. But that's when I noticed that a couple of extra folders would appear on the desktop, too. ;-) In one of those was about 340MB of source code for Adobe Illustrator, Dimensions, Streamline and some other stuff.

About four days after we received this particular build (and I had noticed its interesting attributes) I got a call from Adobe:

Adobe: There are problems with the latest build of Illustrator. We need to recall those CD-ROMs immediately.

Me: Gosh ... sounds bad. Problems?

Adobe: Yes. We will be sending you a prepaid FedEx return envelope. It's extremely important that you return those discs to us right away.

Me: I see. Oh, my. Look ... can you tell me what the problem is? It's not a virus, is it?

Adobe: I can't really say. It's a technical issue. But if you've installed Build 378468434 on any of your equipment, you should un-install it right away.

Me: Oh, dear. Oh, dear oh dear. I will do so, ma'am, immediately. It ... it wouldn't damage any of our systems, would it?

Adobe: Um... you should be OK. But, just to be on the safe side you should be sure to uninstall it from any of your machines and make sure you send those CDs back to us right away.

Me: Yes ma'am, will do.

Adobe: Thanks, have a nice day.

Me: (pushes eject button on CD-R burner, grabs a Sharpie)

Re:Whoops...

[mouse_8b]

Awesome. :) This must be why they always say not to code whilst drunk. Who says that? They should be shot.

Not too uncommon

[0123456]

One of the 'Elite' sequels was shipped with a swap file on the CD-ROM. Opening that swap file with a text editor showed it included much of the C code for the game, which presumably must have been swapped out while they were compiling at some point and then copied to the CD by mistake.

From what I remember the installer copied the swap file to the hard disk, but the first patch either deleted it or zeroed it :).

Re:Not too uncommon

[vranash]

Having that game (Which was actually Bethesda's Sea Dogs 2 rebadged before release.) It had a *TON* of files with it, although I think they were lua-scripts or something, not actual c-code. Regardless they had a lot of options available in them for modifying core components of the game. You could change your characters starting stats, name, ship type, etc. Given the somewhat frustrating land-side swordplay, I ended up having more fun tweaking the game than playing it.

Having reminded me, I may have to dig it out sometime soon and see what else it's got going.

There's more

[Kayamon]

Golden Axe 2 (the arcade ROM) has a good chunk of it's source code contained in there too, including the source for it's security routine (oh the hilarity...)

And the PAL version of ICO (PS2) had an objdump of the entire ELF on the disc, which is basically a disassembly with full symbol information.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[billcopc]

When you're a ROM developer, you don't think in such terms. It's all about mapping this and interleaving that.

Rather than writing the extra few lines to calculate the padding required, set up a 0-filled buffer and truncate the first (or last) buffer, rounding up the fwrite call to 2mb requires 0 extra lines.

Besides, they don't expect many people to actually look at the ROM code. This emulation craze is fairly recent.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Carrot007]

> 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.

Does anyone else...

[achenaar]

find it amusing that this happened because of the Link-er.
I can't be the only one...
Can I?

I'll get me coat.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

FoxPro

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted anonymously to hide my shame of working with visual FoxPro.

FoxPro, I discovered after shipping our product for 2 years, didn't really compile anything when you made an .exe It just included a runtime and the source code in the .exe file. If you looked at it ina hex editor, there was the full source code, complete with comments. Apparently there was an option to scramble the source code. The guy responsible for building the installation didn't do that.

opensource

[Paul_Hindt]

Dude, get this...I downloaded this game, I think it was called Quake 3...well, I started poking around on their website and found all the source code! Crazy huh?