3 ms·

More like it's a bug that worked on the real console so they didn't ever notice it.

• mastax 10y ago
  Yeah this seems like null pointer dereference that happened to work fine so it was never found.
  • loeg 10y ago
    Well, and that NULL was a valid memory location on this platform. It's actually quite nice to have virtual memory with NULL unmapped!
    • masklinn 10y ago
      Technically, there's no requirement (or guarantee) that NULL is the address 0, there have been multiple architectures with non-zero NULL. And every architecture out there allows accessing physical address 0 (OS may map logical address 0 to be unaccessible). So they could well have knowingly decided to load address 0.
    • hrydgard 10y ago
      NULL is actually only a valid memory location from the view of the GPU on this platform, not the CPU, and yeah, this is very likely to simply be an uncaught bug. Traditional game console architectures don't usually have a lot of memory protection for the GPU - in fact, both the 360 and the 3DS were at various points in times hacked by subverting the GPU to do writes to global memory.
      • to3m 10y ago
        This is going back a few years now, but I'm pretty sure NULL was valid to read from the Wii's CPU (though not write, I don't think). It was where the product code was stored, as I recall - so every now and again you'd find some junk in some random string, starting with your title's product code, and it would be time to track down another missing NULL check...