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Interesting story. Goes to show you the falacy of writing fault tolerant systems as opposed to writing noisy systems. Had the GBA architects made the device ha

Interesting story. Goes to show you the falacy of writing fault tolerant systems as opposed to writing noisy systems. Had the GBA architects made the device halt on invalid memory rather than return the last thing on the bus and hope everything would be ok this entire class of bug wouldn't exist and the authors of that code likely would've found that bug during production.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> Had the GBA architects made the device halt on invalid memory rather than return the last thing on the bus and hope everything would be ok this entire class of bug wouldn't exist and the authors of that code likely would've found that bug during production. Of course, would it matter if these bugs were found? The games ran fine on real hardware. There’s no maintenance burden either, because updating a gba game is literally impossible.
- ranger207 7y ago
  >updating a gba game is literally impossible. Not quite. The Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire Berry Glitch bug was fixed by connecting to games that had a patch program, such as Pokémon Emerald, the 3rd in the Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald series. https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Berry_glitch https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Berry_glitch
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Huh, cool. Does anyone know how this worked? I know the carts themselves are mostly write-once so the bug and patch must have been related to the save portion or some hardware specific to this cartridge, right?
    - wizzwizz4 7y ago
      I think it just used an arbitrary code execution thing to change the system clock, so that the faulty code was still there, but never failed.
- capableweb 7y ago
  > because updating a gba game is literally impossible Hey now, I'm sure it's not "impossible", you could probably overwrite specific sectors with laser or whatever, but probably had more to do with the distribution, where the economy and environment impact wouldn't make sense.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    I’m pretty sure the carts were quite literally write-once. Lasers would just damage the cart.
zodiac 7y ago
Are they "bugs" from the point of view of the gba designers or the game programmers? I was u der the impression that the game programmers purposely read invalid memory this way in order to prevent emulation
- Narishma 7y ago
  I don't think game developers care about emulation all that much.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> Had the GBA architects made the device halt on invalid memory rather than return the last thing on the bus and hope everything would be ok this entire class of bug wouldn't exist and the authors of that code likely would've found that bug during production. Of course, would it matter if these bugs were found? The games ran fine on real hardware. There’s no maintenance burden either, because updating a gba game is literally impossible.

ranger207 7y ago
>updating a gba game is literally impossible. Not quite. The Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire Berry Glitch bug was fixed by connecting to games that had a patch program, such as Pokémon Emerald, the 3rd in the Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald series. https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Berry_glitch https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Berry_glitch
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Huh, cool. Does anyone know how this worked? I know the carts themselves are mostly write-once so the bug and patch must have been related to the save portion or some hardware specific to this cartridge, right?
  - wizzwizz4 7y ago
    I think it just used an arbitrary code execution thing to change the system clock, so that the faulty code was still there, but never failed.
capableweb 7y ago
> because updating a gba game is literally impossible Hey now, I'm sure it's not "impossible", you could probably overwrite specific sectors with laser or whatever, but probably had more to do with the distribution, where the economy and environment impact wouldn't make sense.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I’m pretty sure the carts were quite literally write-once. Lasers would just damage the cart.

zodiac 7y ago

Are they "bugs" from the point of view of the gba designers or the game programmers? I was u der the impression that the game programmers purposely read invalid memory this way in order to prevent emulation

Narishma 7y ago
I don't think game developers care about emulation all that much.