5 ms·
Man, I loved things like the Game Genie and Gameshark. They gave me my earliest understanding of how software runs in memory and the nature of the memory. Was
by ravenstine 6y ago
Man, I loved things like the Game Genie and Gameshark. They gave me my earliest understanding of how software runs in memory and the nature of the memory. Was great to just poke at parts of the memory with it and just see what happens.
I didn't need to be reminded of another reason to hate Nintendo. I think I air my grievances in every HN thread about Nintendo. But this does add to the pile. Around the same time I lost interest in Nintendo, games like Halo became attractive because Bungie explicitly wanted people to mod the PC version of the game. At the time, it was really cool for a game company to embrace the creativity of their players instead of putting a lock in their imaginations like Nintendo wanted.
Nintendo's misguided hatred of memory editors goes beyond just punishing players. They essentially against the nerds who one day might have become inspired to build their games. The only kids I knew who had the Game Genie/Shark were nerds. Average people didn't really have them and being able to "cheat" in the games wasn't really going to ruin their experience.
- minimaxir 6y agoThe Game Genie/Gameshark incidentally scared child-me away from computer science because I didn't understand how the hell they came up with these codes (aside from 99 in hex is 63 and 255 in hex is FF). One Game Shark came with a "how to hack" VHS which came down to "it's easy, just observe which values change in memory when you perform an action, and just freeze that value!". That's one way to get imposter syndrome. The best unintentional introduction to computer science/memory abuse in a video game for me was the Missingno glitch in Pokemon Red/Blue.
- Lammy 6y ago> The best unintentional introduction to computer science/memory abuse in a video game for me was the Missingno glitch in Pokemon Red/Blue. Same for me, as well as forcing wild encounters to be Mew (#151), the Pokémon normally unobtainable outside of Nintendo events. That "0115D8CF" address/value is burned into the same part of my brain as the "FuCK GateWay" WinXP key.
- colordrops 6y agoIf this is what scared you from computer science, then if game genie didn't exist, something else would have scared you.
- minimaxir 6y agoI was scared away from CS many times before I was forced to do it and it turned out I was good at it.
- ficklepickle 6y agoMe too, my friend! Part of me wishes I got into it earlier. But another part of me wouldn't change a thing for fear of messing it up.
- Narishma 6y agoModding games on the PC, with the developer's blessing, was pretty common for a decade or two before Halo came out.
- ravenstine 6y agoThat's true, was just the first example that came to mind since I spent a ton of time modding Halo: Custom Edition back in the day.