4 ms·

When I was a kid I had a game genie on the NES and Genesis, and a GameShark on the PSX. The Genesis one in particular (well maybe it was the GameShark, memory f

When I was a kid I had a game genie on the NES and Genesis, and a GameShark on the PSX. The Genesis one in particular (well maybe it was the GameShark, memory from that long ago is a bit fuzzy) had a VHS that explained how to make your own cheat codes. There were basically tools in the device that let you snapshot the memory at a specific point in time, then you could do an action, and get essentially a diff between the snapshots. By seeing what values changed, you could figure out what codes to set. The easiest was always infinite lives - snapshot, then kill yourself, and compare what changed. Do it a few times and you'll find the address for the life counter, so you'd set that to 99 and try it out til you got the right code and locked the value at 99. The device really was cool as shit, it was my first introduction into doing anything with computers really, I spent hours creating my own codes as a kid. IIRC cheat codes were often published in popular gaming magazines as well, which is how you found most of them in the world before widespread Internet & PC access. I'd assume that either manufacturers or some other party found common codes manually via similar methods to this.

trafficante 4y ago
Oh man I remember that “make your own GG codes” tutorial tape. My nerdy preteen self spent many hours making my own (usually terrible) cheat codes and bragging about them at the lunch table the next day. Thinking back on it, half the codes were dumb stuff like “turn Sonic red” that probably would have a been a big hit if the modern Sonic fandom existed back in the 90s. I hit my apex a few years later in the n64 era when a few games started to leave in cut content or beta stuff. Gamesharking cut content back into Goldeneye and Banjo Kazooie blew the other kids’ minds back then. Funnily enough, a few years ago I found myself using Cheat Engine to skip a grindy part of a game - and it turned out that the code hunting skills from my childhood transferred perfectly. The exact same techniques from that old VHS tape applied, all wrapped up in a modern GUI.

trafficante 4y ago

Oh man I remember that “make your own GG codes” tutorial tape. My nerdy preteen self spent many hours making my own (usually terrible) cheat codes and bragging about them at the lunch table the next day. Thinking back on it, half the codes were dumb stuff like “turn Sonic red” that probably would have a been a big hit if the modern Sonic fandom existed back in the 90s. I hit my apex a few years later in the n64 era when a few games started to leave in cut content or beta stuff. Gamesharking cut content back into Goldeneye and Banjo Kazooie blew the other kids’ minds back then. Funnily enough, a few years ago I found myself using Cheat Engine to skip a grindy part of a game - and it turned out that the code hunting skills from my childhood transferred perfectly. The exact same techniques from that old VHS tape applied, all wrapped up in a modern GUI.