5 ms·
You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow
- Founderarcstone 13d agoOne of the best games ever made very cool you made this.
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- sph 13d agoYet another downside of using ‘safe’ languages. You don’t get cool stuff like this.
- surgical_fire 13d agoNuclear Gandhi would never have been a thing.
- ufo 13d agoNuclear Gandhi is an urban legend. Turns out there was no such bug in Civ 1.
- tialaramex 13d agoAnd in more recent games where there is Nuclear Gandhi it's because of that legend. If you write a game in a decent language where such a thing won't happen by mistake you can still have it be present on purpose and in some cases that even fits the game's lore. Random glitches are confusing and bad. Falling off the world in Blue Prince due to collision bugs is annoying for example. However "glitches" which are intended behaviour are fun. I've enjoyed every time I saw somebody get that note and gift from Mrs Babbage because they drafted that particular room in that particular place and it had an effect which in hindsight they now realise was both foreseeable and regrettable...
- surgical_fire 13d agoI know. The urban legend would still not be a thing.
- sph 13d agoIt would’ve been debunked by Snopes on day 1: “impossible, the game is written in Rust” (I can’t think of one language that defaults to saturating integers)
- CodesInChaos 13d agoMany safe languages still suffer from integer overflows. For example in Rust and C# you can pick between an exception being thrown, or silent wrapping when an overflow happens.
- vhcr 13d agoOr using the saturating methods.
- bigstrat2003 13d agoI don't think that's suffering at that point. The programmer has made an explicit decision to let things overflow, so he should be prepared to handle that possibility. It's not like a language where overflow happens silently without warning.
- JoshTriplett 13d agoI remember the days of DOS and getting a direct pointer to video memory. And I've enjoyed the long history of video game exploits and even arbitrary code execution. But at the same time, I'm also glad that era is over. The same bugs that help you jailbreak a phone can also be the bugs that help you gain illicit access to one.
- rep_lodsb 13d agoIllicit access as defined by Google / Apple? If the three letter agencies are interested in you, they don't need to exploit any bugs, they can just demand access from those two companies, and get it. To the device that you carry in your pocket 24/7, with GPS, microphone and camera. In the days of DOS, the BIOS would load the first sector of a floppy disk or hard drive into memory and transfer control to it. You could replace that sector, and not a single line of code that you didn't write yourself would be executed after that. THIS is how it should be on a PERSONAL computer. A virus could do the same, of course, and gain full control of the machine, but that is not an argument against giving control to the user. You could blame DOS for not intercepting attempts to rewrite the boot sector and asking the user for consent, but completely preventing something like this in the name of security would be even worse! Imagine if back then, there was a "secure boot" mechanism so that only a boot sector with Microsoft's cryptographic signature was allowed, and that boot sector code would in turn verify everything loaded afterwards. Linux wouldn't exist. So, neither would Android, but the situation would be much the same as it is now, only with Microsoft Phone OS instead -- and absolutely no concept of how it could be different, of a computing device controlled by its user instead of a giant corporation.
- zdragnar 13d agoYou aren't arguing for jailbreaks, you are arguing for the phone to be in the user's full control. Ideally, ios and Android would be secure enough that no jailbreaks are possible, but open enough to allow the user to replace the OS with one of their choosing. Having it locked down and then resorting to exploiting loopholes is the worst of both worlds.
- JoshTriplett 13d ago
- nubinetwork 13d agoThe elixir glitch works on a lot of bosses...
- shusaku 13d agoI feel like this is particularly amusing though because as I understand it this boss is not in the original game. So on a DS which is so powerful you should never have glitches due to such technical limitations, the developers flew insanely close to the sun.
- falsaberN1 13d agoI don't want Chrono Cross-contamination in my trigger, thanks. Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior. (The thing with FATE and Robo, the Porre thing, the fate of Crono and co., it's a terrible fanfic made canon). Trigger only worked because of Toriyama gathering the all-star staff (look up the interview with Torishima giving the details). Cross was out of his hands and it shows.
- debo_ 13d agoI loved trigger, got to play it on release. I loved Cross even more. I played that one about 5 years after its release. Cross has this underlying sense of menace beneath the idyllic (and wondrous) atmosphere of the archipelago. I think it's incredible. Personally I don't care much about stories in games. Most of them are awful anyways. I really gravitate towards atmosphere, and Cross has that in spades.
- noodletheworld 13d agoYou can downvote the parent post all you like, but… > Personally I don't care much about stories in games I cant relate to this. Chrono trigger is a game I love because of the great story. If you’re playing rpgs and you don't care about the story or characters… I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages? No idea. Chrono cross left no impression on me. I agree with the parent post.
- SmasherEpilepti 13d ago> I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages? I think you were intending for novels, but poetry books typically don't really have much in the way of "story", just aesthetics. Even for novels, there are many that I primarily appreciate the prose. I love everything about the Kingkiller Chronicle books, but the prose itself is quite pleasant in isolation, and I could probably appreciate the books even if the story and worldbuilding weren't good. Plenty of RPGs don't have much in the way of story. The story of the first Final Fantasy is nearly absent. Same with the first Diablo, and most roguelikes. Obviously, you can enjoy an RPG without caring for the story or characters, because the main point the vast majority of games is to play them.
- acbart 13d agoThere's a live music concert for Chrono Trigger playing right now. That game had one of the best soundtracks of all time.
- ramesh31 13d ago>"That game had one of the best soundtracks of all time." Agreed, there's just something really special about it. You may appreciate these guys, I've had their playlist on repeat for years while working: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p636Rw_L3XU&list=PL1FBFF9D52E759BCF&index=4&pp=iAQB8AUB&ra=m https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p636Rw_L3XU&list=PL1FBFF9D52E7...
- tfigueroa 13d ago100%, really a fantastic soundtrack - still gives me chills. Thank you for sharing this - here’s what I’ve had on my playlist recently: https://youtu.be/zWeGxKsPXZ4 https://youtu.be/zWeGxKsPXZ4
- ihsw 13d agoYou might like Chrono Symphonic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JQxH77NWEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JQxH77NWEQ OCReMix is quite good for this.
- lucgray 13d agoI love this jazz arrangement https://open.spotify.com/album/4NtHhdEp0nCFLz3SwoM4QB?si=rUVtGhBoQEKe8WLWCLR6nQ https://open.spotify.com/album/4NtHhdEp0nCFLz3SwoM4QB?si=rUV... And despite being trigger/cross love this one as well https://open.spotify.com/album/7izJQDtszjo9DbOVEMsvEj?si=HnNVW48DQZerd1DOOVX0Kg https://open.spotify.com/album/7izJQDtszjo9DbOVEMsvEj?si=HnN... Hard for me to listen to the last one without getting a little emotional, something about the lyrics and simple piano accompaniment
- matheusmoreira 13d agoThe other OCRemix albums are highly recommended too, especially the early ones.
- mitxela 13d agoDeshittified link: https://breezewiki.com/chrono/wiki/Dream_Devourer https://breezewiki.com/chrono/wiki/Dream_Devourer
- thevinter 13d agoWhile I agree that fandom is shit - the link you shared doesn't contain any mentions about int overflow
- handoflixue 13d agoIt's buried at the bottom of Boss Battle Strategy: "Since the Dream Devourer has 32000 HP, which is close to the signed 16-bit integer limit, it is actually possible to defeat it by healing it. By using powerful magic that it absorbs during its second phase, it can be (temporarily) healed past 32767 HP, which overflows the counter and makes its HP go negative."
- thevinter 13d agoThat part is not on breezewiki.com, is it?
- seam_carver 13d agoIn Fire Emblem 3 Houses, the final boss of the Azure route has 199 HP and is standing on a 60 HP heal tile. If you deal 3 damage, it goes to 196. 196+60=256. This overflows to zero and you win.
- PlunderBunny 13d agoI figured out that, in the early versions of Realmz for the Mac, there was an enchanted item (a helm?) that added a few points to the wearer’s stats when equipped, but when removed it took away more than it added (i.e. left you worse off). It only took a few seconds for my programmer brain to start me furiously equipping and then un-equipping it, and sure enough, when that stat went to -127, one more equip-and-unequip was sufficient to give me a +128 bonus for that stat. I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.
- LoganDark 13d agoI would figure the reason was because calculating it based on your inventory every time it's needed would've been expensive, so the developers decided to cache it, but instead of recalculating it from scratch when there's a stat change, they decided to try updating it incrementally, but I guess also imperatively. A string of mistakes has to happen to lead to such a situation but it doesn't seem super unnatural to me.
- Nition 13d agoI wonder if it was percentage based. That'd be one of the easiest mistakes to make. - Player has a stat of 100 - Wears "+10%" helm - Player has a stat of 110 - Removes helm, game subtracts 10% - Player has a stat of 99 Actually, now that I think about it more, that wouldn't work as described above because once your stat got close to zero you'd enter a kind of Zeno's Paradox situation.
- chii 13d agoit's more likely that the stat for equipping is calculated differently to when unequipping (ala, "same" code in two different places, and one got modified at some point and forgot about the other).
- thaumasiotes 13d ago> I wonder if it was percentage based. That'd be one of the easiest mistakes to make. How would that be one of the easiest mistakes to make? There are no operations for working with percentages, nor is it a thing you'd want to do. To make that helm work as you describe, you'd need to multiply the stat by 1.1 when equipping the helm and then by 0.9 when deequipping it. But at that point you've lost any justification for making the mistake; those are just two random numbers that don't cancel each other out. It's not like you're adding a number in one place and then erroneously subtracting that same number somewhere else. (Also, these are very strange multipliers to use this way, because they can never produce exact results. You're bound to see rounding errors if you insist on update-when-equipping and update-when-deequipping instead of recalculate-stats-when-equipment-changes.)
- anon_cow1111 13d agoI think it could be an unpopular opinion, but I like seeing these completely stupid link-to-a-wiki with no context whatsoever posts. Things that force you to actually RTFA of some obscure bit of tech trivia feel a little bit more like how using the internet used to be all those years ago. (I still need to finish the FoE romhack though)
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- a1o 13d agoThis boss doesn’t exist in the SNES version right? I don’t remember it.
- jjice 13d agoNope, just in the 2010(ish) DS version and later.
- SatvikBeri 13d agoSimilarly, you can defeat the Egg Dragon superboss in Lufia 2 by healing before attacking: it starts with 65,535 HP.
- avaer 13d agoParallel rabbit holes if you like this stuff: - in Pokemon gen 1 you can wrap your stats back to zero by buffing them too much - In FF7 you can overflow the damage calculation to kill Ruby in one hit - Mario 64 has a mountain of usable glitches; "parallel universes" let you skip collisions at high speeds - GTA 3/VC/SA have crazy mission/wrong warp corruptions involving parallel game simulations - NES Mario can be corrupted to execute arbitrary code in TAS - OOT can be heap-corrupted so badly you can write a loader for an entire DLC via controller ("triforce%", my choice for most insane controller based hack of a game)
- matheusmoreira 13d ago> NES Mario can be corrupted to execute arbitrary code in TAS Pokémon, too! https://tasvideos.org/3358M https://tasvideos.org/3358M https://youtu.be/zZCqoHHtovQ https://youtu.be/zZCqoHHtovQ
- christophilus 13d agoA friend of mine and I played Secret of Mana until our money overflowed the bounds of an int (or whatever was backing it. It evidently caused save game corruption, and that was the end of our epic run.
- lawik 13d agoThat is a way cooler end. I soent a lot of time grinding up the levels on the spells to get the extra cool effects that would happen more frequently as your spell level approached 9. Though it would never pass 8:99 if I recall correctly. I lent the game to a friend. His kid brother overwrote every save file with one called Mnupll. Love the game. Never redid that. Would have liked to max out weapons because I think you could grind for orbs in the final fort.
- Ndymium 13d agoA classic way of getting endless money in Transport Tycoon was to build a tunnel going from one edge of the map to another. The money counter would overflow and you'd get enough money to last you a lifetime. As kids we didn't know why this would happen, we just knew that it did and used it every game.
- nomilk 13d agoI recall my friend's older brother and his friends all loving chronotrigger some 3.5 decades ago. Is it worth playing today? (I don't have any gaming consoles, and use macOS) (I've never played an RPG, except for Disk 1 of the original Final Fantasy VII, which I really enjoyed).
- Root_Denied 13d agoI'd say it's still very worth playing. It has a lot of tropes that future games took inspiration from, and it's art style is iconic (in part because the character designer and art direct was Akira Toriyama, of Dragonball fame). If nothing else the soundtrack will grab you by the ears and draw you in. I've seen people bounce off of it, no shame if that happens - in typical JRPG fashion of the time it came out it's involved (there's some non-intuitive progression steps) and takes about 20-30 hours to complete. There's a DS version which I can't speak to since I've only played the original SNES version, but I understand it adds some additional content that's not required for the story.
- peheje 13d agoAvailable in play store on Android also. Cheap
- cheesecakegood 12d agoAdditionally romhacks exist assuming you own the original game, which layer some quality of life tweaks on top! For the SNES version at least.
- plastic-enjoyer 13d agoYes. It is one of the most polished JRPGs, and there are no random encounters or grinding. The game can be played through in 24 hours, with optional side quests.
- nubinetwork 13d agoI play it on average once a year, the full 6h playthrough.
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- taurath 13d agoWhat a terribly enshittified website. Probably took all its content from free community members too
- a96 12d agoYes, that's the MO of fandom.com
- whizzter 13d agoReminded me of SNES Shadowrun, don't remember if my English skills were weak or what the cause of me misunderstanding it was but when you encountered the Jester in the game, you're supposed to shoot him until you get a chance for a conversation and saying his name completes that bossfight. However, I missed that this part was the key and after a bunch of deaths I went on to level up my character past what the developers had probably intended at that stage of the game and subsequently managed to kill the Jester (he was strong enough that it was hard even when fully powered up). Killing him probably lacked proper codepaths so the game crashed/blacked out and wiped the savegame forcing me to start over (quite an unusual thing to see in a SNES game).
- torlok 13d agoFandom Wiki leaves 5 lines of readable text on my iPhone after about 3 seconds of loading.
- MisterTea 12d agoIt's an ad ridden sewer. The final straw was disabling comment visibility to only those who are logged in. I used that site a bunch for Kenshi and the comments were a trove of information. No more. I refuse to make an account on that visual nightmare.
- xp84 12d agoAlways replace “fandom” with “breezewiki” in the url. It’ll take you to a de-crapified version, and also check for the existence of a real wiki separate from fandom and link to that: https://breezewiki.com/chrono/wiki/Dream_Devourer https://breezewiki.com/chrono/wiki/Dream_Devourer They have a chrome extension too, to do this for you automatically.
- hightrix 12d agoFandom and fextralife are the two “wiki” providers that do this. It’s best to exclude them both from all search results. Fextralife is even worse as it autoplays a twitch steam.
- abustamam 12d agoKinda reminds me of Gandhi urban legend in Civilization, where his "peacefulness" was so low that if it got lower he became a war monger. I thought it was true until I looked it up for this comment. Still, funny stuff! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
- scaphandre 12d agoIn the soccer management game USM98, there was a textbox to input the numbers the wages you could offer to players and coaching staff. This was sensibly limited to positive integers in $native_currency. If I entered 99999999999999, I would get something close to £32,000 per week, suggesting they were using a signed 16-bit int. There was also a button to quickly offer an employee a new 'improved' contract, with something like 1.05x their existing pay. That made it pretty easy to make a lot of money quickly :D https://youtu.be/_gN3SoIuJ1s?t=512 https://youtu.be/_gN3SoIuJ1s?t=512