Kef Schecter (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} furrykef) wrote,@ 2009-05-29 00:09:00 |
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Who Watches The Watchm-- / Pac-Man hackin'
I finished reading Watchmen yesterday morning or so. It was another one of those books that makes you go "What the hell did I just read?" at the end. I suppose I can respect it for apparently having changed the industry (I dunno, I wasn't there), but as a work on its own, I think it's kinda... blah. Rorschach was interesting as hell, but the rest was kinda meh. Especially Dr. Manhattan. I guess what happens when you become the world's most powerful man is you become the world's most boring man. Well, if it were real life, it'd be different, of course, but I think this book proves that what's interesting in real life isn't necessarily interesting on the page (or the screen or whatever).
In entirely unrelated news, I've been hacking ports of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man to see if they have endings or kill screens. Here are the ones I hacked:
Pac-Man for NES
Ms. Pac-Man for NES, Namco version (the Tengen version is completely different and has an ending)
Pac-Man as a minigame in Pac-Man 2 for SNES
All three were found to have no ending and no kill screen or other interesting behavior. The game simply continues forever. Ah well. It was funny when I flooded the screen with Pac-Men in the Pac-Man 2 version in an attempt to give myself infinite lives, though. :P
I developed a mildly clever way of testing it. At first I tried making a direct "level skip" code, but I realized that this might not be a reliable way of replicating the game's actual behavior, so I needed a way to get through a lot of levels very quickly. I tried ideas like infinite lives and infinite blue ghost time, which worked pretty well, but I needed to get through the game more quickly. Then finally I hit upon the idea of making the game to go the next level when you eat the first dot (by tricking the game into thinking it's the last dot). Worked like a charm. As a nice bonus, it was also easy to keep track of the level number, since I got 10 points per level (due to eating one dot each time), so when I had 2550 points, that'd be the 256th level.
I tried coming up with a similar trick for the NES version of Mario Bros., but it didn't work. Apparently the game doesn't have a variable containing the number of enemies left to be killed in the level; it figures out when the level is over by some other means. That means I can't hack it to go to the next level merely by killing the first enemy -- at least, not easily. Ah well...
- Kef
I finished reading Watchmen yesterday morning or so. It was another one of those books that makes you go "What the hell did I just read?" at the end. I suppose I can respect it for apparently having changed the industry (I dunno, I wasn't there), but as a work on its own, I think it's kinda... blah. Rorschach was interesting as hell, but the rest was kinda meh. Especially Dr. Manhattan. I guess what happens when you become the world's most powerful man is you become the world's most boring man. Well, if it were real life, it'd be different, of course, but I think this book proves that what's interesting in real life isn't necessarily interesting on the page (or the screen or whatever).
In entirely unrelated news, I've been hacking ports of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man to see if they have endings or kill screens. Here are the ones I hacked:
Pac-Man for NES
Ms. Pac-Man for NES, Namco version (the Tengen version is completely different and has an ending)
Pac-Man as a minigame in Pac-Man 2 for SNES
All three were found to have no ending and no kill screen or other interesting behavior. The game simply continues forever. Ah well. It was funny when I flooded the screen with Pac-Men in the Pac-Man 2 version in an attempt to give myself infinite lives, though. :P
I developed a mildly clever way of testing it. At first I tried making a direct "level skip" code, but I realized that this might not be a reliable way of replicating the game's actual behavior, so I needed a way to get through a lot of levels very quickly. I tried ideas like infinite lives and infinite blue ghost time, which worked pretty well, but I needed to get through the game more quickly. Then finally I hit upon the idea of making the game to go the next level when you eat the first dot (by tricking the game into thinking it's the last dot). Worked like a charm. As a nice bonus, it was also easy to keep track of the level number, since I got 10 points per level (due to eating one dot each time), so when I had 2550 points, that'd be the 256th level.
I tried coming up with a similar trick for the NES version of Mario Bros., but it didn't work. Apparently the game doesn't have a variable containing the number of enemies left to be killed in the level; it figures out when the level is over by some other means. That means I can't hack it to go to the next level merely by killing the first enemy -- at least, not easily. Ah well...
- Kef
