I saw this person pop up in my recommendations, seems a really interesting channel
I've always heard it was later Genesis cartridges being more prone to randomly crashing, but it turns out it was just to fool Sega QA all along. I've never heard of the game crashing to this screen outside of messing with the cartridge, so I guess it wasn't really necessary.
Oh man, I think Nintendo would've been [I]pissed[/I] if devs could've done things like this on the SNES.
[QUOTE=Alba Meira;52737405]Nintendo would've been [I]pissed[/I] if devs [B]could've[/B][/QUOTE]
Bold part maybe even truer than you realize considering the 65C816 inside the SNES has no exceptions like M68K does.
I actually got the level select for sonic 3d blast on the genesis one by mashing buttons during the startup, got so excited I went to the last level and promptly lost the game. Didn't know how it happened it may have even been because of this cause I certainly didn't do the real code for it.
[QUOTE=EE 20 D0;52737434]Bold part maybe even truer than you realize considering the 65C816 inside the SNES has no exceptions like M68K does.[/QUOTE]
They did do this on the SNES version of Mickey Mania ([URL="https://tcrf.net/Mickey_Mania:_The_Timeless_Adventures_of_Mickey_Mouse_(SNES)"]from TCRF[/URL]). Of course, it'd be for errors that could be detected but don't crash the CPU due to the lack of exceptions.
[QUOTE=GhostSonic;52737448]They did do this on the SNES version of Mickey Mania ([URL="https://tcrf.net/Mickey_Mania:_The_Timeless_Adventures_of_Mickey_Mouse_(SNES)"]from TCRF[/URL]). Of course, it'd be for errors that could be detected but don't crash the CPU due to the lack of exceptions.[/QUOTE]
I was thinking of the likes of the division by zero, bus error, etc exceptions, the most you can do is pray that the CPU executes a BRK instruction that will let you handle any issue inside the NMI before everything goes to hell.
Reminds me of how The New Tetris would give you cheat codes if the game crashed.
[QUOTE=EE 20 D0;52737481]I was thinking of the likes of the division by zero, bus error, etc exceptions, the most you can do is pray that the CPU executes a BRK instruction that will let you handle any issue inside the NMI before everything goes to hell.[/QUOTE]
Yes, I understand this much. I'm assuming SNES Mickey Mania's crash handler only detects certain known errors, since the 65C816 will usually halt or do something else unexpected in the case of something like an invalid instruction. Division by zero wouldn't happen on the CPU anyways due to the lack of a division instruction, a separate I/O device actually handled that on the SNES.
This is another good video showing how they cheated the system.
[video=youtube;cVSM92CBGmc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVSM92CBGmc[/video]
I feel like making crashes warp the player or something is one of those time saving techniques that could really bite you in the ass if your game has a super problematic bug that keeps sending you to level select no matter what, and SEGA won't report on it because it seems intended
Amazing video and channel. Also worth highlighting is the video about how they pulled that first person perspective in Toy Story, it comes with a nice explanation on how they improved performance, with ASM code snippets included.
If there's anything bad to say about their videos, is that I find them a bit too short for my liking. I wish there were more channels like this one.
[QUOTE=DarklytheGreat;52737691]This is another good video showing how they cheated the system.
[video=youtube;cVSM92CBGmc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVSM92CBGmc[/video][/QUOTE]
Here's a version of that video but without the music being so loud
[video=youtube;1lHDsXMwBwk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lHDsXMwBwk[/video]
This is a software engineer's wet dream. Being able to handle errors like this in a clever, humorous, and effective way without getting into trouble.
He also has a super early prototype of Sonic R
[video=youtube;GEl508T02qY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEl508T02qY[/video]
This guy is Jon Burton, the founder of Traveller's Tales. His channel is just incredible if you like this kind of stuff.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
