Zelda: Link's Awakening: Kennel Glitch | Hacker News Reader

Zelda: Link's Awakening: Kennel Glitch

artemis251.fobby.net

170 pointsIvoah44 comments

Back in 1993 when this was released, in the pre gamefaqs era, I found a glitch where pausing the game while transitioning to then next screen would warp you all the way to the same position on the next screen. E.g. Leave screen on the left side, appear on next screen all the way to the left instead of the right side of the screen. This allowed you to break the game in all sorts of fun ways :)

I assume the internets have known about that glitch for a long time but it was really fun to feel like I had some secret trick as a kid that no one else had found.

Same here! :)

I first assumed this article was about that glitch, but apparently that one is known as "the Select Glitch" (because you press the select button to pause / open the map).

Yeah, I remember discovering the select glitch too.

One other thing, that wasn't a glitch but was a hidden feature, if you equipped the bow and arrow and bombs at the same time you could make arrows that exploded on impact. Oh and the thing where you could steal from the shop, I don't remember how I found out about that, probably from a friend showing me.

> Oh and the thing where you could steal from the shop,

But if you do that they call you THIEF… :-( The same happens if you hit a chicken so many times its buddies come and take revenge on you.

>"But if you do that they call you THIEF… :-( "

Why the frowny face? The title of THIEF is deserved!

>"The same happens if you hit a chicken so many times its buddies come and take revenge on you."

Ah yeah, forgot about the chicken revenge thing! Does your name change after that too? IIRC the chicken revenge thing happens in other Zelda games as well, I believe I saw it in Ocarina Of Time at least.

In the french version of the game, my name changes after the chicken revenge: VOYOU, they call you.

Incidentally, they call you VOYOU after you steal something all the same. Though calling you THIEF for hen-slaughter seems a bit off…

That was actually mentioned in Nintendo Power volume 50, it's one of the most well-known and easy-to-perform video game glitches.

They also mentioned the Zelda 2 glitch where you could wrong-warp by jumping off the top of the screen and using the Fairy spell. You could get into a weird town that didn't exist, and if you left you were stuck in the middle of the ocean.

Oh good grief, that happened to me by accident once and I had no idea what was going on. I think I had to restart the game! Thank you for clearing up this mystery for eight-year-old me.

NBD, but I had Nintendo Power issue #1. It came because we registered the original NES super system bought from Sears. We were some lucky kids.

Reminded me of "Glitch City" in the original pokemon games.

https://youtu.be/86VvAY-Rhzo

I remember having so much trouble replicating that glitch when I was a kid.

It's possible you had the DX (GBC) version, which patched the glitch.

On a similar note...

I remember discovering the Super Mario Bros 1 up glitch (just rather randomly, wasn't glitch-hunting) a few weeks after getting my NES/SMB and teaching everyone I knew how to do it.

I'm sure many, many people discovered it independently back in the days before the Internet spread this knowledge out nearly instantaneously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUx66ZEDjnQ

You can actually use this glitch for an ending warp to finish it in minutes: http://www.speedrun.com/run/9me9l88z

I was wondering whether that would be brought up - that link is actually to a friend's run, as far as I know he still holds the record for fastest finish of that game, although I don't think he actively tries to defend it anymore.

It still is the world record for Any%, yes. I'm surprised that a speedrun on an emulator is accepted though, but it seems most of the GBC runs are ran on an emulator.

Game capture from a gbc/GBA is not possible, without using a game boy player for the GameCube - hence the emulator is used so they can actually capture the run. Speedrun.com distributes the allowed emulators on their site so everyone is on a level playing field.

Am I the only one who read the title as "Kernel Glitch"?

No, you are not. I also stumbled into Kennel Gulch before I actually figured out how to read again.

That is exactly what I thought it said until I just read your post -=o|

No. I did too.

No, and I took it a step further by thinking "There's no operating system kernel on original Game Boy games - they are bare metal with an executive loop!"

Video showing "worlds" 0-2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjOO2pkN9KU

> This glitch can permanently ruin a game file and, in the extreme case, possibly even erase or damage your cartridge.

How can this glitch erase the ROM in a cartridge?

I doubt it's implying that. It's maybe possible that you could glitch the save data in a way that the game would crash or misbehave just from trying to read it, though, with no way to fix it short of discharging the save data somehow (I don't recall if gameboy games used battery backup or some kind of flash).

Game Boy games used a CR2016 or (later on) a CR2025 battery to maintain save data.

These are soldered in place, which makes replacing batteries rather annoying, though they're replaceable if you put in the effort.

Unfortunately that trend didn't continue with the GBA, whose games tended to use semi-volatile memory chips that will die after enough time or read/writes. Many of my old GBA games won't hold a save longer than a day or two anymore, without any viable way to repair them. Too bad, so sad.

But hey on the bright side emulators for GBA and GBC are seemingly perfect and run on anything. If someone makes a Gameboy advance micro clone for emulators that is decent I would buy that in a heartbeat.

If you already have a GBA Micro, or other GBA, you can just get a Everdrive GBA: http://krikzz.com/store/home/42-everdrive-gba-x5.html

IIRC many of them use SPI flash or EEPROM, which you should just be able to pop off and replace with a similar part.

I actually did replace the battery of a zelda cartridge on GameBoy when I was a kid. The battery wasn't even the right size and barely fitted inside it, so I had to use some tape to hold it together.

That day my older brother treated me like a genius. (That day only)

It's actually really easy to accidentally erase Link's Awakening save data by just flipping the power switch off and on too quickly (I have done this a few times). So I presume this would fix a glitched save.

> It's maybe possible that you could glitch the save data in a way that the game would crash or misbehave just from trying to read it, though

Exactly. Most console games tend to treat saved game data as non-hostile, because they assume that only their own code will write it; buggy loaders that crash on corrupted data are not uncommon. (This has changed with more recent consoles, after multiple cases of saved game exploits used for jailbreaking; see, for instance, http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Category:Homebrew_exploits .) Memory-corruption bugs in games can overwrite saved games in ways that lead to such issues.

Found accidentally another glitch near the end of game, in the dungeon where you carry a big heavy metal ball you can throw around.

It ended up stuck on a wall, completely glitching the game. Reloading didn't help. My save was dead. I was devastated at the time :)

I got all the way to the end where you are supposed to open the egg, did the thing to open the egg, and it didn't open. I spent days going back through every dungeon to try to trigger it but never could. I couldn't bring myself to replay the game and hope it worked this time.

I got the game the same year it came out and still have never beaten it because of that. Sounds like it was just a super glitchy game.

I played links awakening last year, and I hit this glitch by accident. I just turned my gameboy off though.

Is there any similar writeups of the fishing glitch where you get the fisherman to sit on the tree and then go fishing? That's one of the two I found as a kid. The other gave me some super item but I never could recreate it.

Didn't know about the fishing glitch, take it you mean this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocEh8PzoUOg

Vaguely related, I'm surprised Nintendo doesn't update the graphics on these games and re-release them for iOS, Switch, etc

Does anyone know if this works on virtual console?

I think most emulators have to simulate all the hardware, including the glitches as some game rely on them in order to work.

I wouldn't be surprise if most glitches discovered were also working on an emulator.

The useful features of hardware are emulated. The quirky edge cases, unused opcodes, and more esoteric features are often left out.

The programming oversights in the game logic will remain, but the behavior can sometimes vary when you get to the glitches that play around with memory in a way that they normally wouldn't.

I'd only add that for the GB there really aren't tons of quirky edges cases that you can avoid handling. The GB was around in the time when developers pretty much abused the hardware to get what they wanted, and the GB doesn't have tons of logic to emulate in the first place. That said, what you've described is 100% true about more advanced emulators.

I would assume so. I've written a simple GB emulator and this glitch worked on it, and mine isn't nearly as true to the hardware as Nintendo's VC emulator is.

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