Castlevania III Password Algorithm | Hacker News Reader

Castlevania III Password Algorithm

meatfighter.com

168 pointskiyanwang31 comments

As a kid, I was dumbfounded that passwords worked on NES games, and Castlevania III was my first introduction to the concept. I still remember staring at the screen not comprehending how putting in this combination of icons would get me my game back. I knew there’s no way they could manually create a password for every game state, but I also had no conception of discrete states, algorithms and hashing, so I literally could not conceive of how this thing in front of me worked.

It is personally satisfying to finally get a complete understanding (even though I long ago understood it conceptually).

Mega Man 2 had a similar password concept, but has less state to calculate: https://retromaggedon.com/index.php/mega-man-2-nes-passwords...

I recall seeing codes in gaming magazines at the time, it was pretty neat being able to "send" this state over the mail.

Faxanadu passwords were the worst. Upper case, lower case, numbers, and some punctuation.

It was, however, able to represent your inventory, location, money, etc. Pretty much a full state in ~24 characters, which I thought was very cool.. but 10-year old me didn't always write down the mantra correctly.

You can read about this system here: http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/...

I still think nothing beats Legend of the Mystical Ninja on Super NES. If you are playing a two player game and obtain a password, it's a full 60 characters you'll have to enter. For comparison, the Guardian Legend was 32 characters (like Faxandu) and Metroid was 24. I never played Magic of Scheherazade; looks like that weights in at 43 characters.

Always wished when passwords approached double digit territory that the devs would have sprung for the battery save.

I always liked how Turbo Grafx did this. For many games if you had the Turbo Booster Plus or CD add on, you could save your game to their memory, otherwise you could use a password.

Yes! Didn’t think someone else would remember LotMN! What’s worse, a few of the characters were easy to mistake for other ones, meaning we’d often enter the full thing (no keyboard, of course) and find it didn’t work, either because we mistranscrobe it on “save” or misread what we had written.

(For a while I thought each save also used up memory and they were getting deleted but that wouldn’t make sense.)

Has anyone reverse engineered the encoding?

another horrible game for passwords? international super star soccer deluxe.

it was horrible[0] for really young me (and my friends/family) to type all the characters.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/djWNEy3.png

The Golden Sun series had a password system to transfer your progress from Golden Sun 1 to Golden Sun 2. If you wanted to transfer everything it was 260 characters. At least you only had to do this once and there was an option to use a link cable instead.

If memory serves, the Golden Sun games gave you a choice of three different levels of detail of data transfer via password.

Correct, back in those days digital photos on a phone were also non-existant, which would have made the many pages to transfer everything so much more convienent.

Golden Sun also had a feature where you could put your GS1 game into sleep (at a specific data transfer point), take out the cartridge, and replace it with GS2, and unsleep, to transfer the data. My 11yr old brain was blown by this!

Yep! Specifically, it can transfer all the important things in 16 characters. The medium option about four times as big to send exact stats rather than just levels; that seems like a lot of work for little benefit. The big one transfers every single item in your inventory.

Willow on the NES was also hilariously long and did a whole lot with 18 character passwords. Underrated game, too

Don't have negative thoughts. Remember your mantra!

Faxanadu passwords were pretty terrible for sure..but hands down the the absolute worst has to be james pond 3 on the genesis. There was like 4 different colours and a bunch of symbols like pieces of cheese and rayguns and stuff. The passwords were 32 characters long.

https://www.andrewnile.co.uk/blog/james-pond-3-fish-code/

Writing those things out was ridiculous. We had pages and pages scattered around with James pond passwords.

River City Ransom passwords were terrible as well. Lower, upper case, accents.

At least those were in a grid. The Faxanadu ones were just one line without spaces.

41 year old me doesn't always write down the mantra correctly.

42 year old me can take a screenshot or a photo!

There was this NES game called "The Magic of Scheherazade" that had what at first looked like a very complex password system, but even as a kid, I was able to figure out how to exploit it to cheat at the game, giving me lots of money or start at higher levels, as it wasn't actually hashed very well.

The game itself is kind of obscure and looks like it's a cheap ripoff of Legend of Zelda (there are several scenes that are actually blatant rips), but it's got a lot of depth and is a lot of fun, even today. There's both over-world-action- and turn-based combat, and a whole time travel component.

IIRC, the password system was so bad that you could create game-puzzle-breaking states with it, to where you were in certain levels without items that you needed to progress.

I have a box of old Nintendo power magazines, the box is covered in Metroid codes.

I had the same experience with wonderboy 3: the dragons trap on the sega master system. Especially because it was a platform rpg where you could have different combinations of armor, weapons and shields.

These old games password systems analysis are always so entertaining and interesting to see... just like a glimpse onto the limitations that were faced by 8-bit console gamedevs in the early days, and the very clever solutions they came up with.

There's this Youtube creator called Bisqwit who has a complete series on cracking old videogame passwords:

* Season 1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLzYGEbdY5nEFQsxzFan...

* Season 2: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLzYGEbdY5mmad-FKPIl...

The best story of NES passwords is of course JUSTIN BAILEY, which just happens to function as a Metroid password with a valid checksum, starting you out with a suitless Samus sprite and a bunch of equipment.

The original NES Metroid game also had a password, but just used letters and numbers IIRC. I remember taking a password for one of the games I was playing and incrementing it to find more valid passwords.

Most of them took me back to the beginning of the game without any upgrades, but some of them put me in significantly later stages of the game without any upgrades.

Reminiscent of the Megaman / Megaman X games from my childhood. Megaman 2's algorithm is available as an example here: https://github.com/kpshek/mm2pwd

  Name         Description
  HELP ME       Start and continue with 10 lives.
  AKAMA         Start in Hard Mode alone.
  OKUDA         Start in Normal Mode with Alucard.

Ahh, back when games had cheat codes... nowadays, you’d have to pay $1.99 to unlock the extra difficulties and lives.

Now days it's more likely to be included in an accessibility menu. Games like Celeste, for instance, have options that might have historically been called "cheats".

>back when games had cheat codes

Quite a coincidence because of the only remaining secret of Nier: Automata (2017) was discovered today, an intentional cheat that lets you jump to the end of the game (the game needs multiple playthroughs to see all endings and reach the real one)

https://twitter.com/manfightdragon/status/134561558810678067...

And it was confirmed by Yoko Taro as well (he previously said there is one thing left the players haven't uncovered yet) https://mobile.twitter.com/yokotaro/status/13457144900677468...

Castlevania 4's password system looks identical from the player's perspective. I wonder how similar the implementations are.

fing awesome

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