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Comment by intellix | Hacker News Reader

Did any other game ever do this on any other console?

The Game Genie for the original NES worked like that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Genie

Unlicensed NES Codemasters carts as well like Dizzy and Micro Machines, that used “plug-thru” to utilise the licence chip from any other official game - https://www.nesworld.com/codemasters.php

No, but there were some third-party devices like the Action Replay like this for cheat (read: real time manipulation of the data coming over the bus) purposes, which I successfully used to corrupt my Pokemon Diamond save file by saving in an out of bounds area, alas

Not quite as technologically involved, but there are some disc based games with novel uses of disc swapping. Monster Rancher is a monster breeding game where you get new monsters via inserting any other disc into the console.

There were a couple of expansion discs for PlayStation 1 games as well, Metal Gear Solid Special Missions and Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 required copies of the base games to operate (at least for the European / PAL releases). I suspect there's little data used from the original game discs except acting as a "key".

I think the Dreamcast Pop'n'music (Japan only) games might've had expansion discs as well? Not sure about that one.

I want to say Shenmue on the Dreamcast had run-of-the-mill multi-disc for different chapters _and_ a special disc with internet options.

The discs I was talking about were sold separately, not just multi disc games. Although Shenmue having what is basically a "bonus features" disc in the package is pretty unique (doesn't Shenmue II have some bonus stuff on Disc 4 as well? I think the Saturn Shenmue prototype video is on that disc?).

I know the Playstation 2 did -- Persona 3 for example, in Japan, had its expansion content released as a separate disc. (I think there was also a version released that was both the base game AND the expansion content)

Not that I am aware of. There was talk about this being a potential thing on N64 with Banjo and Tooie but it never came to be.

It's actually fully functional in Banjo-Kazooie, it wasn't until Donkey Kong 64 that Rare was told to remove it from the game. The game is constantly writing to a certain region of memory with information about which hidden locations are unlocked, then on the flipside when the game boots it checks RAM to see if the special data is there, then unlocks the locations. It doesn't actually work by hot swapping, it relies on the fact that the RAM is preserved for a certain amount of time after shutting the console off.

I realized recently that you could actually test this -- with a sufficiently old N64 console, and two copies of Banjo Kazooie, you could use the cheat codes to unlock the hidden locations on one game, then swap over to the second copy. Theoretically, that should unlock them without having to use the cheat codes.

If I was a bit more motivated to spend the money, I'd try it myself and make a Youtube video about it!

Reference: https://www.raregamer.co.uk/rare-gamer-interviews-paul-macha...

e; actually I think it's not possible for a Banjo-Kazooie game to transfer to another Banjo-Kazooie game, the memory that it writes to is different from the one it reads from. https://tcrf.net/Banjo-Kazooie/Stop_N_Swop

This is basically any DLC, right? Extra code is loaded.

DLC doesn't usually introduce new code to a game, that tends to be reserved for full-on title updates. DLC is more like if Sonic and Knuckles could also support special "new level" cartridges, that didn't do anything on their own, but when inserted on top of S&K provided new levels for the player, but didn't themselves contain any program code.

Every game I've worked on (360-era) with DLC has needed supporting code to be distributed in an update first. Everyone gets the update, then the DLC is either just an unlock for what's already there (but hidden), or contains some supporting data.

Right, but that's not absolutely universal. Harmonix does pretty well continuing to release DLC without needing an additional title update in some time now. My point was more that the DLC packages themselves don't often, if ever, come with actual code included, and this is usually for platform security reasons (Sony and Microsoft are both quite controlling about how executable data is managed and how it is stored). Perhaps maybe some scripts for the internal engine, depending on the game.

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