You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow | Hacker News Reader

You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow

chrono.fandom.com

177 pointsronreiter106 comments

I figured out that, in the early versions of Realmz for the Mac, there was an enchanted item (a helm?) that added a few points to the wearer’s stats when equipped, but when removed it took away more than it added (i.e. left you worse off). It only took a few seconds for my programmer brain to start me furiously equipping and then un-equipping it, and sure enough, when that stat went to -127, one more equip-and-unequip was sufficient to give me a +128 bonus for that stat.

I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.

I would figure the reason was because calculating it based on your inventory every time it's needed would've been expensive, so the developers decided to cache it, but instead of recalculating it from scratch when there's a stat change, they decided to try updating it incrementally, but I guess also imperatively. A string of mistakes has to happen to lead to such a situation but it doesn't seem super unnatural to me.

I wonder if it was percentage based. That'd be one of the easiest mistakes to make.

- Player has a stat of 100

- Wears "+10%" helm

- Player has a stat of 110

- Removes helm, game subtracts 10%

- Player has a stat of 99

Actually, now that I think about it more, that wouldn't work as described above because once your stat got close to zero you'd enter a kind of Zeno's Paradox situation.

it's more likely that the stat for equipping is calculated differently to when unequipping (ala, "same" code in two different places, and one got modified at some point and forgot about the other).

> I wonder if it was percentage based. That'd be one of the easiest mistakes to make.

How would that be one of the easiest mistakes to make? There are no operations for working with percentages, nor is it a thing you'd want to do.

To make that helm work as you describe, you'd need to multiply the stat by 1.1 when equipping the helm and then by 0.9 when deequipping it. But at that point you've lost any justification for making the mistake; those are just two random numbers that don't cancel each other out. It's not like you're adding a number in one place and then erroneously subtracting that same number somewhere else.

(Also, these are very strange multipliers to use this way, because they can never produce exact results. You're bound to see rounding errors if you insist on update-when-equipping and update-when-deequipping instead of recalculate-stats-when-equipment-changes.)

That exact sort of magic numbering is rife in games from what I've seen over the years, especially in stuff like an old RPG from 1994. Maybe you've seen better game code on average than me. But you don't even really need the "random numbers" - I'd expect a mistake like:

    GetItemChange(curVal, percentBoost) { return curVal * PERCENT_BOOST; }
    
    eqipVal = val + GetItemChange(val, percentBoost);
    // ... later...
    unequipVal = val - GetItemChange(val, percentBoost);

Edit: I see there's Realmz source code on GitHub.[1] Although I can't see anything that'd cause the specific bug PlunderBunny mentions (they did say 'early versions' so maybe it was fixed), this is the kind of thing I mean re old games and "random numbers". This is part of the Wear method for equipping items:

    if ((item.sp1 > 59) && (item.sp1 < 100))
      c[character].condition[item.sp2] = 0; /**** neutralize condition ***/
    if (item.sp1 == 122) /******** item adds attacks **********/
    {
      c[character].attackbonus += item.sp2;
    }

    if ((item.sp1 > 19) && (item.sp1 < 60)) /******* adds condition *****/
    {
      if (c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] > -1)
        c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] = 0;
      c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] += item.sp2; /**** make condition[sp1-20] = sp2 ***/
    }

    if (item.sp3) /******* adds special ability *****/
    {
      if (item.sp3 < 0)
        c[character].special[abs(item.sp3) - 1] += item.sp5;
      else if ((item.sp3 < 16) && (item.sp3 > 0))
        c[character].spec[item.sp3 - 1] += item.sp5;
      else
        partycondition[item.sp3 - 30] -= abs(item.sp5);
    }

    if (item.sp4) {
      if (item.sp4 < 0)
        c[character].special[abs(item.sp4) - 1] += item.sp5;
      else if ((item.sp4 < 16) && (item.sp4 > 0))
        c[character].spec[item.sp4 - 1] += item.sp5;
      else
        partycondition[item.sp4 - 30] -= abs(item.sp5);
    }
  }

[1] https://github.com/Realmz-Castle/realmz

Never mutate the source of truth

(caveats of course): memory and processing is restricted on the old systems; so these kind of simplifications might be the only way to deliver a big game

If you still like video games and are a bit of a masochist you might try playing Noita sometime, a lot of the late game is basically built around this type of logic.

For example there's a wizard-type enemy that temporarily debuffs your max health by 50%, and the effect can stack if you get hit more than once. But what happens if you pick up a permanent health boost item while the debuff spell is on you? You gain the normal health boost, then it multiplies itself when the wizard's spell expires; you can can go from 100 to several thousand HP in seconds and there's basically no limit.

In any other game this would be considered a bug and patched out in the next update. NOT NOITA, motherfucker. You're almost required to do things like this for a lot of the end-game optional content.

The programmer adjusted the way it works to make it slightly less OP. Just so we could all be sure the bug was now a feature.

Ah I haven't played in a long time, though it's good to see there's still some active updates

Similar to the WoW diamond flask set: https://www.wowhead.com/classic/item=20130/diamond-flask#com...

Noita is mad, in the best sort of way.

So it is this very hard amalgamation of rogue and powder toy that controls like terreria, Very hard, With none of that silly meta progression nonsense you find in most roguelikes, But you push through, get good and beat it. Guess what? That was at most 10% of the game(probably closer to 1%), the other 90% is deliberately obtuse, hidden and optional. What sort of madmen make 90% of their game a easter egg?

round(stat * 1.05); // rounded down round(stat / 1.05); // rounded down again

that would be my first guess.

There were games being written in days where every byte was precious, and the indirection necessary for something like the decorator pattern was just infeasible. There was a lot of direct stat manipulation upon equip & unequip back in the day.

Following that there was the era in which the only way to be competitive in the games space was to write in assembler directly, which would be my guess for how the bug you described happened, since a more sophisticated algorithm should probably have fit just fine by the time we're in the color Mac era but it would have been more painful to write, and nobody has any time for that. Lots of bizarre shortcuts were taken in this era. Some of the posts from Raymond Chen about Windows providing backwards compatibility for games of this era give an idea of the situation, which are related to how the games interacted with the OS rather than with game mechanics but it's a similar process.

Finally, games have this perverse effect going on where if you write down a bunch of effects you want things in your game to have ("armor can add % bonuses to this part of the strike calculation", etc.), it creates a set of boundaries within which the game's systems can function, and the ironic effect of the creation of those boundaries is to immediately bring to mind ways of violating those boundaries and demands from the designers to do so. These violations of the boundaries will tend to be buggy.

I haven't thought about Realmz in a long-ass time. It had some really crazy tracks and was the only game I know of that used MOD instead of MIDI for its music.

Deus Ex Used MOD, At least I think they were mod, There were a fair number of what was basically MIDI + samples formats.

Also while trying to get my facts straight (All I remember was trying to find a mod player to play the deus ex music found on the cd) apparently Unreal tournament and tyrian2000 used mod music as well, Someone at Epic Megagames must have liked them.

Oh man you're right. How could I forget about Unreal Tournament? I totally forget that mod player I found, but it was fun to cobble together playlists.

By the way if you liked the Deus Ex soundtrack you can check out the Sonic Augmentation ocremix album. Really good.

Deshittified link: https://breezewiki.com/chrono/wiki/Dream_Devourer

While I agree that fandom is shit - the link you shared doesn't contain any mentions about int overflow

It's buried at the bottom of Boss Battle Strategy:

"Since the Dream Devourer has 32000 HP, which is close to the signed 16-bit integer limit, it is actually possible to defeat it by healing it. By using powerful magic that it absorbs during its second phase, it can be (temporarily) healed past 32767 HP, which overflows the counter and makes its HP go negative."

That part is not on breezewiki.com, is it?

It is on breezewiki. Right above the gallery section.

Ohhh. I just saw the ChronoWiki banner and clicked on it thinking it was a redirect. My bad!

It seems to display the same content that it does on Fandom for me. What page are you seeing?

I made the same mistake as the other person. When I click the breezewiki link I get a full screen banner (on mobile) that directs me to a wiki page with different information.

I didn’t realize there was content underneath the banner on the first page

There is a certain hilarious irony in killing the big boss with love

Parallel rabbit holes if you like this stuff:

  - in Pokemon gen 1 you can wrap your stats back to zero by buffing them too much
  - In FF7 you can overflow the damage calculation to kill Ruby in one hit
  - Mario 64 has a mountain of usable glitches; "parallel universes" let you skip collisions at high speeds
  - GTA 3/VC/SA have crazy mission/wrong warp corruptions involving parallel game simulations
  - NES Mario can be corrupted to execute arbitrary code in TAS
  - OOT can be heap-corrupted so badly you can write a loader for an entire DLC via controller ("triforce%", my choice for most insane controller based hack of a game)

> NES Mario can be corrupted to execute arbitrary code in TAS

Pokémon, too!

https://tasvideos.org/3358M

https://youtu.be/zZCqoHHtovQ

A classic way of getting endless money in Transport Tycoon was to build a tunnel going from one edge of the map to another. The money counter would overflow and you'd get enough money to last you a lifetime.

As kids we didn't know why this would happen, we just knew that it did and used it every game.

Fandom Wiki leaves 5 lines of readable text on my iPhone after about 3 seconds of loading.

It's an ad ridden sewer. The final straw was disabling comment visibility to only those who are logged in. I used that site a bunch for Kenshi and the comments were a trove of information. No more. I refuse to make an account on that visual nightmare.

Always replace “fandom” with “breezewiki” in the url. It’ll take you to a de-crapified version, and also check for the existence of a real wiki separate from fandom and link to that:

https://breezewiki.com/chrono/wiki/Dream_Devourer

They have a chrome extension too, to do this for you automatically.

Fandom and fextralife are the two “wiki” providers that do this. It’s best to exclude them both from all search results. Fextralife is even worse as it autoplays a twitch steam.

Reminded me of SNES Shadowrun, don't remember if my English skills were weak or what the cause of me misunderstanding it was but when you encountered the Jester in the game, you're supposed to shoot him until you get a chance for a conversation and saying his name completes that bossfight.

However, I missed that this part was the key and after a bunch of deaths I went on to level up my character past what the developers had probably intended at that stage of the game and subsequently managed to kill the Jester (he was strong enough that it was hard even when fully powered up).

Killing him probably lacked proper codepaths so the game crashed/blacked out and wiped the savegame forcing me to start over (quite an unusual thing to see in a SNES game).

Similarly, you can defeat the Egg Dragon superboss in Lufia 2 by healing before attacking: it starts with 65,535 HP.

In Fire Emblem 3 Houses, the final boss of the Azure route has 199 HP and is standing on a 60 HP heal tile.

If you deal 3 damage, it goes to 196. 196+60=256.

This overflows to zero and you win.

I don't want Chrono Cross-contamination in my trigger, thanks.

Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior. (The thing with FATE and Robo, the Porre thing, the fate of Crono and co., it's a terrible fanfic made canon).

Trigger only worked because of Toriyama gathering the all-star staff (look up the interview with Torishima giving the details). Cross was out of his hands and it shows.

I loved trigger, got to play it on release. I loved Cross even more. I played that one about 5 years after its release.

Cross has this underlying sense of menace beneath the idyllic (and wondrous) atmosphere of the archipelago. I think it's incredible.

Personally I don't care much about stories in games. Most of them are awful anyways. I really gravitate towards atmosphere, and Cross has that in spades.

You can downvote the parent post all you like, but…

> Personally I don't care much about stories in games

I cant relate to this.

Chrono trigger is a game I love because of the great story.

If you’re playing rpgs and you don't care about the story or characters…

I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages?

No idea. Chrono cross left no impression on me. I agree with the parent post.

> I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages?

I think you were intending for novels, but poetry books typically don't really have much in the way of "story", just aesthetics. Even for novels, there are many that I primarily appreciate the prose. I love everything about the Kingkiller Chronicle books, but the prose itself is quite pleasant in isolation, and I could probably appreciate the books even if the story and worldbuilding weren't good.

Plenty of RPGs don't have much in the way of story. The story of the first Final Fantasy is nearly absent. Same with the first Diablo, and most roguelikes. Obviously, you can enjoy an RPG without caring for the story or characters, because the main point the vast majority of games is to play them.

The analogy to a book doesn’t fit anyways.

The closest thing would be telling someone they’re reading a choose-your-own-adventure book wrong somehow, and even then it’s a stretch.

Playing devil's advocate:

If someone revealed to you that they enjoyed "You are a shark" as much as "Cave of Time", and after inquiring you learned that they don't read the page, they just skip to the decision, and backtrack if they get a The End:

Did they enjoy the game? If there are enough of these type 2 readers should the industry start catering to them over legacy type 1 page readers?

The point is that it doesn’t matter, they enjoyed it. The fun police weren’t invited to do an investigation, no matter what scenario or analogy is applied.

Saying “you didn’t like it right” is gatekeeping.

Why announce that you’re incapable of allowing someone to hold an opinion that doesn’t match yours?

Would it be so wrong for someone to enjoy something in a different way than you do? Or should they be chastised for enjoying it the wrong way?

You’re welcome to ask what brings them enjoyment, to broaden your views, instead of dismissing them.

Bluntly? Because it’s a meaningless opinion.

You like coding, but not the algorithms.

You like books but not the story.

This isn't “I will play it my way”; its heres a BS reason why legitimate critique can be dismissed out of hand.

“Oh, but for me its not about of the food tastes good”

Ok. Sure. You do You.

…but if someone says: that meal was rubbish and tasteless, is it so outrageous to call out “but I don't care about the taste” as incomprehensible nonsense to the majority of people?

Am I being outrageous here?

What does the the “rp” stand for in rpg?

You tell me.

There is more than one thing to enjoy about anything and yes, someone may enjoy aspects you aren’t even aware of even if they don’t enjoy the aspect you think of as the core aspect.

You brought up the subject of food, but not everyone even agrees that taste is the most important element. For some it’s the social aspect of the meal. For some it’s the nutritional value. Some may only tolerate the taste of something but enjoy the texture or the warm feeling in their belly. People can also eat things they don’t enjoy but be glad they did for the experience of just trying that thing.

It isn’t outrageous that you don’t understand it. It does imply that you’re blind to all the other aspects of games that bring people enjoyment. You personally would probably be better off not trying to defend this and instead trying to understand the views others have. You could just ask the poster what he does care about in games.

> It does imply that you’re blind to all the other aspects of games that bring people enjoyment.

Like what?

I’m not making a sweeping generalisation here about how people play games. We’re talking about chrono cross.

For a story driven JRPG like CT / CC specifically, if you don’t care about the characters or story, there is no reason to achieve any goal in the game.

I’m not so proud I can’t admit to being wrong; but in a JRPG there is no game without the character driven story. If you imagine replacing Kid and Serge with cardboard cutouts labeled A-san and B-san, what are you enjoying about the game?

I can’t speak for the poster and I haven’t played that game, but I’ve played other JRPGs.

Here’s a list of some of the things I can enjoy in a game, JRPG or otherwise, that aren’t necessarily story or character related: technical details/neat hacks, novelty, atmosphere, gameplay/battle/magic/weaponsystems, exploration, finding secrets/special items, level design, enemy and boss design and fights, cinematography (framing, contrast, …), immersion, design elements, collecting things, trying to break the game, talking about the game with others, connection and comparison with other games and media, translation, acting, my mental reaction (turning my brain off/lighting it up) …

I like games for the mechanics and gameplay. Cutscenes and dialogue just get in the way.

Old-school ascii roguelikes are RPGs but most have little-to-no story, almost purely a setting and mechanics. They're my favorite type of game.

You can keep coming up with flawed analogies all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that a good RPG video game is a LOT more than a story.

Is is possible to enjoy the characters, gameplay, strategy, battle system, graphics, and music of a game while caring next to nothing at all about the story. I played a LOT of 16 and 32-bit RPGs in my day and found the stories and character dialogue in nearly all of them to be predictable to the point of cliche. There are rarely any unique plot elements to get invested in, rarely any characters who break out of their mold.

If you've seen one Hero's Journey, you've pretty much seen them all. But obviously you can still build a damn fine movie or video game around it.

(FWIW, I like coding but don't get very excited about algorithms or data structures. They are just tools to use on the way to making something useful in the real world.)

Cross does look very good, I can agree to that, but there are things that bother me severely besides the story, mostly how the gameplay is designed in a way where just smashing circle will win you any battle because Serge is ridiculously strong and mandatory. The element system is very interesting but outside THOSE TWO GUYS (you know who) and the final boss, you are never compelled to use it because the fights are so easy that it's just faster to have Serge cut everything to size. If you choose Glenn over Razzli (and if you choose Razzli you have to get Korcha) the game becomes even easier. And despite the huge roster of characters most of the times it's just more efficient to use Serge, Glenn and Kid/Fargo for stealing (if you want a 100% run).

Even if you go out of your way to use your favorite characters or try to use elements it just becomes slower but not harder. There's almost no reason to use the League of Extraordinary Accents. This game SCREAMS to have something like Lufia II's Ancient Cave where you can get some thrills with those mechanics. The fixed level system really works against it.

There's potential in there, but it feels like most of the mechanics shy away from using it.

Also, despite the music being great, the battles and boss battles reuse the same theme 99% of the time, which gets tiring fast. And the regular boss battle theme happens to be the worst track in all of the game (DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU! pirori pirori pirori~ DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU!)

But the worst part is the freaking dwarfs trying to give you the eco-friendly message about how humans are destroying the environment and whatnot...despite humans not even being industrialized in all of El Nido (except for those guys outside of time) and they say that while committing genocide against the fairies with heavy smog-spewing machinery and tanks. Like give me a break... Every human settlement in El Nido is comfy nature-friendly villages and you are giving me the talk while riding a freaking tank.

The thing I like most about the PS1 era of JRPGs is that a lot of them were highly experimental. Trigger is sort of the most-polished culmination of a style developed across 8-bit and 16-bit jrpgs. Games like Cross, FF8, the SaGa Frontier games, even Legend of Mana are where Square really started to experiment, and I'm glad they did.

Cross is mechanically a mess. My least favorite part is how you must equip eleventy billion elements, it's tedious as heck, and it sort of discourages you from trying other characters because even bulk-switching elements doesn't work well due to slot and native element differences.

It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.

I still think the atmosphere shines brightly enough to surmount these issues. It's not just that the game is beautiful, it's that the vibe is completely unique to this day, imo. FF7 also had that undertone of menace and "something's not quite right here", but there was always at least one obvious threat. In Cross, it's hard to ever put your finger on what has really gone wrong for most of the game, but you can feel in your bones that something creepy is going on. The juxtaposition between that and some of the most beautifully poignant art and music on the PS1 just hit the spot for me.

Funny, I very much prefer Legend of Mana and SaGa Frontier (specially the first, has more robots).

The atmosphere in Cross is really good yeah, but the plot and gameplay issues really hold it back. I can forgive it being a bad sequel (mean-spirited towards Trigger at times for some odd reason) or having a silly plot, but I can't forgive the wasted potential. Feels like the director lost interest once the Radical Dreamers portion was remade.

Have you tried SaGa: Emerald Beyond? The SaGa series is by far my favorite jrpg series, and I feel like they just keep getting better. Scarlet Grace and Emerald Beyond had low production values but they are some of the most fun I've had with videogames ever.

> It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.

I used to call that the "Sony-mandated camera spin" because I half-seriously thought that spinning the camera over the field and characters was a prerequisite for getting a PlayStation devkit in the first place. It's in so many JRPGs, it was in Bust-A-Move (Bust-A-Groove), the dancing game, when one character solos, etc.

Sony actually had policies like this; for example, sprite-based PlayStation games were popular in Japan but near-forbidden in North America, because SCEA's marketing strategy was to emphasize 3D polygon graphics and convey a sense that the world had moved on from sprites. Of course, much like modern mobile policies, if you were big enough the rules could be bent for you. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and other tentpoles could thus release sprite-based games.

Cross has an amazing soundtrack tho. I think this is probably the main area where didn't felt like a downgrade.

But I agree. Chrono trigger it's the closet thing to perfection in a JRPG. Just pure mastering of the craft in all areas, music, art direction, gameplay, pacing, etc.

It's not that cross it's bad, not at all, has a lot of innovation, but Trigger has a big shadow to scape.

For what it's worth, the fangame "crimson echoes" is a great alternative sequel.

A friend of mine and I played Secret of Mana until our money overflowed the bounds of an int (or whatever was backing it. It evidently caused save game corruption, and that was the end of our epic run.

That is a way cooler end.

I soent a lot of time grinding up the levels on the spells to get the extra cool effects that would happen more frequently as your spell level approached 9. Though it would never pass 8:99 if I recall correctly.

I lent the game to a friend. His kid brother overwrote every save file with one called Mnupll.

Love the game. Never redid that. Would have liked to max out weapons because I think you could grind for orbs in the final fort.

There's a live music concert for Chrono Trigger playing right now. That game had one of the best soundtracks of all time.

>"That game had one of the best soundtracks of all time."

Agreed, there's just something really special about it. You may appreciate these guys, I've had their playlist on repeat for years while working: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p636Rw_L3XU&list=PL1FBFF9D52E7...

100%, really a fantastic soundtrack - still gives me chills.

Thank you for sharing this - here’s what I’ve had on my playlist recently: https://youtu.be/zWeGxKsPXZ4

You might like Chrono Symphonic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JQxH77NWEQ

OCReMix is quite good for this.

I love this jazz arrangement https://open.spotify.com/album/4NtHhdEp0nCFLz3SwoM4QB?si=rUV...

And despite being trigger/cross love this one as well https://open.spotify.com/album/7izJQDtszjo9DbOVEMsvEj?si=HnN...

Hard for me to listen to the last one without getting a little emotional, something about the lyrics and simple piano accompaniment

The other OCRemix albums are highly recommended too, especially the early ones.

I used to listen to this album all the time some good 15 years ago, but have forgot its name.

Thank you so much for this. I am so glad to find this again.

Sublime. Thank you for sharing.

Yasunori Mitsuda's music has had a lasting impression on me. From Chrono to Xenogears and beyond, I had some strong feels associated with his music. Thanks for sharing that link :D

I cut a one-take version of Frog with some of my fav. musicians:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCuDk18gGRc

So many memorable tracks and setpieces...we had it good.

Corridors of Time is still sublime. After I heard that song I had to figure out the notes. Turns out there's this random tool that turns game music rips into midi, so I was able to figure out the chords in that song. I still play it from time to time.

I recall my friend's older brother and his friends all loving chronotrigger some 3.5 decades ago.

Is it worth playing today? (I don't have any gaming consoles, and use macOS)

(I've never played an RPG, except for Disk 1 of the original Final Fantasy VII, which I really enjoyed).

I'd say it's still very worth playing. It has a lot of tropes that future games took inspiration from, and it's art style is iconic (in part because the character designer and art direct was Akira Toriyama, of Dragonball fame). If nothing else the soundtrack will grab you by the ears and draw you in.

I've seen people bounce off of it, no shame if that happens - in typical JRPG fashion of the time it came out it's involved (there's some non-intuitive progression steps) and takes about 20-30 hours to complete.

There's a DS version which I can't speak to since I've only played the original SNES version, but I understand it adds some additional content that's not required for the story.

Available in play store on Android also. Cheap

Additionally romhacks exist assuming you own the original game, which layer some quality of life tweaks on top! For the SNES version at least.

Yes. It is one of the most polished JRPGs, and there are no random encounters or grinding. The game can be played through in 24 hours, with optional side quests.

I play it on average once a year, the full 6h playthrough.

Chrono Trigger holds up very well, and much better than many PSX/N64 games. It was at the pinickle of 16bit sprite graphics. I beat it a bunch of times as a teen on an emulator. Then I bought it for the DS and beat it again several years ago. It's available on Steam.

If you like JRPGs (and you say you like FFVII so that applies to you!) then you should. Personally I played it wanting to try out the genre and found it uninteresting. But hey, doesn't cost anything to try something new!

i played thru it with my kids recently and they all loved it so i would say it holds up, the steam version is fine

The elixir glitch works on a lot of bosses...

I feel like this is particularly amusing though because as I understand it this boss is not in the original game. So on a DS which is so powerful you should never have glitches due to such technical limitations, the developers flew insanely close to the sun.

In the soccer management game USM98, there was a textbox to input the numbers the wages you could offer to players and coaching staff. This was sensibly limited to positive integers in $native_currency. If I entered 99999999999999, I would get something close to £32,000 per week, suggesting they were using a signed 16-bit int.

There was also a button to quickly offer an employee a new 'improved' contract, with something like 1.05x their existing pay.

That made it pretty easy to make a lot of money quickly :D

https://youtu.be/_gN3SoIuJ1s?t=512

The classic Alone in the Dark I gives you "infinite" health points via integer (16-bit) underflow due to a bit of negligience. Once you get the poison, just drink it. And during the animation just drink it again. And again. And again...

Kinda reminds me of Gandhi urban legend in Civilization, where his "peacefulness" was so low that if it got lower he became a war monger. I thought it was true until I looked it up for this comment. Still, funny stuff!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

I think it could be an unpopular opinion, but I like seeing these completely stupid link-to-a-wiki with no context whatsoever posts. Things that force you to actually RTFA of some obscure bit of tech trivia feel a little bit more like how using the internet used to be all those years ago.

(I still need to finish the FoE romhack though)

This boss doesn’t exist in the SNES version right? I don’t remember it.

Nope, just in the 2010(ish) DS version and later.

What a terribly enshittified website. Probably took all its content from free community members too

Yes, that's the MO of fandom.com

Well we don’t have to worry, anyone with a product that bad will surely see competition soon! Right? Riiight?

Things just seem to only get worse nowadays

One of the best games ever made very cool you made this.

Yet another downside of using ‘safe’ languages. You don’t get cool stuff like this.

Nuclear Gandhi would never have been a thing.

Nuclear Gandhi is an urban legend. Turns out there was no such bug in Civ 1.

And in more recent games where there is Nuclear Gandhi it's because of that legend.

If you write a game in a decent language where such a thing won't happen by mistake you can still have it be present on purpose and in some cases that even fits the game's lore.

Random glitches are confusing and bad. Falling off the world in Blue Prince due to collision bugs is annoying for example. However "glitches" which are intended behaviour are fun. I've enjoyed every time I saw somebody get that note and gift from Mrs Babbage because they drafted that particular room in that particular place and it had an effect which in hindsight they now realise was both foreseeable and regrettable...

I know. The urban legend would still not be a thing.

It would’ve been debunked by Snopes on day 1: “impossible, the game is written in Rust”

(I can’t think of one language that defaults to saturating integers)

Many safe languages still suffer from integer overflows. For example in Rust and C# you can pick between an exception being thrown, or silent wrapping when an overflow happens.

Or using the saturating methods.

I don't think that's suffering at that point. The programmer has made an explicit decision to let things overflow, so he should be prepared to handle that possibility. It's not like a language where overflow happens silently without warning.

I remember the days of DOS and getting a direct pointer to video memory. And I've enjoyed the long history of video game exploits and even arbitrary code execution. But at the same time, I'm also glad that era is over. The same bugs that help you jailbreak a phone can also be the bugs that help you gain illicit access to one.

Illicit access as defined by Google / Apple? If the three letter agencies are interested in you, they don't need to exploit any bugs, they can just demand access from those two companies, and get it. To the device that you carry in your pocket 24/7, with GPS, microphone and camera.

In the days of DOS, the BIOS would load the first sector of a floppy disk or hard drive into memory and transfer control to it. You could replace that sector, and not a single line of code that you didn't write yourself would be executed after that. THIS is how it should be on a PERSONAL computer. A virus could do the same, of course, and gain full control of the machine, but that is not an argument against giving control to the user. You could blame DOS for not intercepting attempts to rewrite the boot sector and asking the user for consent, but completely preventing something like this in the name of security would be even worse!

Imagine if back then, there was a "secure boot" mechanism so that only a boot sector with Microsoft's cryptographic signature was allowed, and that boot sector code would in turn verify everything loaded afterwards. Linux wouldn't exist. So, neither would Android, but the situation would be much the same as it is now, only with Microsoft Phone OS instead -- and absolutely no concept of how it could be different, of a computing device controlled by its user instead of a giant corporation.

You aren't arguing for jailbreaks, you are arguing for the phone to be in the user's full control.

Ideally, ios and Android would be secure enough that no jailbreaks are possible, but open enough to allow the user to replace the OS with one of their choosing.

Having it locked down and then resorting to exploiting loopholes is the worst of both worlds.

> Illicit access as defined by Google / Apple?

No, illicit access as defined by a user who doesn't want anyone but themselves to have access.

Remember the iPhone jailbreaks where you visited a website and the website exploited the phone and installed a jailbreak? That was a remote security exploit, and any other site could have done that too and used it less benevolently.

Users should have full control over their devices. They shouldn't have to get it via exploits, and it's a good thing when those exploits are fixed, because they're security holes that can be used to harm the user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com