My daughter doesn't code, but she and another friend of hers do a lot of work to find, get and set up game emulators and related wares.
Motivated to do light "sys admin" work, but not coding, I guess.
Motivated to do light "sys admin" work, but not coding, I guess.
Sonic & Knuckles was a pretty awesome Sonic installment for the Megadrive that had a really weird cartridge. On top, it had a flip-open cartridge slot... You could plug in Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 to play through those previously existing games with the Knuckles character. Awesome!
So how do you play the games like that on your emulator? Turns out it's really simple:
> cat snk.bin sonic3.bin > sonic3nk.bin
Or on Windows, as I first learnt it (I had no idea what the command actually did back then, it was magic to me):
> copy /b snk.bin + sonic3.bin sonic3nk.bin
Suddenly I have a brand new game to play!
How it works: When you plug another cartridge into the top of Sonic & Knuckles the console sees both games combined as a contiguous block of memory, which is equivalent to concatenating together the binary dumps of the cartridges.
More details about this are available on this slightly horrific but very thorough webpage: http://www.emulationzone.org/projects/s&k/thesis.htm