Hidden messages in NES games' code

magweasel.com

40 points·amelim··9 comments

If you have a copy of the original Prince of Persia (the DOS game), open up prince.exe in a hex editor :)

Whats in there??

Quotes from early reviews of the game. Here's a few:

"A tremendous achievement. . . Mechner has crafted the smoothest animation ever seen in a game of this type."

"PRINCE OF PERSIA is the STAR WARS of its field."

They aren't accessible inside the game, you have to be reading through the executable to find them. I discovered this by chance back in the early 90s.

My favourite was in Trolls, which I have seen it myself somewhere 1992-1993, later it was put in mobygames:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/trolls

"This game was written on a very slow schneider 10mhz 286 with lots of wait states. If for some reason on your very fast xxxx 25mh 486 this game seems to be fast or unplayable, do no blame us for it was a penny pinching boss who would not buy us reasonable pc's to work on. signed THE PROGRAMMERS OF FLAIR SOFTWARE"

lol reminds me of the original Mech Warrior. A faster processor made it look like the game was in fast forward.

This reminds me of a neat trick I saw in an old 4k demo: adding text (e.g. the creator's name) at the very beginning of the binary. They'd figured out what the text meant in machine language, then added a few opcodes after to undo the effects of executing the text directly.

Did they tack a ^Z after the text so that when you TYPE the executable, you get just the "hi mom from bitphr33k / n3cr0ph1li4" or whatever?

IIRC, they did not, but that would have been a great idea.

Back in 2001 I created an executable this way which runs on both linux and dos:

http://320x200.org/attic/files/doslinux.asm

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