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NaughtyHusky posted:Some of the stuff left on retail disks is just shocking, two that spring to mind: I remember the South Park one. It was the Hot Coffee of 1999... To contribute, they recently found unused music in Donkey Kong. There's also a job offer from Nintendo hidden in the ROM! Probably not good any more, though. 
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Nov 18, 2014 00:03
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The N64 version of Ocarina of Time has all kinds of weird/cool poo poo buried in its rom. It took a decade-ish for anyone to discover that the Arwing from Star Fox is in there as an enemy with its own unique AI behaviour and sound effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H10Tl3sTpWM
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Nov 18, 2014 00:17
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I remembered in a thread similar to this a couple years ago, some folks were talking about how they discovered the boats in Everquest were actually mobs carrying dummy items to weigh them down. When the items were pick-pocketed from the ships, the ships flew away at light speed. While not quite cut content, anyone else know any insane coding oddities like these?
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Nov 18, 2014 00:57
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NaughtyHusky posted:Some of the stuff left on retail disks is just shocking, two that spring to mind: Speaking of that, NHL Breakaway 98 had a bunch of developer photos hidden in a .bin file in the cart, because to quote developer Dave Lang, "it would be Un-American not to use all of the space on the cart." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D09yz9N0T-E Well, it's not really shocking as much as really embarrassing to look at now.
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Nov 18, 2014 01:08
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Considering how much we tore the Goldeneye cartridge apart with Action Replays and Game Genies in the late 90s I'm regularly astonished at the amount of stuff hidden in there. for example: http://tcrf.net/GoldenEye_007_(Nintendo_64)#ZX_Spectrum_Emulator quote:Deep within the ROM, coding remains for a ZX Spectrum emulator. It seems that Rare programmer Steve Ellis wanted to test out whether the ZX Spectrum could be emulated on the Nintendo 64, and added it to his current project at that time. While the methods to access the emulator were removed before release, the emulator itself is still fully functional and handles all 48k and smaller Spectrum titles, albeit with no sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONJtqf2lIIM Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 01:39
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Cast Iron Brick posted:I remembered in a thread similar to this a couple years ago, some folks were talking about how they discovered the boats in Everquest were actually mobs carrying dummy items to weigh them down. When the items were pick-pocketed from the ships, the ships flew away at light speed. Eve Online had an issue like this. Internally, a player is just a container, and skills in your head are literally just items in that can. You could send the server some manually crafted commands to attempt to store non-skill things in your head -- which would generally fail, but in interesting ways. In particular, if you took the item ID of a ship that was currently logged off in space in a safespot, you could send the server a message asking to store that ship in your head. The attempt would fail, and the server would respond with the text of the Python exception that was thrown -- and that text happened to include the exact X/Y/Z position of the logged-off ship in the solar system. So, you could then position a tackler in that spot and catch the ship when it logged in.
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Nov 18, 2014 01:45
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Dr. Dos posted:My favorite page will always be Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2 the game of a thousand licenses. Technically Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny were in the same game Although they did actually appear in a scene together in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Anyway, thanks for the scans of Super Mario World. I don't know if there are as many beta images of SMB3 in Nintendo Power, considering it had been finished for two years by the time it came out in the US, and they might have kept it under wraps to be revealed in The Wizard. (I don't know the full details, I hadn't been born at that point) However, there are some beta shots right on the back of the box. There's nothing too crazy that's been uncovered like unused powerups or different boss battles, but there are plenty of recoloured enemies and alternative level layouts. There's also the possibility of more minigames, but instead of being given them by a toad, there would be a koopa troopa or hammer brother doing it instead.
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Nov 18, 2014 01:52
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http://tcrf.net/Bubble_Bobble_%28NES%29 Beat NES Bubble Bobble, and you get the code to access Super Bubble Bobble, the harder second run. Beat Super Bubble Bobble, and you get a sound test, with one kinda neat track that's not used anywhere else in the game. Or is it? Keep in mind Bubble Bobble had a 5-character password system, and you were guaranteed to get a working one with minimal experimentation—I discovered Super Bubble Bobble long before legit beating the game, and there were even a lot of passwords that sent you to level numbers otherwise inaccessible (which were all copies of the final boss fight from either the first or second run). So I must have spent hours trying every combination I could think of in search of that secret level with the cool music that absolutely had to exist. Anyway, knowing now that that track was the credits music from Rainbow Islands, I can finally be at peace.
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Nov 18, 2014 01:55
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The one from TCRF which come to my mind and wasn't posted here, is the debug screen in NES version of SNK's Mechanized Attack. Said menu has a cursor which looks like a girl. And you can strip her from clothes, setting proper values in the menu: http://tcrf.net/Mechanized_Attack_(NES)  for tiny pixelated full frontal nudity.Seen someone mention the message from developers, but I think no one posted the ones in The New Tetris, which hosts like four article-lenght rants, and bunch of ascii art: https://tcrf.net/The_New_Tetris I won't post the whole thing, just the "hidden credits" which set the mood for the rest: code:
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Nov 18, 2014 20:35
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ullerrm posted:Eve Online had an issue like this. Internally, a player is just a container, and skills in your head are literally just items in that can. You could send the server some manually crafted commands to attempt to store non-skill things in your head -- which would generally fail, but in interesting ways. Supposedly one of the old ways of stealing supercapitals was to examine the data sent to you near a POS and then send the server a message telling it to inject the POS' force field in your skill queue. At the time (like 2005?) this worked enough that your character would be stuck with an error when you tried to move with a force field in your skill queue but now your buddy could hop into the now defenseless POS and board the supercapital.
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Nov 18, 2014 20:51
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:Speaking of GBA, I would love for tcrf.net to examine GBA ports of games. I noticed FFVI Advance doesn't have a page there, and I'd love to see differences between something like the Earthbound VC WiiU release, the GBA port, and the SNES version. Stuff like that. The @CuttingRoomWiki account tweeted a few of the changes in VC games but I forget how long ago it was. What's interesting is that on the Wii, the ROMs themselves were usually patched (with a few exceptions), so if you extracted the ROM from the package you'd get something different than you'd get say, downloading it off the internet. For the 3DS (and Wii U?) games, though, they generally seem to be patched with a text file, sometimes with commentary and notes from the patchers -- for example, Super Mario Bros. DX has a bunch of big patches to excise any mention of VS. mode and high-score swapping from the Fortune cards. Heran Bago posted:This also has unused graphics where they were improving the Panel de Pon game with new characters, a suspend screen, and translating bits of it into English. This hidden mode still exists in the Virtual Console release, too.
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Nov 18, 2014 23:22
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Since this is going to be talking about pages on TCRF. I'll share some stuff not on it. Power Instinct 3: Groove on Fight AI Debug Mode  It keeps track of it's previous actions, distance away, your life, and it's own life. Lastly, it reads your inputs like any Fighting Game AI should. All I remember inputs are on the bottom and distance away which is on the top that say 0065. To activate just write any number at memory region 0x60D7C4C.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:38
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You'll notice that some Wing Commander games use a special DOS extender that's really finicky. Turns out it was buggy and crashed on exit no matter what they did. They couldn't fix it in time for release, so they just hex edited the error message to say "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!" instead.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:53
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Luigi Thirty posted:You'll notice that some Wing Commander games use a special DOS extender that's really finicky. Turns out it was buggy and crashed on exit no matter what they did. They couldn't fix it in time for release, so they just hex edited the error message to say "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!" instead. When you quit Bad Rats it opens a separate exe to kill the first one's process.
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Nov 19, 2014 01:04
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Luigi Thirty posted:You'll notice that some Wing Commander games use a special DOS extender that's really finicky. Turns out it was buggy and crashed on exit no matter what they did. They couldn't fix it in time for release, so they just hex edited the error message to say "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!" instead. This is amazing.
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Nov 19, 2014 02:35
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Code Jockey posted:This is amazing. Agreed, that is simply excellent!
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Nov 19, 2014 02:56
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Zamujasa posted:What's interesting is that on the Wii, the ROMs themselves were usually patched (with a few exceptions), so if you extracted the ROM from the package you'd get something different than you'd get say, downloading it off the internet. For the 3DS (and Wii U?) games, though, they generally seem to be patched with a text file, sometimes with commentary and notes from the patchers -- for example, Super Mario Bros. DX has a bunch of big patches to excise any mention of VS. mode and high-score swapping from the Fortune cards.
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Nov 19, 2014 09:46
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If I remember right one of the Sega Genesis collections just used a regular Genesis emulator ported to the GameCube complete with instructions on how to format and package ROMs correctly for use with the emulator on the disc.
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Nov 19, 2014 10:09
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Luigi Thirty posted:You'll notice that some Wing Commander games use a special DOS extender that's really finicky. Turns out it was buggy and crashed on exit no matter what they did. They couldn't fix it in time for release, so they just hex edited the error message to say "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!" instead. The extra chapters from Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing are hilarious -- there's a lot of crazy and insane poo poo that programs did. They're here under "Sample Chapters". The Kins posted:A good chunk of the Sega VC games on the Wii used plaintext patch files, complete with Japanese-language comments from whichever M2 employee was doing the hacking. There was nothing enormously spicy though - there was commented out code for one of the Phantasy Star games to increase the XP earned to ridiculous levels for testing, and a fix for a bizarre Phantasy Star 3 glitch where you can start losing experience and skills, but for the most part it was just removing/recolouring red crosses and reducing epilepsy-inducing pallete flashing. Ah, right. One of the other unexplained (to my knowledge) VC changes for some games were completely annihilating the music in games like Super Mario RPG. The dumped games play very little sound, mostly garbage samples. The actual music is stored in some other format in the VC wrapper. Then there are changes like Super Mario Bros. 2, which had all of the palette entries for the waterfalls set to one of the black tones. Tecmo Bowl had all the player names blanked out and the title screen routines hacked to never scroll through the teams (due to licensing). The vast majority of VC changes were just to reduce flashing, though. In the same vein, though, is the absolutely bizarre tale of Donkey Kong Original Edition, which was a exclusive re-release of Donkey Kong (NES) for Europe... with the missing pie factory stage added. But it turns out it wasn't the original edition at all, but a bizarre hack done by some poor developer. The game even bugs out pretty badly sometimes if you run it on an NTSC system because the new routines are too slow. And that's even before you get into the fact that the original arcade version wasn't even developed by Nintendo proper. (Even funnier is that the same company ended up developing the Sega version of the game...) Luigi Thirty posted:If I remember right one of the Sega Genesis collections just used a regular Genesis emulator ported to the GameCube complete with instructions on how to format and package ROMs correctly for use with the emulator on the disc. That was the Sega Smash Pack for the Dreamcast.
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Nov 19, 2014 10:16
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I love old console games with wacky antipiracy junk in them. Earthbound liked to scare little kids by putting up a IT IS A SERIOUS CRIME TO COPY VIDEO GAMES screen if it glitches out. If it detected tampering, it would also jack up the random encounters to make the game unplayable. And if you did somehow manage to beat the game like that, it would crash on the final boss and erase your saved games. Someone at Nintendo didn't want their game hosed with. Banjo-Kazooie would delete the bridge to Grunty's tower if you used certain Gameshark codes on it. I also remember if you pirated Tribes and tried to play it online without changing the default name (which the group that released it set) it would boot you from the server and say the FBI was on its way to your house. Another good one is this impossibly hard Sunsoft NES platformer named Gimmick. If you pirated it, you wouldn't notice a difference until you got to the last screen before the final boss and the good ending. It replaces it with a screen that just says "BLACK HOLE". This is a reference to another impossibly hard Sunsoft NES platformer where if you hosed up in certain levels, you would be sent to a zone that said "BLACK HOLE" where you fell to your death over and over until you run out of lives. Because Sunsoft hates you. Luigi Thirty fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 10:32
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Luigi Thirty posted:I love old console games with wacky antipiracy junk in them. Earthbound liked to scare little kids by putting up a IT IS A SERIOUS CRIME TO COPY VIDEO GAMES screen if it glitches out. If it detected tampering, it would also jack up the random encounters to make the game unplayable. And if you did somehow manage to beat the game like that, it would crash on the final boss and erase your saved games. Someone at Nintendo didn't want their game hosed with. devin posted:Here are some notes I took about some rather aggressive copy protection in Mega Man X. It checks for the presence of SRAM at various addresses and has (at least) three main effects if it detects it: This is especially funny because a good friend of mine actually got that "shove you into the intro seemingly at random and barely any health" effect right off the bat using an ancient version of SNES9x. His ROM was probably damaged, too, but still... The Kins fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 10:41
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ullerrm posted:] Doesn't the Game cube Mario Kart have the fuel arcade version unlockable with a action reply code too? Luigi Thirty posted:If I remember right one of the Sega Genesis collections just used a regular Genesis emulator ported to the GameCube complete with instructions on how to format and package ROMs correctly for use with the emulator on the disc. It was Dreamcast, and they addressed it directly to the group most reputable for ripping Dreamcast games at the time. It's a great story btw. http://tcrf.net/Sega_Smash_Pack_Volume_1_(Dreamcast)
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Nov 19, 2014 12:41
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The Kins posted:Speaking of, someone at TCRF's forums documented Mega Man X's antipiracy junk a few weeks back. I've had the back to intro stage thing happen on a recent version of snes9x. Using a different rom fixed it though. I wonder if using a rom that was dumped incorrectly caused the antipiracy measures to activate and freak the gently caress out.
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Nov 19, 2014 12:52
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RodShaft posted:Doesn't the Game cube Mario Kart have the fuel arcade version unlockable with a action reply code too? Nah, Double Dash and the arcade game were different games by different developers, whereas F-Zero AX/GX were by the same team and pretty much the same game.
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Nov 19, 2014 12:56
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Luigi Thirty posted:You'll notice that some Wing Commander games use a special DOS extender that's really finicky. Turns out it was buggy and crashed on exit no matter what they did. They couldn't fix it in time for release, so they just hex edited the error message to say "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!" instead. Jumping through hoops to get a late-DOS Origin game working perfectly made their 'Voodoo' memory manager very aptly named.
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Nov 19, 2014 13:42
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I remember discovering an Easter egg in one of those arcade gun games by accidentally shooting a window during a scene transition. Suddenly I was transported to a mini game where you shot watermelons off one of the dev's heads. Wish I could remember the name of the game though.
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Nov 19, 2014 13:56
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I love TCRF.net  RodShaft posted:Doesn't the Game cube Mario Kart have the fuel arcade version unlockable with a action reply code too? No but you are probably confusing it with the fact that people managed to get the arcade version of Mario Kart running on the Wii using something called Triforce. Other interesting reads if you haven't heard their origins (or the cheats in the first place): http://forum.starmen.net/forum/General/BFG/Crazy-Glitched-Sim-City-Cart/first This one is where people discover the SNES Sim City had a "God Mode" 18 years after the games release. Very interesting to read the posts as they slowly figure out what's going on. Somewhat similar is someone discovering "God Mode" in Super Metroid 19 years after the games release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ZyC0mflU4
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Nov 19, 2014 14:49
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It's funny and weird to see what debug code never gets taken out, but never gets discovered until years later. Related: After all the debug code was removed from the original Game Boy Pokemon titles, the developers at Game Freak decided that they couldn't let the final 300 bytes or so of ROM go to waste, so they added Mew as a company-wide "prank" that, if all had gone well, would have never been seen by anyone. Especially not Nintendo. But then a bug made Mew appear on some folks' games, and Nintendo and Game Freak decided to turn lemons into lemonade and use limited official opportunities to get Mew via magazines etc. as a marketing tool. Which apparently worked very well! The programmer responsible retells the story to Iwata here.
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Nov 19, 2014 14:55
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Party Plane Jones posted:I remember discovering an Easter egg in one of those arcade gun games by accidentally shooting a window during a scene transition. Suddenly I was transported to a mini game where you shot watermelons off one of the dev's heads. Probably a Midway one like Area 51, they had a lot of stuff like that.
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Nov 19, 2014 15:38
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 if you didn't play Kronn Hunter mode whenever you played Area 51 by shooting the first three humans that came up. It scrambled the backgrounds and gave you a K on the high score screen instead of a rank.
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Nov 19, 2014 17:54
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Light Gun Man posted:Probably a Midway one like Area 51, they had a lot of stuff like that. Yeah, that's what I thought, but I couldn't find anything about it online.
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Nov 19, 2014 18:17
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Luigi Thirty posted:I also remember if you pirated Tribes and tried to play it online without changing the default name (which the group that released it set) it would boot you from the server and say the FBI was on its way to your house. That must not have been very effective because I remember Tribes being absurdly pirated. They had something like over five times as many players on the servers as copies sold. Luigi Thirty posted:
Do you know if that works in the home ports? I came across my copy of the PC version the other day and that might be amusing to check out... Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 18:17
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This isn't a cut content story exactly, but I found it kind of interesting. I think I originally saw it briefly discussed on SA somewhere, but between system shock 2 and bioshock, irrational games made The Lost and then canned the completed game because it wasn't up to their standards. The rights to it got bought by another company, who changed a bunch of assets, ported it to Windows and released it in India as Agni: Queen of Darkness. It THEN somehow also ended up in Russia, with the original art assets but with all the text translated (I can't remember what this version was called). And then, finally, it got brought over to America by some other publisher as one of those lovely looking games you pick up cheap at a computer shop or on weird online game stores, titled Netherworld: Beyond Time I Stand. I could've bought it online when I was looking up all this stuff last year, but I didn't have a job at the time and didn't feel like paying for it, and now it's gone from those online stores and I'm kicking myself for missing the chance  If anybody stumbles across it out in the wild somewhere, it'd be an interesting game to make a thread about.
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Nov 19, 2014 18:23
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Random Stranger posted:Do you know if that works in the home ports? I came across my copy of the PC version the other day and that might be amusing to check out... Yeah, it works in the PC port as well as the PSX and Saturn ports. When the game starts, shoot the first three humans you see and nothing else. Enemies will shoot you but you'll be invincible. After you shoot the third guy (who should be the one from the intro running at the screen) it skips the first level and sends you into Kronn Hunter mode where the palette is all jacked up. Anyway, looks like the Gimmick thing was more complicated than I half-remembered. In one level, there's a sprite of a little tiny black bug. Any time a sprite is loaded, it checks to see if the sprite is that bug. If it is, then a copy protection routine is run. It checks to see if the title screen has been tampered with. If it has, then a hidden and encrypted routine is activated that blanks the screen and puts BLACK HOLE on the screen forever. The game was only released in Japan and Sweden but there was a Chinese pirated version that didn't take out the copy protection. Luigi Thirty fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 18:24
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Luigi Thirty posted:Another good one is this impossibly hard Sunsoft NES platformer named Gimmick. If you pirated it, you wouldn't notice a difference until you got to the last screen before the final boss and the good ending. It replaces it with a screen that just says "BLACK HOLE". This is a reference to another impossibly hard Sunsoft NES platformer where if you hosed up in certain levels, you would be sent to a zone that said "BLACK HOLE" where you fell to your death over and over until you run out of lives. Because Sunsoft hates you. That lovely little game is Atlantis No Nazo, probably one of the earliest troll games on the Famicom. Basically if you went to the wrong door out of a selection of three in a certain Zone, it takes you to Zone 42 which is the infamous Black Hole screen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzBhaHfhs0Q Now, for a bit of unused stuff that I think is cool, Tetris for NES was originally supposed to have music on the title screen. It's a cute little song.
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Nov 19, 2014 22:32
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Luigi Thirty posted:Yeah, it works in the PC port as well as the PSX and Saturn ports. When the game starts, shoot the first three humans you see and nothing else. Enemies will shoot you but you'll be invincible. After you shoot the third guy (who should be the one from the intro running at the screen) it skips the first level and sends you into Kronn Hunter mode where the palette is all jacked up. I did the Kronn mode thing at the arcade once and an employee walked by and thought I broke the machine.
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Nov 20, 2014 00:16
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http://tcrf.net/Hero_Core This is definitely one of my favorite things on the wiki. Thanks Daniel Remar for keeping it funky fresh
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Nov 20, 2014 07:38
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Red Bones posted:This isn't a cut content story exactly, but I found it kind of interesting. I think I originally saw it briefly discussed on SA somewhere, but between system shock 2 and bioshock, irrational games made The Lost and then canned the completed game because it wasn't up to their standards. The rights to it got bought by another company, who changed a bunch of assets, ported it to Windows and released it in India as Agni: Queen of Darkness. It THEN somehow also ended up in Russia, with the original art assets but with all the text translated (I can't remember what this version was called). And then, finally, it got brought over to America by some other publisher as one of those lovely looking games you pick up cheap at a computer shop or on weird online game stores, titled Netherworld: Beyond Time I Stand. I could've bought it online when I was looking up all this stuff last year, but I didn't have a job at the time and didn't feel like paying for it, and now it's gone from those online stores and I'm kicking myself for missing the chance It was released here in Poland. Apparently it was renamed once more, and sold as Inferno: When Death is Your Only Ally (with translated title and in-game text). You can see the gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV0lOT-xqVc copies float on an auction site for literal pennies, so I can grab you a copy if you can stand the hideous box art. laserghost fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 13:37
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laserghost posted:It was released here in Poland. Apparently it was renamed once more, and sold as Inferno: When Death is Your Only Ally (with translated title and in-game text). You can see the gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV0lOT-xqVc copies float on an auction site for literal pennies, so I can grab you a copy if you can stand the hideous box art. I'd be interested in seeing what it's like. Can you turn on PMs and we can work something out?
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Nov 20, 2014 21:16
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I like how the name becomes more and more metal every time it's rereleased.
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Nov 20, 2014 21:20
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