11–20 of 39 posts
These old games password systems analysis are always so entertaining and interesting to see... just like a glimpse onto the limitations that were faced by 8-bit console gamedevs in the early days, and the very clever solutions they came up with. There's this Youtube creator called Bisqwit who has a complete series on cracking old videogame passwords: * Season 1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLzYGEbdY5nEFQs…
As a kid, I was dumbfounded that passwords worked on NES games, and Castlevania III was my first introduction to the concept. I still remember staring at the screen not comprehending how putting in this combination of icons would get me my game back. I knew there’s no way they could manually create a password for every game state, but I also had no conception of discrete states, algorithms and hashing, so I literally…
Faxanadu passwords were the worst. Upper case, lower case, numbers, and some punctuation. It was, however, able to represent your inventory, location, money, etc. Pretty much a full state in ~24 characters, which I thought was very cool.. but 10-year old me didn't always write down the mantra correctly. You can read about this system here: http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/...
As a kid, I was dumbfounded that passwords worked on NES games, and Castlevania III was my first introduction to the concept. I still remember staring at the screen not comprehending how putting in this combination of icons would get me my game back. I knew there’s no way they could manually create a password for every game state, but I also had no conception of discrete states, algorithms and hashing, so I literally…
Faxanadu passwords were the worst. Upper case, lower case, numbers, and some punctuation. It was, however, able to represent your inventory, location, money, etc. Pretty much a full state in ~24 characters, which I thought was very cool.. but 10-year old me didn't always write down the mantra correctly. You can read about this system here: http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/...
Name Description HELP ME Start and continue with 10 lives. AKAMA Start in Hard Mode alone. OKUDA Start in Normal Mode with Alucard. Ahh, back when games had cheat codes... nowadays, you’d have to pay $1.99 to unlock the extra difficulties and lives.
Quite a coincidence because of the only remaining secret of Nier: Automata (2017) was discovered today, an intentional cheat that lets you jump to the end of the game (the game needs multiple playthroughs to see all endings and reach the real one)
https://twitter.com/manfightdragon/status/134561558810678067...
And it was confirmed by Yoko Taro as well (he previously said there is one thing left the players haven't uncovered yet) https://mobile.twitter.com/yokotaro/status/13457144900677468...
As a kid, I was dumbfounded that passwords worked on NES games, and Castlevania III was my first introduction to the concept. I still remember staring at the screen not comprehending how putting in this combination of icons would get me my game back. I knew there’s no way they could manually create a password for every game state, but I also had no conception of discrete states, algorithms and hashing, so I literally…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Faxanadu passwords were the worst. Upper case, lower case, numbers, and some punctuation. It was, however, able to represent your inventory, location, money, etc. Pretty much a full state in ~24 characters, which I thought was very cool.. but 10-year old me didn't always write down the mantra correctly. You can read about this system here: http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/...
I still think nothing beats Legend of the Mystical Ninja on Super NES. If you are playing a two player game and obtain a password, it's a full 60 characters you'll have to enter. For comparison, the Guardian Legend was 32 characters (like Faxandu) and Metroid was 24. I never played Magic of Scheherazade; looks like that weights in at 43 characters.
I always liked how Turbo Grafx did this. For many games if you had the Turbo Booster Plus or CD add on, you could save your game to their memory, otherwise you could use a password.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Faxanadu passwords were the worst. Upper case, lower case, numbers, and some punctuation. It was, however, able to represent your inventory, location, money, etc. Pretty much a full state in ~24 characters, which I thought was very cool.. but 10-year old me didn't always write down the mantra correctly. You can read about this system here: http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/...
I still think nothing beats Legend of the Mystical Ninja on Super NES. If you are playing a two player game and obtain a password, it's a full 60 characters you'll have to enter. For comparison, the Guardian Legend was 32 characters (like Faxandu) and Metroid was 24. I never played Magic of Scheherazade; looks like that weights in at 43 characters.
(For a while I thought each save also used up memory and they were getting deleted but that wouldn’t make sense.)
Has anyone reverse engineered the encoding?
As a kid, I was dumbfounded that passwords worked on NES games, and Castlevania III was my first introduction to the concept. I still remember staring at the screen not comprehending how putting in this combination of icons would get me my game back. I knew there’s no way they could manually create a password for every game state, but I also had no conception of discrete states, algorithms and hashing, so I literally…
Faxanadu passwords were the worst. Upper case, lower case, numbers, and some punctuation. It was, however, able to represent your inventory, location, money, etc. Pretty much a full state in ~24 characters, which I thought was very cool.. but 10-year old me didn't always write down the mantra correctly. You can read about this system here: http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/...