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Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

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Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

#21

Post by sunrunner »

hughes wrote: post #15
sunrunner wrote: post #5

Not a comment on the post, but I sure wish Jira would load even half as quickly as this site.

Is this a joke because the site isn't loading at all?

At the time of writing the comment it was practically instantaneous for me and the comment was genuine. Now it seems to be having trouble and I'm choosing to retroactively make the comment a joke about Jira ;)

Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

#23

Post by reactordev »

zero_shift wrote: post #14
jsheard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Excalibur_II_(Final_Fan...

Oh yeah. The sword you pick up in Memoria. The problem there is that the PAL version runs slower; the way PSX games "translated" between the two video systems was just to have longer VSync pauses for PAL. So the game is actually slower, not interpolated

Longer vsync pauses but larger frame time deltas so it’s basically the same speed of play. The only thing that was even noticeable was the UI lag.

Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

#24

Post by lelandfe »

jsheard wrote: post #13
zero_shift wrote: post #12

About a year ago I was looking at Crash Bandicoot timer systems and I found that Crash 3 has a constantly incrementing int32. It only resets if you die. Left for 2.26 years, it will overflow. When it does finally overflow, we get "minus" time and the game breaks in funny ways. I did a video about it: https://youtu.be/f7ZzoyVLu58

There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Excalibur_II_(Final_Fan...

So the invisible 12h timer runs during cutscenes. During Excalibur 2 runs, I used to open and close the PS1 disc tray to skip (normally unskippable) cutscenes. Never knew why that worked.

(I also never managed to get it)

Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

#27

Post by jonhohle »

zero_shift wrote: post #12

About a year ago I was looking at Crash Bandicoot timer systems and I found that Crash 3 has a constantly incrementing int32. It only resets if you die. Left for 2.26 years, it will overflow. When it does finally overflow, we get "minus" time and the game breaks in funny ways. I did a video about it: https://youtu.be/f7ZzoyVLu58

I think many games were that way. SotN definitely has a global timer. On a native 32-bit system it makes sense, especially when the life of a game was a few months to a few years on the retail shelf. No player is going to leave their system running for 2.27 years so what’s the point of even tesing it?

Who knew at the time they were creating games that would be disassembled, deconstructed, reverse engineered. Do any of us think about that regarding any program we write?

Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

#28

Post by p1necone »

lelandfe wrote: post #24
jsheard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Excalibur_II_(Final_Fan...

So the invisible 12h timer runs during cutscenes. During Excalibur 2 runs, I used to open and close the PS1 disc tray to skip (normally unskippable) cutscenes. Never knew why that worked. (I also never managed to get it)

> Never knew why that worked.

I'm guessing the game probably streams FMV cutscenes of the disc as they play, and the fallback behaviour if it can't find them is to skip rather than crash.

Re: Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

#29

Post by jonhohle »

lelandfe wrote: post #24
jsheard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Excalibur_II_(Final_Fan...

So the invisible 12h timer runs during cutscenes. During Excalibur 2 runs, I used to open and close the PS1 disc tray to skip (normally unskippable) cutscenes. Never knew why that worked. (I also never managed to get it)

I’m going to wager that the cutscenes are all XA audio/video DMA’d from the disc. Opening the disc kills the DMA and the error recovery is just to end the cutscene and continue. The program is in RAM, so a little interruption on reading doesn’t hurt unless you need to time it to avoid an error reading the file for the next section of gameplay.
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