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Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

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Re: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

#21

Post by Dwedit »

selcuka wrote: post #3

When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum 48K with a cassette tape as the storage unit. Tapes are notoriously unreliable. One day I loaded a game [1] and got the dreaded "R tape loading error". Instead of adjusting the azimuth and retrying, I decided to take my chances and typed RUN to execute the one-line BASIC bootloader that starts the actual machine-code game. To my surprise, the game started, but there was something…

Rubber keys and rotten leads

Rand and run and load and screens

Then five minutes fingers crossed

Hoping not to witness the terror

Of R: Tape Loading Error

(M.J. Hibbett & The Validators - Hey Hey 16k)

Re: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

#22

Post by PlunderBunny »

GolfPopper wrote: post #11
nopelynopington wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember weirdness in c64 games because of tape errors. I remember playing tusker and it was like it was haunted. Main character changed colour and disappeared entirely, hud elements turned Eldritch between game screens. It was wonderful

I had a corrupted save of Ultima III for the C64 on a disk. The game worked normally, but the world data had been corrupted into a bizarre mis-mash of all available terrain types and monsters. I kept that disk around and periodically loaded it just to fool around.

I think you could deliberately insert the wrong disk at some point and get corrupted terrain that had an ‘infinite’ chest in it (or was that Última IV?)

Re: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

#24

Post by drcode »

hagbard_c wrote: post #18
JetSetIlly wrote: post #7

The simplest 2600 games were just 2k in size not 4k. Combat for example, is a 2k rom. If you want to increase your chances of finding something but still generating a "complete" rom, then limit the size to 2k.

If 256 bytes is enough to code a demo... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlW84fEHngM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-WjF_dxdHM I'd say gentlemen (m/f) start your random number generators

Let me introduce you to Hard 2632, a device for 32 byte demos: https://xayax.net/hard2632/

Re: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

#25

Post by ticulatedspline »

staplung wrote: post #10

Fun. It's basically Borges Library of Babel [1] where each book is a 4K ROM! If you do the math based on the specs given in the story (and crucially, you assume that each possible book appears once) you end up with a library several times larger than the observable universe. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

https://libraryofbabel.info/ is inspired by that story and is a library of all combinations of 3,200 characters (well lowercase letters, space, comma and period)

Re: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

#26

Post by georgemcbay »

selcuka wrote: post #3

When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum 48K with a cassette tape as the storage unit. Tapes are notoriously unreliable. One day I loaded a game [1] and got the dreaded "R tape loading error". Instead of adjusting the azimuth and retrying, I decided to take my chances and typed RUN to execute the one-line BASIC bootloader that starts the actual machine-code game. To my surprise, the game started, but there was something…

There was a sub-industry created around doing this sort of memory modification on purpose with devices like the "Game Genie".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Genie

Re: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

#27

Post by sedatk »

ralferoo wrote: post #6
selcuka wrote: post #3

When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum 48K with a cassette tape as the storage unit. Tapes are notoriously unreliable. One day I loaded a game [1] and got the dreaded "R tape loading error". Instead of adjusting the azimuth and retrying, I decided to take my chances and typed RUN to execute the one-line BASIC bootloader that starts the actual machine-code game. To my surprise, the game started, but there was something…

I had a different, but in some ways similar, experience with the game Elite on the Amstrad CPC. At the time I borrowed it from my friend who raved about it, the elastic band in my tape deck was starting to stretch, and the tape speed was somewhat inconsistent. Listening to it load sounded horrible - you could hear it warbling on the normally steady tones, but generally things loaded just fine so I wasn't massively wo…

I think Elite on CPC had a Firebird loader, which had its own checksum algorithm different from Amstrad ROM. It had way shorter blocks. It might be weaker against certain patterns more than the stock ROM as you said.

Re: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

#28

Post by sedatk »

selcuka wrote: post #3

When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum 48K with a cassette tape as the storage unit. Tapes are notoriously unreliable. One day I loaded a game [1] and got the dreaded "R tape loading error". Instead of adjusting the azimuth and retrying, I decided to take my chances and typed RUN to execute the one-line BASIC bootloader that starts the actual machine-code game. To my surprise, the game started, but there was something…

I had a cracked version of Turbo Esprit game on Amstrad CPC. There was one utility pole in the game in one of the maps. You reached to it by turning left at the start and then right, and it was second pole on the right, or something like that. If you hit that pole using "street turn" action, you'd instantly get teleported to another street with hundreds of pedestrians, climbing up to the sky. I thought I'd found heaven, but now thinking about it, the glitch might be caused because of the crack and repackaging. I loved discovering such an obscure behavior in a game though. I couldn't reproduce it on an emulator again.

Re: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

#29

Post by Dwedit »

georgemcbay wrote: post #26
selcuka wrote: post #3

When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum 48K with a cassette tape as the storage unit. Tapes are notoriously unreliable. One day I loaded a game [1] and got the dreaded "R tape loading error". Instead of adjusting the azimuth and retrying, I decided to take my chances and typed RUN to execute the one-line BASIC bootloader that starts the actual machine-code game. To my surprise, the game started, but there was something…

There was a sub-industry created around doing this sort of memory modification on purpose with devices like the "Game Genie". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Genie

Game Genie was a device that could replace values on the cartridge bus, allowing it to change what the system sees when it fetches bytes from ROM.

Unlike many other cheat devices, this meant that Game Genie modified ROM (game program) rather than RAM (game variables).

Re: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

#30

Post by p0w3n3d »

When did we get from pulling games to pulling something that runs on Atari? Entropy theory describes why the monkeys won't write shakespeare even after billion years. It's not about probability, it's about information which those monkeys will lack. Randomly generated data might contain parts of the game but not the game itself.
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