Category Archives: Outlandish Brainstorms

Entertaining bizarre ideas largely related to multimedia hacking and reverse engineering

More NES Password Madness

I was perusing my old Nintendo Power issues today, as I am wont to do for no good reason, and I stumbled upon a forgotten bonus that the magazine shipped to its subscribers once upon a time– Top Secret Passwords:

Click for a larger image, and to guess which game is covered by the level 8 password on the sticky note

Now I’m playing with power. They put a tremendous amount of work into that cover. Passports for not only the Principality of NES but also the Republic of SNES. I guess in the early 1990s, nothing said “top secret” quite like a portable phone. Luckily, the book features passwords for Solar Jetman, the present object of my password infatuation. I wonder if the official password validator accepts the secret password comprised of all ‘Q’s, or if that’s handled by a special case.

Not only is Solar Jetman covered in the book but when I opened the book a carefully folded piece of paper slid out. It contained a number of very neatly written passwords, including ones for every world in Solar Jetman! It doesn’t look like my handwriting, plus the paper includes passwords for games that I never would have been caught dead playing. What a mystery. It’s almost like someone meant for me to find these clues and take up the cause of researching these ancient Nintendo password systems.

The password book contains passwords for a number of games where the only information carried in the password is what level the player was on. For a number of such games, I did a quick string check through the respective ROM data for the passwords. It looks like no coders bothered to use straight string comparison techniques for password validation.

One can only guess what sort of international espionage thrillers influenced the book’s artists, but their conceptualization of incognito (and airplane markings) involved a lot of pink:

Click for larger image of Codename: Pink Gamer

Nintendo Intelligence Agency

I spent the vast majority of my junior high free time in front of a scratchy television connected to a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console. (Try not to act too surprised.) Many of the more involved Nintendo games either had battery-backed RAM on the cartridge PCB for saving games or employed a password system. The game would issue a password at various junctures in the game that you were expected to copy down accurately so that you could resume your game at a later time. Password lengths were commensurate with the complexity of the game and the amount of information required to represent a game’s state. For example, some games obviously had a table of plaintext 4- or 5-character passwords since the only information being saved was which of the game’s 8 levels the player has just passed. On the other end of the spectrum, the most complex password system I ever encountered was for Wall Street Kid, the groundbreaking stock market sim for the NES. It was a variable length password (at least 50 characters was nominal, if memory serves) with just about every letter of the English alphabet, upper and lower case, numbers, and various other symbols. I don’t think I ever successfully copied down a password for that game.

Wall Street Kid

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SDL Corruption

Pursuant to Alex’s challenge to write a Unix player for Trixter’s 8088 Corruption data file, combined with an interest in re-learning the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) API, I wrote a basic program that takes said data file, a font file, and the hardwired colors in the CGA card and renders the video using SDL. I don’t think the font vectors I scavenged are 100% the same as the ones in Trixter’s IBM model 5150 PC:

In particular, I’m not sure about all of those box characters. I think the box is supposed to be one flat color. Anyway, here is another shot, only from the “Tron light cycles” section of video:

Followed up in SDL Corruption Corrected.

SNES FMV

After sorting out Trixter’s 8088 Corruption details sometime ago I started to wonder about FMV on other relatively low-power systems. Let’s consider the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES).

The SNES came out quite some time after the original IBM PC (10 years?). Still, the original IBM PC targeted in Trixter’s experiment had several advantages such as more capacity (10 megabytes of HD space), a marginally more powerful CPU (Intel 8088 @ 4.77 MHz), and a pre-defined vector codebook for the FMV hack.

Let’s start with a modest goal: 1 full minute (60 seconds) of full motion video and audio on the regulation Super Nintendo Entertainment System hardware.