{"id":265,"date":"2006-06-04T21:13:15","date_gmt":"2006-06-05T04:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=265"},"modified":"2006-10-04T21:14:29","modified_gmt":"2006-10-05T04:14:29","slug":"nintendo-intelligence-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/nintendo-intelligence-agency\/","title":{"rendered":"Nintendo Intelligence Agency"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n


\n
\n\"Wall
\nWall Street Kid<\/em>
\n<\/a>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Other games were a little more innovative and used pictorial passwords. Some Mega Man and Castlevania games used this. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
\n\"Mega
\nMega Man II<\/em><\/a> password screen<\/p>\n<\/td>\n		\n
\n\"Castlevania
\nCastlevania III: Dracula’s Curse<\/em><\/a> password screen\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

I thought Mega Man’s dots worked well. A problem with Castlevania’s system is that I would write letters inside the graph cells and would always need to record a legend next to the graph.<\/p>\n

It is useful to note that games from the same company would often share password systems, or at least formats. For example, Metroid<\/a> and Kid Icarus<\/a> both had a password in the format of 4 strings of 6 characters (which allowed for some curious English-language special passwords such as ‘ICARUS FIGHTS MEDUSA ANGELS’).<\/p>\n


\n
\n\"Kid
\nKid Icarus<\/em><\/a> password screen
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

As a nerd in my formative years I was curious about how these password systems operated, especially after Nintendo Power magazine published the complete guide to how 1943’s<\/a> password system worked (the issue with Duck Tales<\/a> on the cover). I actually tried to discern some details about a medium complexity password system from Solar Jetman<\/a> simply by trial and error, observation and note-taking. Naturally, I didn’t get far, but I realized recently that I still have my notes from 15 years ago (this is in contrast to notes taken during countless years of academia, to which I never, ever refer). Solar Jetman had a 12-character password in which I was able to observe some simple perturbations.<\/p>\n


\n
\n\"Solar
\nSolar Jetman<\/em><\/a>, first planet with associated password
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

According to my brief and largely incomprehensible notes from 1.5 decades previous, the password for planet Mexomorf with all the same starting parameters (regular pod capsule, $1000, and something referred to as “41”) has 3 changed characters. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the people charged with creating these password systems were super-geniuses.<\/p>\n

Armed with some computer science knowledge and general information coding theory, I now know a little better. The first thing that occurs to me now when analyzing these passwords is recognizing how much information is actually encoded in a password. For example, the Metroid\/Kid Icarus password system allowed for 64 unique symbols. log2<\/sub>64 = 6. Thus, each of the 24 characters encodes 6 bits for a total of 144 bits of information. Passwords as found in Solar Jetman do not fall into the same, neat, power-of-2 pattern as they can use any of the 26 English alphabetic letters for their 12 password characters.<\/p>\n

According to my notes, another title with an obscenely long, and variable length, password was for an incredibly interesting action\/adventure\/role-playing game named The Magic of Scheherazade<\/a>. Some games really should have had battery-backed RAM. This game’s passwords were between 43 and 45 characters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cracking passwords…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,23,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo","category-outlandish-brainstorms","category-reverse-engineering"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t