Yeah, I'm not familiar with Contra I think I played it and didn't like it much, or it was too hard.
Isn't there an SMB1 hack out there that gives you like 127 lives and is still pretty much impossible without cheating? I remember watching a video of that with some guy saying "FUCK!" over and over.
Originally posted by Colin30 lives isn't always enough.
This.
Originally posted by TerraSpeaking of Konami, has anyone played The Lone Ranger for NES? That had its own code, but the game was still ridiculously hard even with the code Hell, I had a hard time beating it with save-states
My dad and I would play this off and on. I remember going to different towns and such, but not really getting anywhere, at least story-wise. Then we would die and stop playing, lol.
Yeah, there were only 8 checkpoints in the whole game (and that counts the starting point for the game as a checkpoint). If you die, you're sent back to the last checkpoint with your progress rolled back. And it's very easy to die, especially considering the difficulty of the bosses and the existence of pits and spikes. Did I mention that hearts for life recovery are very rare?
I had my NES opened, with the case removed, and I would create short circuits between pins on the back of the cartridge connector and create all sorts of weird glitches
More precicely on by inserting some paperclips on the top of the long metal pins you see in this at the bottom right of picture:
The paperclips were connected to some wires and a push-on switch, so I could trigger the glitches on command.
After a few experiment, and by looking inside the cartridges themselves, which had a ROM named "PRG" and another "CHR", I quickly understood that half of the cart connector was used for graphics (CHR) and the other half for the game program (PRG).
At first I could only create graphic glitches by short circuiting the CHR pins, some similar to some Game Genie codes, affecting only the graphics and not the gameplay. But doing any kind of short circuit on the PRG pins would result in an instant crash/freeze of the game.
I experimented a few things, like putting a diode or a potentiometer between the two wires. I found that I could trigger some program changes by connecting a CHR pin to a PRG pin going through a potentiometer fined tuned to a very precise value (it doesn't make sense since it's all digital, but it worked!)
Once, I found a combination of CHR and PRG pins that would trigger weird programming changes when I clicked the switch (it would affect Mario's position), and then realized that the potentiometer was disconnected, so there was no way that the current could pass between the pins since they were not connected together! (scary!)
It must be some weird electrical phenomenon, but by using two coupled wires of the right length and size (I used some typical 110v type wire, about a foot long) with some mini push switch in serial on one of the wire, the CHR digital signal would affect the PRG signal in a way that it would not crash the game (most of the time).
With that switch, I could cause a lot of weird things to happen in SMB, in real time:
I could push Mario against walls to the right, until he would walk right through them. Hitting the switch would sometime throw Mario violently to the right of the screen. I used to tease my friends with that while they were playing
Some pin combination could also cause changes in the level structure, sometimes changing the memory pointer determining where the level data is currently read. That would warp Mario to strange semi-random worlds. Because of the way the SMB level data is stored, random data would cause weird but mostly playable levels to appear. When I hit a part where Mario was blocked by a wall, I would hit the trigger to make him walk though walls.
I mostly experimented with SMB since it was giving me the best results with program changes. I also did the same thing with SMB 2 JP (aka Lost Levels) which I had as a pirate famicom cart with an adapter.
Anyway, that was a lot of fun!
I did eventually get a real Game Genie and had fun hacking codes to find similar semi-random worlds and glitches.