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by schwartzworld
1999 days ago
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Honestly the language used makes it sound like the Game Genie was a cheating device, but it was a lot more than that. Game Genie allowed you to breathe new life into your old games. I had the game genie for Sega Genesis. I had like 15 games for it, and I played some of them like Sonic 2 and Kid Chameleon a lot. Sega games didn't have a way to save them, so you played the beginning levels again and again until you knew the Blue Hill Zone map inside and out. "Cheats" were the only way to change this. Even without GG, you could enter debug mode in Sonic 2, (1 9 9... Damn I can't remember the rest.) and use it to reshape levels in fun new ways. Game Genie gave you access to those sorts of features on all your games. Sure, being able to jump higher is helpful in Mario, but in Sonic the Hedgehog it's just different, and sometimes harder. My friends and i tried thousands of codes at random, noting the ones that still loaded a playable game. We also noticed the digits of the hex codes were significant. So to stick with the jumping example, we figured out which digits meant "jumping code" and then tweak the others. I didn't know what hexidecimal was, so it was a wow moment when I realized a > 9 I think it's worth noting that Sega incorporated the thru-cartridge design of the GG into the game Sonic and Knuckles. If you connected it to other Sonic titles you could play those games as Knuckles. If you connected it to any other random game you got new levels of the mini ring collecting game that was part of Sonic 3/Sonic and Knuckles. |
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Reminds me when I was a kid in DOS days. I somehow managed to learn how to save a game, modify something (e.g. sell some items to get gold), save a game again, compare two savegames and then use a hex editor to modify the memory that changed between those two savegames. I also didn't really know hexadecimal back then, I just knew to put 0xff into all changed fields. I always wondered why it gave me "ugly" numbers like 4294967296, but I wasn't complaining because it was a lot of ingame gold.