God, I love these people. I feel shameful to not have such a hacker mindset -- to do something probably useless just for the fun of it.
I love these people.
If you don't want to read the full article but still wonder "huh I thought NES carts ran from ROM?", then yeah they do but the exploit manages to make the CPU jump into RAM that is used to store the high score table. Fantastic.
Getting to the point of arbitrary code execution is always more interesting than what you do with it after the fact.
To be able and take apart the game, find out when and where it does all this, then where you can manipulate things to input instructions, is a level of dedication that's admirable.
How long before someone runs Doom on Tetris?
Time well wasted.
I want to this with Factorio. Build a huge computer within Factorio made out of belts. Make it seg fault and break out of the game.
People figuring out ACE in old games utterly fascinates me. I remember seeing this in Super Mario World a couple years ago and I became a bit transfixed on how that was even possible.
I mean this in the best way, and I am being complimentary, but it's going to sound like I'm being a jerk: I love when really smart people spend a lot of time and effort doing completely useless things.
Is there any reason, at least immediately, to inject code into NES Tetris? No, I doubt it, but that's not the point. The point is figuring out what's possible, and figuring out what you can force some old code and a primitive computer to do. It might not be "useful" in the classical sense, but neither is a Sudoku puzzle or a crossword puzzle or playing NES Tetris to begin with.
Honestly, I'm surprised that it took tetris so long to be broken! I strongly suspect this will usher in a new era of any% runs, in which the goal is to get the end scene/credits of the game to run as quickly as possible.
My favourite example of this is Ocarina of Time, which has had ACE exploits for years now. The game is so totally broken, it can be "beat" in just a handful of minutes by manipulating the games memory and editing specific entrance warps.
Perhaps most incredibly, people edit the memory with their hands, using nothing more than a couple buttons and the analog joystick.
here is someone who rolled credits in just 3m: https://www.speedrun.com/oot/runs/z1l1627m
I love this kind of stuff.
Reminds me of how they programmed Flappy Bird inside Super Mario World using glitches. Crazy stuff.
I loved playing Tetris very much in childhood
I feel like any sort of time spent on NES/SNES in 2024 is just evidence of Nintendo doing unethical mind control/psychology tricks on children.
These people are talented, there is no sane reason they picked this project.
Such exploits always remind me of the line from Stross' Accelerando about the ultimate end game for hacking: "running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath"