Jailbreaking Super Mario World to Install a Hex Editor and Mod Loader [video]

[skierscott]

At PyCon (not long ago), I saw a talk on hacking NES games and integration with Twilio.

The speaker live coded a hacking script for a NES emulator. He was showing off the Twilio API, which allowed the audience to text memory addresses and bytes to modify the games memory.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=v75rNdPukuI

[MrJagil]

Pannenkoek2012 does great breakdowns of SM64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A

If you like this sort of stuff, reddit.com/r/speedrun can be fun to visit.

[rjeli]

Pannenkoek just released a glorious 37 minute video on sm64 mechanics: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UnU7DJXiMAQ

And if you have never watched speed runs, Summoning Salt has a fascinating series on world record progressions in popular games: https://youtu.be/RdAkY7RfajY

[joshguthrie]

Pannenkoek2012 is both genius and crazy awesome at the same time. Its video "0.5x A Key Presses" provoked a riot in video game circles some times ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A

[CM30]

Okay, this is just insane. Modding the game via using a glitch to write custom code to it? That's impressive work.

Reminds me of some similar stuff you can do with Pokemon Red and Blue, which let you hack the games and share your changes to other people through the link cable functionality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2x3pIvVnP4

[ZenoArrow]

In a similar vein, there's the TASBot-programmed mods of Super Mario World. This one is particularly impressive (the mod you see on screen was programmed by controller inputs):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IOsvuEA2h4w

[ericfrederich]

This guy needs to travel back in time and do that on one of the demo machines in an electronics store.

[JTon]

I had a good laugh when he pulled all the controls, C-clamps, and multi-taps. Amazing.

[artemisbot]

The number of things people do to break old games consistently amazes me. Glitched speedruns ala 0 Exit in SMW (first demoed on a real SNES by the creator of this video) and Ocarina of Time Any% show an insane amount of dedication.

[cgijoe]

That's just insanity. Love Seth's work.

[jordache]

how do they even find what each hex code does? wow

[pubby]

It's all 65c816 machine code, which is well documented. You'd run the ROM through a disassembler and use an emulator to find out what everything does. Most (all?) of the disassembly work has already been done though, as SMW is very, very popular to romhack.