About a year ago I was looking at Crash Bandicoot timer systems and I found that Crash 3 has a constantly incrementing int32. It only resets if you die.
Left for 2.26 years, it will overflow.
When it does finally overflow, we get "minus" time and the game breaks in funny ways. I did a video about it: https://youtu.be/f7ZzoyVLu58
There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race.
So the invisible 12h timer runs during cutscenes. During Excalibur 2 runs, I used to open and close the PS1 disc tray to skip (normally unskippable) cutscenes. Never knew why that worked.
I’m going to wager that the cutscenes are all XA audio/video DMA’d from the disc. Opening the disc kills the DMA and the error recovery is just to end the cutscene and continue. The program is in RAM, so a little interruption on reading doesn’t hurt unless you need to time it to avoid an error reading the file for the next section of gameplay.
I recall that handling disc eject was an explicit part of the Tech Requirements Doc (things the console manufacturer requires you to comply with). They'd typically check while playing, while loading and while streaming.
I'm guessing the game probably streams FMV cutscenes of the disc as they play, and the fallback behaviour if it can't find them is to skip rather than crash.
Oh yeah. The sword you pick up in Memoria. The problem there is that the PAL version runs slower; the way PSX games "translated" between the two video systems was just to have longer VSync pauses for PAL. So the game is actually slower, not interpolated
Erm. No, like lots of games during the era quite a lot of stuff is tied to the frame rate, so the 50Hz region game just runs slower than the 60Hz one as next to nobody bothers to adjust for it. The clock for the hidden weapon does run at the same rate for both unfortunately, hence it being harder to get in 50Hz regions.
No? Wall time (that the challenge runs on) is unchanged, game time (Vsync) is running at 83% of full speed (50Hz vs 60Hz), so if something tied to frame rate (animation, walking speed etc.) takes 1 second to do on NTSC, it'll take 1.2 seconds to do on PAL etc.
I think many games were that way. SotN definitely has a global timer. On a native 32-bit system it makes sense, especially when the life of a game was a few months to a few years on the retail shelf. No player is going to leave their system running for 2.27 years so what’s the point of even tesing it?
Who knew at the time they were creating games that would be disassembled, deconstructed, reverse engineered. Do any of us think about that regarding any program we write?
Can be more than timers too. There's a funny one in Paper Mario where a block technically can be hit so many times it'll reset and award items again. Hit enough times it'll eventually crash. Of course it'd take around 30 years for the first rollover and 400 or so for the crash.
https://n64squid.com/paper-mario-reward-block-glitch/
Doom is actually such a good game, I always go back to it every few years. The 2016 reboot is also pretty fun, but the later two in the series didn’t do it for me.
Same. Something about the metroidvania design with the home hub of the later ones didn’t give the same feeling. It should be run, kill, find secrets, end, next level.
Fun fact: Doom is now a Microsoft property, along with Quake, StarCraft, WarCraft, Overwatch, all of the adventure games from Infocom and Sierra, and of course Halo. Microsoft pretty much owns most of PC gaming. Which is what they've wanted since 1996 or so.
They own the past of PC gaming, as well as Call of Duty but that is more popular on consoles than PC nowadays. Those listed are small time compared to Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Roblox, Apex Legends, Marvel Rivals and a number of hard-hitting games every year such as Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3 etc.
They missed that window when Sierra was still the publisher for Half-Life. Besides, Valve is not a publicly traded company and Gabe Newell as former manager at Microsoft has no interest in getting back together. Valve is betting everything on Linux right now to be more independent from Microsoft.
Assuming correct implementation of the NTP spec and adherence to the "eras" functions, NTP should be resistant to this failure in 2036.
The problem being so many micro-controllers, non-interfaceable or cheaply designed computers/devices/machines might not follow the standards and therefore be susceptible although your iPhone, Laptop and Fridge should all be fine.
This headline gave me a heart attack... I misread the site's name as Lenovo, and as I'm responsible for a whole lot of their servers running for years in a critical role... heart attack.
It's also running on very old hardware, potentially with some electrolytic capacitors that have dried up. And, there's always the possibility that it's a gamma ray [1]!
At the time of writing the comment it was practically instantaneous for me and the comment was genuine. Now it seems to be having trouble and I'm choosing to retroactively make the comment a joke about Jira ;)