Video games are fun by themselves, but they are also a playground for creativity. Here are some incredible hacks where players manage to execute Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE)

Incredible hacks

• Pokemon Yellow reprogrammed from the inside is a 2012 tool assisted ACE in Pokemon Yellow.
• Super mario Bros 3 Credits Warp is a very complex live ACE. Live video, explanation
• Solving Sploosh Kaboom is another amazing speedrunning story. This time they reverse-engineered the Pseudo Random Number Generator in Zelda Wind Waker in order to beat a very annoying minigame consistently. Wow.
• Speaking of Random Number Generators, here is a nice article about a fixed point in New Super Mario Bros PRNG. It makes all numbers generated with this seed identicals, and it’s interesting to see what the consequences are in the game.
• Paper Mario Any% Speedrun with Arbitrary Code Execution assisted by Ocarina of Time. That’s probably both the craziest arbitry code execution and speedrun I’ve seen so far. It’s performed in real time, live on Twitch, with real hardware !

TL;DR: We’re using ACE (Arbitrary Code Execution) in OoT to write code to memory that we can reach with a glitch in Paper Mario after quickly swapping cartridges [(If we quickly turn off the console, swap cartridges to Paper Mario, and turn the console back on, that instruction will still be there in memory)], and then that code lets us write more code with our filenames that warps us to the end of the game.

More technical details here.

• Missingno. A Rust keynote talk about how Pokemon is made, and how it led to the presence of a buggy pokemon.

Speedrunning stories

You probably don’t need me to browse youtube but if you are into speedrunning, there are 2 youtube channels you should check out:

• Summoning Salt has videos on the history behind world records
• Bismuth focuses mostly on tool assisted speedruns and on the techniques behind world records.

Some of my favorite videos include:

• Super Mario Bros. World Record Explained. TL;DR: it requires thousands of tries to perfectly achievte all the necessary glitches to improve slightly the record.
• The Legend of Zelda World Record Speedrun Explained. Well that’s just a classic game, but so many glitches are necessary !
• The story behing Dark Souls 2, all bosses no hits. The story behind finishing arguably one of the hardest games ever made without a single hit in a 12 hour run.
• How Lucky is Too Lucky Did Dream Cheat at Minecraft ? Matt reverse engineered a speedrun with statistics and probabilities in order to verify if it’s likely to perform such a run that requires random items to appear. Another article explains with napkin maths the financial reasons behind such cheats.

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