11th October 2005, 3:07 PM
I know that. I REALLY know that. I've said as much myself in the past. That is not what I am saying.
I'm basically saying what you said after that, about the actual saved files being corrupted beyond usability. As I said, different games will cope with utterly corrupted save data in different ways. Pokemon, for example, will fail to even load up if you corrupt the saved data. I suppose that the right Game Shark code will clear the data out, or you could open it and remove the battery for a short period of time (in older tech that used batteries anyway). The only exception would be if the saved data has to already be, from the start, in a certain format and the game isn't designed to format a blank slate. Then, you are basically screwed.
As for NES games, you can't alter the code on them either. The only thing you could change would be saved data. Same thing basically, except for one. Apparently, you CAN short the thing out. I used to have a copy of FF1 that screwed up so bad that the characters for naming... characters... were changed to random bits of data. I tried everything to undo the effect, including removing the battery to clear the saved data (here's the odd thing, removing the save battery did not delete the data immediatly. I actually had to wait overnight, I think a capacitor may have been to blame for that, possibly holding an extra charge that had to slowly disappate). I also made sure that all the pins were making perfect contact. In the end, the only conclusion I could come up with was that there was some glitch inside the game. A later copy of FF1 worked just fine and still does. Then there is the issue of SMB3. I'm not sure what happened there. All I know is that game has NO save battery, no EPROM (that wasn't even in use in NES games, just a sort of RAM that used a battery), and could not be written to. The only thing I can think of is the Genie actually shorted out the ROM somehow and ruined it. Anyway, ever since a particularly experimental code, it no longer works, forever. It did make a pretty horrid noise when I put that code in there... Too bad too, since I had a pretty cool code for SMB3 that shrunk every single sprite that Mario had into about the size of his hat (cycling through), gave me P wing status all the time, and made every level behave like an underwater level. The crippling part of that is that pipes do NOT work underwater in SMB3, so you couldn't finish the game (and it was a "3 liner" code, so no extra codes to bail me out).
I'm basically saying what you said after that, about the actual saved files being corrupted beyond usability. As I said, different games will cope with utterly corrupted save data in different ways. Pokemon, for example, will fail to even load up if you corrupt the saved data. I suppose that the right Game Shark code will clear the data out, or you could open it and remove the battery for a short period of time (in older tech that used batteries anyway). The only exception would be if the saved data has to already be, from the start, in a certain format and the game isn't designed to format a blank slate. Then, you are basically screwed.
As for NES games, you can't alter the code on them either. The only thing you could change would be saved data. Same thing basically, except for one. Apparently, you CAN short the thing out. I used to have a copy of FF1 that screwed up so bad that the characters for naming... characters... were changed to random bits of data. I tried everything to undo the effect, including removing the battery to clear the saved data (here's the odd thing, removing the save battery did not delete the data immediatly. I actually had to wait overnight, I think a capacitor may have been to blame for that, possibly holding an extra charge that had to slowly disappate). I also made sure that all the pins were making perfect contact. In the end, the only conclusion I could come up with was that there was some glitch inside the game. A later copy of FF1 worked just fine and still does. Then there is the issue of SMB3. I'm not sure what happened there. All I know is that game has NO save battery, no EPROM (that wasn't even in use in NES games, just a sort of RAM that used a battery), and could not be written to. The only thing I can think of is the Genie actually shorted out the ROM somehow and ruined it. Anyway, ever since a particularly experimental code, it no longer works, forever. It did make a pretty horrid noise when I put that code in there... Too bad too, since I had a pretty cool code for SMB3 that shrunk every single sprite that Mario had into about the size of his hat (cycling through), gave me P wing status all the time, and made every level behave like an underwater level. The crippling part of that is that pipes do NOT work underwater in SMB3, so you couldn't finish the game (and it was a "3 liner" code, so no extra codes to bail me out).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)