was such a long password really necessary?:')

[maelbrazil]

The game's Gargoyle Quest ll for the NES btw

 

[Dr.Kisaragi]

Man! Passwords are like telephone hotline.

 

[qw90700]

Depends, I saw longer ones lol.

Passwords gotta contain state of the game, location of the player to what the player may have in their inventory. Not to mention all these + all possible differences that overall state of the player may have in the game requires as long as password it needs!!

 

[Nelson2001 Nelson2001]

It can vary according to the characters between 4 to more than 16 characters and also the numbers, letters and consonants, symbols and sometimes objects depending on the game.

 

[Yuniheim]

Depends, I saw longer ones lol.

Passwords gotta contain state of the game, location of the player to what the player may have in their inventory. Not to mention all these + all possible differences that overall state of the player may have in the game requires as long as password it needs!!

This exactly. Some good examples of this are Golden Sun and some Megaman games.

 

[qw90700]

This exactly. Some good examples of this are Golden Sun and some Megaman games.

And then we have a password system using pictures instead: https://castlevania.fandom.com/wiki/Castlevania_III:_Dracula's_Curse/Passwords

You either had to draw it, give a name to these symbols or take picture of it which even makes the password system hard!!! lol

 

[Xdqwerty Xdqwerty]

Atleast you didnt have to input the entire bee movie script in hex code

 

[X y b e r - S k u ll]

Reminds me of this

 

[anonimo123]

 

[maelbrazil]

Depends, I saw longer ones lol.

Passwords gotta contain state of the game, location of the player to what the player may have in their inventory. Not to mention all these + all possible differences that overall state of the player may have in the game requires as long as password it needs!!

that blew my mind
so what you are doing when setting a password is programming the game to put you in a specific place with specific items instead of just loading a save file?

 

[cloudsets]

that blew my mind
so what you are doing when setting a password is programming the game to put you in a specific place with specific items instead of just loading a save file?

Yes, the passwords all refer to all the data that would normally be stored in a save file. The game takes all the variables that could be relevant to your game state at the time you save and encodes them as the password it shows you. When you input that password again, the game converts it back to that information and loads up the game state associated with it.

You can even “hack” the passwords if you can figure out what values are associated with what information and give yourself a desirable state. For instance, if you figure out what part of the password represents a life counter, you can calculate how to maximize your lives every time you start the game again.

 

[pai]

Reminds me of this

lol i trought of this one

 

[qw90700]

that blew my mind
so what you are doing when setting a password is programming the game to put you in a specific place with specific items instead of just loading a save file?

Yeah but this is really not "programming" per se, it's rather about triggering the game in the way it can react as how it's designed. It's pretty much a system checking so many values in so much codes of the game that need to know what to do depending on what kind of conditions are valid.

For example most simple password is about which level you wanna go to. When you start the game all the usual order of the code being processed like playing a music file from the start but when you enter a password you directly "jump to" the level the password is for.

When game gets complex the password contains more different values it contains like item codes, state codes and all. Naturally these values are what the player can change by playing the game like how many people you saved, if everyone was saved or not, if a special boss was killed or not, what items you have and how many of them you have, et cetera.

Technically a simple save file works via pretty much the same system that simple passwords are as passwords are actually manually entered content of simple save files when these save files are automatically recorded passwords. However as save files got complex the less you can make a password for that. Some save files record an aspect of RAM that people are familiar with how emulator save states works but not so same. Some save files have a whole database especially for modern RPGs so game will know which quests you cleared and even what kind of outcome you had with the quests. Naturally complexity calls for encoding so many possible values to record and need.

 

[Kremiso]

ah ah
i remember International Superstar Soccer on SNES back then, each time carefully copying that extra long string with a lot of number/special char/letter similarities

i felt cold in my spine

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Considering how awfully long text passwords (as opposed to image-based ones) were on the NES, and how common they were, I'd wager that they had something to do with the machine itself and it was not the result of some widespread workplace incompetence :P

I remember reading that the console can't even visualize its own color scheme -- you had to input the correct codes for each one you wanted to depict step-by-step.

 

[Cardboardtubeknight Cardboardtubeknight]

Imagine going to Tom Nook and just speaking nonsense to get a fishing rod early

 

[Scotty]

Yeesh! I'll take the image based passwords (Castlevania: Bloodlines, Megaman 3, Aladdin (SNES)) over writing morse code. And god forbid it doesn't work because some characters look identical to each other.

 

[thecrow2313]

Man! Passwords are like telephone hotline.

Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle passwords were easy to remember

Post automatically merged: Today at 4:20 PM

View attachment 98674

 

[maelbrazil]

Yeah but this is really not "programming" per se, it's rather about triggering the game in the way it can react as how it's designed. It's pretty much a system checking so many values in so much codes of the game that need to know what to do depending on what kind of conditions are valid.

For example most simple password is about which level you wanna go to. When you start the game all the usual order of the code being processed like playing a music file from the start but when you enter a password you directly "jump to" the level the password is for.

When game gets complex the password contains more different values it contains like item codes, state codes and all. Naturally these values are what the player can change by playing the game like how many people you saved, if everyone was saved or not, if a special boss was killed or not, what items you have and how many of them you have, et cetera.

Technically a simple save file works via pretty much the same system that simple passwords are as passwords are actually manually entered content of simple save files when these save files are automatically recorded passwords. However as save files got complex the less you can make a password for that. Some save files record an aspect of RAM that people are familiar with how emulator save states works but not so same. Some save files have a whole database especially for modern RPGs so game will know which quests you cleared and even what kind of outcome you had with the quests. Naturally complexity calls for encoding so many possible values to record and need.

based on this, considering that you've never played the game before, could you technically set the password to get you straight to the last possible CONTINUE with all items and power-ups?

 

[thecrow2313]

The Guardian Legend password system was 32 characters long including a mix of letters and numbers

 

[Kremiso]

my god, i think to remember some cases where the password itself disappeared after a while, you hadn't the time to write down lul

 

[Adrastia]

Depends, I saw longer ones lol.

Passwords gotta contain state of the game, location of the player to what the player may have in their inventory. Not to mention all these + all possible differences that overall state of the player may have in the game requires as long as password it needs!!

This is why terrible font choices were such a nightmare. I'm looking at you, Faxanadu!

 

[thecrow2313]

my god, i think to remember some cases where the password itself disappeared after a while, you hadn't the time to write down lul

Could be very worse

 

[qw90700]

based on this, considering that you've never played the game before, could you technically set the password to get you straight to the last possible CONTINUE with all items and power-ups?

Well each part of code means something and it triggers different aspect of the game.

For example a code may be "AB34??":

"AB" here may mean which level you would jump to.

Let's consider in the game player can only get a pistol and its ammo as weapon so then "3" here could be an item code for the pistol and "4" would be how much ammo it has.

"??" could be how much lives you have left or "how many people you saved" in the game before.

So by figuring these stuff out you my manipulate passwords to get an item you never had, jump to a further level you were never before and stuff but lots of passwords are not that easy. I can say developers sometimes bothered a lot especially in a way accidental passwords because of "0" and "O" or something won't make the password work so they had to pick very different values between different passwords. They wouldn't want you cheat the game that easy!!! Sometimes even a simple "how many lives you had code" can be like "?xAa4L" and no amount of number of lives would look that similar lol.

 

[maelbrazil]

Well each part of code means something and it triggers different aspect of the game.

For example a code may be "AB34??":

"AB" here may mean which level you would jump to.

Let's consider the game player can only get a pistol and its ammo as weapon so then "3" here could be an item code for the pistol and "4" would be how much ammo it has.

"??" could be how much lives you have left or "how many people you saved" in the game before".

So by figuring these stuff out you my manipulate passwords to get an item you never had, jump to a further level you were never before and stuff but lots of passwords are not that easy. I can say developers sometimes bothered a lot especially in a way accidental passwords because of "0" and "O" or something won't make the password work so they had to pick very different values between different passwords. They wouldn't want you cheat the game that easy!!! Sometimes even a simple "how many lives you had code" can be like "?xAa4L" and no amount of number of lives would look that similar lol.

pretty well explained, thanks a bunch:D