[HN Gopher] Castlevania III Password Algorithm
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Castlevania III Password Algorithm
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 124 points
Date : 2021-01-03 14:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meatfighter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (meatfighter.com)
| tubbyjr wrote:
| fing awesome
| vsavsa wrote:
| https://www-dev.medicine.uiowa.edu/sercc/sites/medicine.uiow...
| vsavsa wrote:
| safsaf https://www-
| dev.medicine.uiowa.edu/sercc/sites/medicine.uiow...
| vsavsa wrote:
| gewg https://www-
| dev.medicine.uiowa.edu/sercc/sites/medicine.uiow...
| vsavsa wrote:
| sawgfewqgew https://www-
| dev.medicine.uiowa.edu/sercc/sites/medicine.uiow...
| asdnoiad wrote:
| @dang hope this gets to you, seems to be a scam site promoting
| the games
| vsavsa wrote:
| wehgewhew
|
| https://www-dev.medicine.uiowa.edu/sercc/sites/medicine.uiow...
| city41 wrote:
| Castlevania 4's password system looks identical from the player's
| perspective. I wonder how similar the implementations are.
| scott_s wrote:
| As a kid, I was dumbfounded that passwords worked on NES games,
| and Castlevania III was my first introduction to the concept. I
| still remember staring at the screen not comprehending how
| putting in this combination of icons would get me my game back. I
| knew there's no way they could manually create a password for
| every game state, but I also had no conception of discrete
| states, algorithms and hashing, so I literally could not conceive
| of _how_ this thing in front of me worked.
|
| It is personally satisfying to finally get a complete
| understanding (even though I long ago understood it
| conceptually).
| fullstop wrote:
| Faxanadu passwords were the worst. Upper case, lower case,
| numbers, and some punctuation.
|
| It was, however, able to represent your inventory, location,
| money, etc. Pretty much a full state in ~24 characters, which I
| thought was very cool.. but 10-year old me didn't always write
| down the mantra correctly.
|
| You can read about this system here: http://www.the-
| interweb.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/...
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| I still think nothing beats Legend of the Mystical Ninja on
| Super NES. If you are playing a two player game and obtain a
| password, it's a full 60 characters you'll have to enter. For
| comparison, the Guardian Legend was 32 characters (like
| Faxandu) and Metroid was 24. I never played Magic of
| Scheherazade; looks like that weights in at 43 characters.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| another horrible game for passwords? international super
| star soccer deluxe.
|
| it was horrible[0] for really young me (and my
| friends/family) to type all the characters.
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/djWNEy3.png
| ranaexmachina wrote:
| The Golden Sun series had a password system to transfer
| your progress from Golden Sun 1 to Golden Sun 2. If you
| wanted to transfer everything it was _260_ characters. At
| least you only had to do this once and there was an option
| to use a link cable instead.
| SilasX wrote:
| Yes! Didn't think someone else would remember LotMN! What's
| worse, a few of the characters were easy to mistake for
| other ones, meaning we'd often enter the full thing (no
| keyboard, of course) and find it didn't work, either
| because we mistranscrobe it on "save" or misread what we
| had written.
|
| (For a while I thought each save _also_ used up memory and
| they were getting deleted but that wouldn't make sense.)
|
| Has anyone reverse engineered the encoding?
| city41 wrote:
| Always wished when passwords approached double digit
| territory that the devs would have sprung for the battery
| save.
|
| I always liked how Turbo Grafx did this. For many games if
| you had the Turbo Booster Plus or CD add on, you could save
| your game to their memory, otherwise you could use a
| password.
| grawprog wrote:
| Faxanadu passwords were pretty terrible for sure..but hands
| down the the absolute worst has to be james pond 3 on the
| genesis. There was like 4 different colours and a bunch of
| symbols like pieces of cheese and rayguns and stuff. The
| passwords were 32 characters long.
|
| https://www.andrewnile.co.uk/blog/james-pond-3-fish-code/
|
| Writing those things out was ridiculous. We had pages and
| pages scattered around with James pond passwords.
| [deleted]
| batty_alex wrote:
| Willow on the NES was also hilariously long and did a whole
| lot with 18 character passwords. Underrated game, too
| dole wrote:
| River City Ransom passwords were terrible as well. Lower,
| upper case, accents.
| nicetryguy wrote:
| Don't have negative thoughts. Remember your mantra!
| moron4hire wrote:
| There was this NES game called "The Magic of Scheherazade" that
| had what at first looked like a very complex password system,
| but even as a kid, I was able to figure out how to exploit it
| to cheat at the game, giving me lots of money or start at
| higher levels, as it wasn't actually hashed very well.
|
| The game itself is kind of obscure and looks like it's a cheap
| ripoff of Legend of Zelda (there are several scenes that are
| actually blatant rips), but it's got a lot of depth and is a
| lot of fun, even today. There's both over-world-action- and
| turn-based combat, and a whole time travel component.
|
| IIRC, the password system was so bad that you could create
| game-puzzle-breaking states with it, to where you were in
| certain levels without items that you needed to progress.
| worstenbrood wrote:
| I had the same experience with wonderboy 3: the dragons trap on
| the sega master system. Especially because it was a platform
| rpg where you could have different combinations of armor,
| weapons and shields.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Mega Man 2 had a similar password concept, but has less state
| to calculate: https://retromaggedon.com/index.php/mega-
| man-2-nes-passwords...
|
| I recall seeing codes in gaming magazines at the time, it was
| pretty neat being able to "send" this state over the mail.
| duxup wrote:
| I have a box of old Nintendo power magazines, the box is
| covered in Metroid codes.
| wesleyk wrote:
| Reminiscent of the Megaman / Megaman X games from my childhood.
| Megaman 2's algorithm is available as an example here:
| https://github.com/kpshek/mm2pwd
| u801e wrote:
| The original NES Metroid game also had a password, but just used
| letters and numbers IIRC. I remember taking a password for one of
| the games I was playing and incrementing it to find more valid
| passwords.
|
| Most of them took me back to the beginning of the game without
| any upgrades, but some of them put me in significantly later
| stages of the game without any upgrades.
| TillE wrote:
| The best story of NES passwords is of course JUSTIN BAILEY, which
| just happens to function as a Metroid password with a valid
| checksum, starting you out with a suitless Samus sprite and a
| bunch of equipment.
| j1elo wrote:
| These old games password systems analysis are always so
| entertaining and interesting to see... just like a glimpse onto
| the limitations that were faced by 8-bit console gamedevs in the
| early days, and the very clever solutions they came up with.
|
| There's this Youtube creator called _Bisqwit_ who has a complete
| series on cracking old videogame passwords:
|
| * Season 1:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLzYGEbdY5nEFQsxzFan...
|
| * Season 2:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLzYGEbdY5mmad-FKPIl...
| [deleted]
| _fs wrote:
| Name Description HELP ME Start and continue
| with 10 lives. AKAMA Start in Hard Mode alone.
| OKUDA Start in Normal Mode with Alucard.
|
| Ahh, back when games had cheat codes... nowadays, you'd have to
| pay $1.99 to unlock the extra difficulties and lives.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Now days it's more likely to be included in an accessibility
| menu. Games like Celeste, for instance, have options that might
| have historically been called "cheats".
| bdz wrote:
| >back when games had cheat codes
|
| Quite a coincidence because of the only remaining secret of
| Nier: Automata (2017) was discovered today, an intentional
| cheat that lets you jump to the end of the game (the game needs
| multiple playthroughs to see all endings and reach the real
| one)
|
| https://twitter.com/manfightdragon/status/134561558810678067...
|
| And it was confirmed by Yoko Taro as well (he previously said
| there is one thing left the players haven't uncovered yet)
| https://mobile.twitter.com/yokotaro/status/13457144900677468...
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(page generated 2021-01-03 23:01 UTC)