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[MrRoboto75]

Yeah, back in the day I used to have one of the "Black Cartridge" Pac-Man games.  Not licensed by nintendo.

[methylatedspirit]

I think I've just discovered the best glitch in an emulator. It's in VICE, specifically in the SID emulator part VSID. There's this music, Empty (512 bytes), and it comes with not only a .prg file, but also a SID file. I think there's something ever so slightly wrong with the SID file in both downloads that it ends up playing wrong on VICE, but for some reason, the version in the HSVC works perfectly fine. JSIDplay2 plays the files just fine, so I think it's an issue with the emulator.

If you don't play anything before Empty, it ends up sounding like Voice 1 and 2 fade away very quickly, only leaving you with Voice 3. The best part comes when you play something before Empty. I think what happens is that the pitch registers for Voices 1 and 2 are held from the previous song at the exact moment the song is switched, which ends up producing some of the most discordant music since *insert least-favorite artist here*.

Listen to some example trainwrecks for yourself. (I'm not using YT because my account name is now my real name. Thanks, uni.)

[King Zultan]

Were those black cartage Nintendo games rare or something as I've only ever seen one and its some weird religious game.

[wierd]

There as a 2 part security system made using nintendo proprietary silicon, in the form of the 10NES chip.

To play on the NES, cartridges needed this chip inside them.

Late in the console's life, a few ways to circumvent this were developed.  Most of the religious pablum games take the authentication system offline with a voltage spike early in power on. (potentially dangerous to the console... but... whatever.)  Tengen however, used legal trickery to obtain a copy of the chip's sourcecode, and used it to produce its own matching silicon.

[voliol]

A little late perhaps, but here is a video repeating what Reelya said about the final Pacman level:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKKfW8X9uYk
It's basically the same explanation, but with illustrations/animations.

[Naturegirl1999]

I remember a few videos I saw that showed it messing with the right half of the screen but not the left half, like the left half looked normal but the right half was corrupted infinitely generating dots and very very pixelated, not even looking like a maze

[MrRoboto75]

Today I tried to make a replacement card for one of the Dominion sets I own, as one of its cards was bent with a crease on arrival.  The base set gives you blanks to fill in case of this.

I tried writing it in pencil and inking over it with Micron pens.  Micron pens do not enjoy cardstock.  Micron pens and cardstock basically act like dry erase on whiteboard.  So I wasted an hour or two and a blank card, and I'm not sure what would work better.  The card to replace has a lot of text to write, so the fine tip was useful to fit it all on.

[Reelya]

I remember a few videos I saw that showed it messing with the right half of the screen but not the left half, like the left half looked normal but the right half was corrupted infinitely generating dots and very very pixelated, not even looking like a maze

What's happened is it drew 256 fruit into a buffer that's meant to hold the symbols for 7 fruit. This then overwrites the right hand part of the screen going downwards. Why would it do that though? Traditional Japanese writing flows in the same direction as the gibberish symbols seem to be in Pac Man level 256. So in other words it feels weird that that's the direction of the screen buffer they went with, but only if you're taking an English-centric view of how things are supposed to be. It's reasonable to assume the designer laid out the map like that because that's how Japanese writing works.

The reason most of the symbols are gibberish is because not only does the bug over-write the part of memory they're meant to be writing to, it also reads way past the part of memory it's meant to be copying from. After all, it was only expected to copy 7 symbols for one place in memory to another, but it reads and copies 256 "symbols" instead, which is basically reading random memory contents that have nothing to do with symbols. And, similar to glitch pokemon, those values could exceed the number of actual symbols the game knows about, so when it comes to draw the screen, it's drawing some real symbols, but also copying blocks of pure gibberish and putting those on the screen.

[Naturegirl1999]

I was more asking why isn’t The Who,e screen gibberish?

[bloop_bleep]

It only overwrites part of the memory associated with the screen.

[Naturegirl1999]

Thanks

[Reelya]

What happens is that it writes 256 symbols into a buffer. The first 7 were the buffer for storing the fruit symbols on the bottom right, but it exceeds that and starts writing into memory reserved for other things, in this case where the map is stored. But since it only writes a set amount of symbols before stopping, it doesn't overwrite the *whole* screen.

It's 256 because that's how many possible values an 8-bit number can hold.

To summarize why it happens, the game writes 7 'fruit' symbols as your level indicator. So from 7 up, it always writes 7 symbols. But, if the level is lower, it does a different thing where it writes between 1 and 6 symbols. So, if the level = 1, it writes 1 symbol, then stops.

So it goes like this:

1) set a counter to 1
2) draw the symbol for the counter
3) is the counter equal to the current level? If yes, then stop
4) increase the counter by 1
5) go to step 2

The problem occurs because if you input level = 0 into this, it still thinks it's a low level, but it still starts the counter from 1, and only realizes it needs to stop after it's cycled all the way up to 255, then clocked the counter back to zero.

EDIT: and the funny thing is that if any of probably a dozen different decisions had been made differently, this bug wouldn't have happened, or nobody would have noticed. For example, if he chose to draw the fruit *first* then the 256 fruit would have been drawn, then the map would have been drawn over the fruit, fixing the problem. The bug would still be there, but no-one would have ever noticed. Or, if he decided to count level 0 as the first level, the problem would have been fixed in development. Or, if he used "<=" rather than "=" for the loop test, it would merely have drawn no fruit at all instead of 256, leaving the "level 256 doesn't show any fruit" "bug" as a very obscure bit of lore indeed. And probably a number of other decisions if made differently would have killed this bug.

[LordBaal]

What in the actuall fuck. Which are the odds of having the qanon crap explained here and then today talk with someone here, in the butthole of the world, telling me that Trump is indeed figthing a battle against the antichrist, anunakis, reptiloids and Jheova were woven into this actually interesting sci-fi movie of interplanetary conquest and layered conspiracies that hide a war that has been going on for millenia, back then with rayguns, now with media and social conditioning....

Oh and of course your standard: "Pfff those that said aliens build the pyramids are crazy. It was of course humans.... with alien antigravity tech."

I was like, yeah, cool history but I really need this money, could you let me finish changing this pipes, Im not expert plumber so I need to be extra careful.

The hell is going on with people???

[Reelya]

This is why it's relevant and I started looking into it. My landlord, flatmate, randos in the street etc started trying to pill me on the worst sort of conspiracy crap this year.

I'm going to write a bit about this, random thoughts.

What I think has happened is (see Simulacra and Simulation) people experience reality not through "raw reality" but through a web of symbols and meanings we've constructed to explain reality. When something new happens, we want an explanation of how that fits in with our preexisting web of meanings. Also, people don't like to feel powerless, they like the feeling of agency, even if that feeling is completely fake. It's the pretense of agency that is sought.

These two main facts explain why people are drawn to conspiracy theories in times of crisis. First, a crisis cuts through all the layers of meaning we've built up. For example, a virus kills a king as easily as a beggar or cuts across borders as if they don't exist. It renders our abstractions meaningless, so the layers of meaning are dissolved. Therefore a void of meaning appears, which is ripe for conspiracy grifters to exploit. The virus doesn't give a shit, there's no deeper meaning behind these events. Nature doesn't like us or hate us, it's a constant roll of the dice and this year we came up unlucky. 100 years worth of unlucky.

The main point here isn't that there are no other things that constantly challenge our beliefs, it's that a virus is just a harder one to ignore. So, a capitalist Christian can just ignore the homeless, because they rationalize away the existence of the homeless. Perhaps they're just bad people and God punished them for being bad.

The virus cuts through and challenges every belief system, however some face the challenge better than others. For example, if you have a good knowledge of science basics it's not that hard to follow along with the progress of the virus and nothing that's happening challenges anything we already knew about viruses and the risk of disease. However, for an evangelical protestant, for example, a pandemic is a serious challenge to their worldview, since if there's a Just God who carefully manipulates the world then it's hard to comprehend how a virus could just rip through and kill Christians and non-believers just as easily. So they're prone to conspiracy theories including that "satanists" caused the virus or are somehow manipulating the virus for power, because this absolves God of responsibility, thus reducing their own cognitive dissonance.

It's a basic test of how good your worldview was. If your understanding of raw reality itself was basically the same before the pandemic as afterwards, then by definition you had a robust world view. This doesn't mean it was right or wrong, but the pandemic is the challenge and if you can incorporate that new information into your worldview without having to change your understanding of reality itself, then your worldview was robust, by definition. However, people who have a worldview built on delusion, fantasy, no matter what book that's from, they're hit with the pure indiscriminate spread of a plague and suddenly they're yelling about how doctors are really satan and this has revealed that the servants of Moloch walk amongst us.

As for why they refuse to go along with health advice, that can partly be explained as wanting at least the illusion of agency. Going along with things like mask wearing doesn't feel like agency. For example, a local conspiracy theorist here was telling everyone to wear masks, back before it was general advice, but as soon as the government said they think everyone should wear a mask, she reversed her advice and said masks were evil. The simplest explanation is that by going against expert advice you can retain a feeling of personal agency, as if you're doing something about it. And even if this doesn't actually help you in the slightest, it helps these people psychologically.

[Naturegirl1999]

Oh am I glad to not be around QAnon people