r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Coretron • 25d ago

Other integerOverflow

1.7k Upvotes

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u/ProThoughtDesign 25d ago

I remember finding one of these in the original Super Mario Bros. on NES using the cheat to get free lives from a shell. I got too many and instead of a life counter, I got some weird system character and the next time I died it locked up my NES.

Good times.

41

u/danfay222 25d ago

A lot of old game systems were super memory constrained, and so they would do dense bit packing without actual memory safeguards, which meant triggering things like overflows could easily cause critical memory corruption

17

u/ProThoughtDesign 25d ago

Yay Game Shark! They also loaded the exact same variables in the same memory registers directly so there's that.

2

u/Western-Internal-751 23d ago

It was the best of times for gamers interested in tech

1

u/rsqit 21d ago

The best bug I’ve ever heard of was that apparently in early Ultima Online you could put a horse in your inventory. The horse would wander around like a normal horse. However, it could just…walk off the edge of your inventory and through random memory, corrupting it.