Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpalawaga | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'm surprised that it took tetris so long to be broken! I strongly suspect this will usher in a new era of any% runs, in which the goal is to get the end scene/credits of the game to run as quickly as possible.

My favourite example of this is Ocarina of Time, which has had ACE exploits for years now. The game is so totally broken, it can be "beat" in just a handful of minutes by manipulating the games memory and editing specific entrance warps.

Perhaps most incredibly, people edit the memory with their hands, using nothing more than a couple buttons and the analog joystick.

here is someone who rolled credits in just 3m: https://www.speedrun.com/oot/runs/z1l1627m

View on HN

I saw a similar one Super Mario, where finding a glitch in a warp tunnel triggered an out of bounds read, and prior joysticking wrote the appropriate bytes just beyond the buffer to trigger whatever they wanted.

There was another one in a Pokemon game where you had to do a bunch of buy/ sell transactions to prep memory just so, then overflow an item count to trigger a jump.

Truly fantastic stuff. Someday aliens will attack and these antics will save us.

Super Mario World code injection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0

Just based on reading TFA, I doubt it since the ACE apparently relies on getting to the kill screen in the first place. Imagine if OoT's ACE was triggered by the end credits rolling; you can't improve your times with it because it only happens after completing a run successfully.

Honestly, I'm surprised that it took tetris so long to be broken!

Before this, what made you think arbitrary execution was plausible?

Things like this are common in software of the era, but few look for such things.

That doesn't answer the question at all. They said specifically that they expected this in tetris before it happened for some reason.

The entire nature of the kill screen in NES Tetris is that the game crashes because the game has written over its stack.

It might help if you told us what you think makes Tetris unique in that an ACE would be assumed to be implausible rather than simply not yet found

...that does answer question tho?

tetris = old game

old game = expectation of ACE bugs

thus, tetris = expectation of ACE bugs

That is what I meant, thank you.

Not many people actively look for bugs like this. It usually takes a chance discovery to be made widely know before someone else realizes that they have everything needed to do something like this.

If people actively looked, like they scrutinize modern software, these things would be fully understood, or at least fully documented, in no time. But, as I said, almost no one looks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com