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Bot reprogrammed a Super Mario World cartridge to compile Pong. And Snake. Wat.

TuismTuism
edited in General
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/how-an-emulator-fueled-robot-reprogrammed-super-mario-world-on-the-fly/


This is pretty nuts. So apparently one could program bots to play a game in such a way as to compile code. Like, real code.

Why don't modern games do this? :O We need more platformers that can compile Pong. And Snake. Maybe the entire first half of FFVII.

Comments

  • dislekciadislekcia
    edited
    Tuism said:
    This is pretty nuts. So apparently one could program bots to play a game in such a way as to compile code. Like, real code.

    Why don't modern games do this? :O We need more platformers that can compile Pong. And Snake. Maybe the entire first half of FFVII.
    It didn't compile code. Raw instructions (binary 1s and 0s that are the eventual output of a compiler) were input into the game's memory and those instructions could run Pong and Snake, using the game's already loaded assets ;)

    It's still cool as hell, it's just not compiling code on the machine - the already-compiled code is loaded into memory by the bot using controller input data. That's only possible using a specific glitch in the game that will make it start trying to run instructions from the memory buffers that the controller inputs get stored in.

    Modern games have similar bugs. There was a specific save file for Mech Commander (I think it was) on the original Xbox that allowed people to run arbitrary instructions that they could add to the end of the file. That's how loads of original Xboxes were rooted and turned into media machines - and where XBMC came from, back in the day! These days few people write stuff in actual machine code, higher level languages are easier for programmers to understand and can be compiled to multiple different types of CPU instruction sets. You do not want to be doing that by hand...
  • ChippitChippit
    The bug in question is called a buffer overflow, which is generally exploited to allow you to exectute arbitrary code. This happens in all sorts of things, not just games, and it's a really serious security flaw. For example, Windows XP's GDI layer had a bug that would do this when opening PNG images, and it would manifest in a whole bunch of Windows applications. These sorts of issues are REALLY unlikely to turn up in testing, and usually require carefully crafted files/inputs in order to get them to do anything other than just crash fantastically (or cause software to start doing weird things), and so they occasionally sneak into releases, often going undiscovered for years (or forever!).

    @dislekcia's pretty much got it with regards to it appearing in games, although I believe the Xbox game in question is Mechassault (close enough!). A similar exploit was available in older PS2's right in the BIOS, and on Wii the game that's at fault is Zelda: Twilight Princess. These classes of bugs are the basis of homebrew software on a LOT of platforms, since it's generally the easiest way to get any old code to run on otherwise closed devices.

    But yes, a very cool demonstration of it in action in an unusually visual manner!
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