by Snorb » Thu Jun 19, '14, 1:57 am
Every so often, I get the urge to go through some games-- PC games, video game roms-- with a hex editor and see if there's anything. Usually, I get a bunch of garbled code, but sometimes I strike gold.
Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday for the Genesis is one of those instances of gold. For example, what I found:
*The game's name is misspelled in the ROM header as "BUCK RODGERS COUNTDOWN TO DOOMSD", probably because of size limitations.
*There's a lot of subroutine names in plain text (such as ADDCORPSE, ADDFIGURE, SPACECOMBAT, and so on.)
*The game's entire credits are in plain text-- Tony Van, the lead developer of the Genesis version of Shadowrun, was also the lead developer for this game.
*Some weapons are dummied out of the game-- knives, monoknives, swords, bolt guns, any kind of rifles (rocket or laser), sonic stunners, and polearms; each of these was in the PC version as well as the pen and paper game.
*There's mention in the code of "and you record . as logbook entry .", leftovers from the PC version's copy protection.
*Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday was worked on September 5, 1991.
*There's a complete list of ship names in plain text: Maelstrom Rider (your ship), Van Allen, Hubble, Copernicus, Kepler, Goddard, Adder, Viper, Anaconda, Sidewinder, Boomslang, Mojave, Sahara, Gobi, Outback, Kalihari, Flare, Corona, Hermes, Osiris, Apollo, Liberator, Eclipse, Daisy, Gambit, Dervish. I think these might be grouped by where you encounter the ships (scientists near Mars, snakes near Venus...) and someone on the programming team was a Blake's 7 fan, apparently.
The Cutting Room Floor (at tcrf.net) has a lot of stuff dummied out of games, including the Phantasy Star series! (WARNING: Some of the stuff may have salty language, so ye be warned.)
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Well, excuse me while I defy all laws of logic and common sense and do it anyway.