

Hidden messages in NES games' code - amelim
http://magweasel.com/2009/08/29/hidden-messagin/

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chaosmachine
If you have a copy of the original Prince of Persia (the DOS game), open up
prince.exe in a hex editor :)

~~~
hardik
Whats in there??

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chaosmachine
Quotes from early reviews of the game. Here's a few:

"A tremendous achievement. . . Mechner has crafted the smoothest animation
ever seen in a game of this type."

"PRINCE OF PERSIA is the STAR WARS of its field."

They aren't accessible inside the game, you have to be reading through the
executable to find them. I discovered this by chance back in the early 90s.

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malkia
My favourite was in Trolls, which I have seen it myself somewhere 1992-1993,
later it was put in mobygames:

<http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/trolls>

"This game was written on a very slow schneider 10mhz 286 with lots of wait
states. If for some reason on your very fast xxxx 25mh 486 this game seems to
be fast or unplayable, do no blame us for it was a penny pinching boss who
would not buy us reasonable pc's to work on. signed THE PROGRAMMERS OF FLAIR
SOFTWARE"

~~~
flooha
lol reminds me of the original Mech Warrior. A faster processor made it look
like the game was in fast forward.

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jcl
This reminds me of a neat trick I saw in an old 4k demo: adding text (e.g. the
creator's name) at the very beginning of the binary. They'd figured out what
the text meant in machine language, then added a few opcodes after to undo the
effects of executing the text directly.

~~~
bitwize
Did they tack a ^Z after the text so that when you TYPE the executable, you
get just the "hi mom from bitphr33k / n3cr0ph1li4" or whatever?

~~~
jcl
IIRC, they did not, but that would have been a great idea.

