

Retro Game Internals: Punch-Out Passwords - jeff18
http://tomorrowcorporation.com/posts/retro-game-internals-punch-out-passwords

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jlees
An interesting read; there's something really nice about the way older games
do things (like this saved state encoding, or anti-cheat by referring to
certain pages in the manual. In this age of cloud save (and I say this having
worked on a cloud save product!), we've lost a level of connection here.

I was intrigued as to how one would even figure out the sequence of operations
used to encode progress into a 'phone number'; a quick search turned up an in-
depth report ([http://www.dougbabcock.com/mtpo-
passwords.txt](http://www.dougbabcock.com/mtpo-passwords.txt)) which doesn't
appear to be credited in Allan's article. It looks like Doug used a password
archive to figure out the steps as an exercise in cracking, which itself
sounds jolly fun.

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Sanddancer
Amusing how the three busy signal codes correspond to Nintendo's customer
service lines for Japan, the US Toll Free, and Washington State. 135 792 4680
is obvious, but it makes me curious as to significance of the show credits and
direct to Tyson numbers. Especially in that era, hard-coded numbers were
rarely completely random. It's a bit interesting and amusing how 30 years
later, these games still have stories to tell.

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kalleboo
> 135 792 4680 is obvious

It's not obvious to me, could you explain?

~~~
haar
Odd progression, even progression.

