About a year ago I was looking at Crash Bandicoot timer systems and I found that Crash 3 has a constantly incrementing int32. It only resets if you die.
Left for 2.26 years, it will overflow.
When it does finally overflow, we get "minus" time and the game breaks in funny ways. I did a video about it: https://youtu.be/f7ZzoyVLu58
There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race.
So the invisible 12h timer runs during cutscenes. During Excalibur 2 runs, I used to open and close the PS1 disc tray to skip (normally unskippable) cutscenes. Never knew why that worked.
I’m going to wager that the cutscenes are all XA audio/video DMA’d from the disc. Opening the disc kills the DMA and the error recovery is just to end the cutscene and continue. The program is in RAM, so a little interruption on reading doesn’t hurt unless you need to time it to avoid an error reading the file for the next section of gameplay.
I'm guessing the game probably streams FMV cutscenes of the disc as they play, and the fallback behaviour if it can't find them is to skip rather than crash.
Oh yeah. The sword you pick up in Memoria. The problem there is that the PAL version runs slower; the way PSX games "translated" between the two video systems was just to have longer VSync pauses for PAL. So the game is actually slower, not interpolated
Erm. No, like lots of games during the era quite a lot of stuff is tied to the frame rate, so the 50Hz region game just runs slower than the 60Hz one as next to nobody bothers to adjust for it. The clock for the hidden weapon does run at the same rate for both unfortunately, hence it being harder to get in 50Hz regions.
I think many games were that way. SotN definitely has a global timer. On a native 32-bit system it makes sense, especially when the life of a game was a few months to a few years on the retail shelf. No player is going to leave their system running for 2.27 years so what’s the point of even tesing it?
Who knew at the time they were creating games that would be disassembled, deconstructed, reverse engineered. Do any of us think about that regarding any program we write?
Can be more than timers too. There's a funny one in Paper Mario where a block technically can be hit so many times it'll reset and award items again. Hit enough times it'll eventually crash. Of course it'd take around 30 years for the first rollover and 400 or so for the crash.
https://n64squid.com/paper-mario-reward-block-glitch/
Doom is actually such a good game, I always go back to it every few years. The 2016 reboot is also pretty fun, but the later two in the series didn’t do it for me.
Same. Something about the metroidvania design with the home hub of the later ones didn’t give the same feeling. It should be run, kill, find secrets, end, next level.
Fun fact: Doom is now a Microsoft property, along with Quake, StarCraft, WarCraft, Overwatch, all of the adventure games from Infocom and Sierra, and of course Halo. Microsoft pretty much owns most of PC gaming. Which is what they've wanted since 1996 or so.
Assuming correct implementation of the NTP spec and adherence to the "eras" functions, NTP should be resistant to this failure in 2036.
The problem being so many micro-controllers, non-interfaceable or cheaply designed computers/devices/machines might not follow the standards and therefore be susceptible although your iPhone, Laptop and Fridge should all be fine.
This headline gave me a heart attack... I misread the site's name as Lenovo, and as I'm responsible for a whole lot of their servers running for years in a critical role... heart attack.
It's also running on very old hardware, potentially with some electrolytic capacitors that have dried up. And, there's always the possibility that it's a gamma ray [1]!
At the time of writing the comment it was practically instantaneous for me and the comment was genuine. Now it seems to be having trouble and I'm choosing to retroactively make the comment a joke about Jira ;)
About a year ago I was looking at Crash Bandicoot timer systems and I found that Crash 3 has a constantly incrementing int32. It only resets if you die.
Left for 2.26 years, it will overflow.
When it does finally overflow, we get "minus" time and the game breaks in funny ways. I did a video about it: https://youtu.be/f7ZzoyVLu58
There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race.
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Excalibur_II_(Final_Fan...
So the invisible 12h timer runs during cutscenes. During Excalibur 2 runs, I used to open and close the PS1 disc tray to skip (normally unskippable) cutscenes. Never knew why that worked.
(I also never managed to get it)
I’m going to wager that the cutscenes are all XA audio/video DMA’d from the disc. Opening the disc kills the DMA and the error recovery is just to end the cutscene and continue. The program is in RAM, so a little interruption on reading doesn’t hurt unless you need to time it to avoid an error reading the file for the next section of gameplay.
That’s a solid guess. And if that’s the case, that’s actually pretty good error handling!
> Never knew why that worked.
I'm guessing the game probably streams FMV cutscenes of the disc as they play, and the fallback behaviour if it can't find them is to skip rather than crash.
Oh yeah. The sword you pick up in Memoria. The problem there is that the PAL version runs slower; the way PSX games "translated" between the two video systems was just to have longer VSync pauses for PAL. So the game is actually slower, not interpolated
Longer vsync pauses but larger frame time deltas so it’s basically the same speed of play. The only thing that was even noticeable was the UI lag.
Erm. No, like lots of games during the era quite a lot of stuff is tied to the frame rate, so the 50Hz region game just runs slower than the 60Hz one as next to nobody bothers to adjust for it. The clock for the hidden weapon does run at the same rate for both unfortunately, hence it being harder to get in 50Hz regions.
So that's why it's called Excalibur 2!
You really managed to make the whole video without making a single "crash" pun? (Those freezes come close enough that you could call them crashes...)
I think many games were that way. SotN definitely has a global timer. On a native 32-bit system it makes sense, especially when the life of a game was a few months to a few years on the retail shelf. No player is going to leave their system running for 2.27 years so what’s the point of even tesing it?
Who knew at the time they were creating games that would be disassembled, deconstructed, reverse engineered. Do any of us think about that regarding any program we write?
Can be more than timers too. There's a funny one in Paper Mario where a block technically can be hit so many times it'll reset and award items again. Hit enough times it'll eventually crash. Of course it'd take around 30 years for the first rollover and 400 or so for the crash. https://n64squid.com/paper-mario-reward-block-glitch/
Great video, just subscribed
Since we've hugged the site to death, have an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250916234009/https://lenowo.or...
Sadly it appears that archive.org didn't capture all of the site formatting, but at least the text is there.
Just be glad you knew what the bug was before you started. After 2.5 years... "Shit, I forgot to enable debug logging"
Literally unplayable, someone should fix that.
Doom is actually such a good game, I always go back to it every few years. The 2016 reboot is also pretty fun, but the later two in the series didn’t do it for me.
Same. Something about the metroidvania design with the home hub of the later ones didn’t give the same feeling. It should be run, kill, find secrets, end, next level.
2016 remains one the greatest single player FPS games I've played (Titan Fall 2 is the other)
Same. And love those brutality mods.
Fun fact: Doom is now a Microsoft property, along with Quake, StarCraft, WarCraft, Overwatch, all of the adventure games from Infocom and Sierra, and of course Halo. Microsoft pretty much owns most of PC gaming. Which is what they've wanted since 1996 or so.
> Microsoft pretty much owns most of PC gaming.
So valve next?
2038 is going to be a fun year.
That seems much closer than it did in y2k.
Everybody is sleeping on 2036 for NTP. That's when the fun begins.
Assuming correct implementation of the NTP spec and adherence to the "eras" functions, NTP should be resistant to this failure in 2036.
The problem being so many micro-controllers, non-interfaceable or cheaply designed computers/devices/machines might not follow the standards and therefore be susceptible although your iPhone, Laptop and Fridge should all be fine.
I am going to need to see this replicated before I can believe.
The easy way to e-Nostradamus predictions:
"See this crash?
I predicted it years ago.
Don't ask me how, I couldn't tell you."
p.s. I had an old iPaq that I wouldn't have trusted to run for longer than a day and stay stable, kudos for that at the very minimum.
This headline gave me a heart attack... I misread the site's name as Lenovo, and as I'm responsible for a whole lot of their servers running for years in a critical role... heart attack.
Maybe I need my morning coffee. :)
It's good it didn't took a billion years to overflow. That would have been quite a long wait.
Seems to be a PocketPC port of Doom, with no source given or even a snippet of the relevant code/variable name/etc. shown at all.
Yes. I think it it seems like it was the os that overflowed, and not Doom in this case.
They explained it was in the game code though?
It's also running on very old hardware, potentially with some electrolytic capacitors that have dried up. And, there's always the possibility that it's a gamma ray [1]!
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221011-how-space-weathe...
glitchless?
Has this ever come up in a TAS of custom levels?
Not a comment on the post, but I sure wish Jira would load even half as quickly as this site.
It takes serious hardware investment [0] to pull that off.
[0] https://lenowo.org/viewtopic.php?t=28
Perhaps it's hosted on a disposable vape?
Commenting on my Epic from an LG Fridge.
It's not loading for me at all.
We recently moved to Linear and couldn’t be happier, can recommend!
Is this a joke because the site isn't loading at all?
At the time of writing the comment it was practically instantaneous for me and the comment was genuine. Now it seems to be having trouble and I'm choosing to retroactively make the comment a joke about Jira ;)
Came back to check this since the tab never loaded. I'm guessing traffic caused some issues?
I’m guessing HN hug of death. Probably smarter than just auto scaling to handle any surge traffic and then get swamped by crawlers & higher bills.