Foone🏳️⚧️
Oh my god, I just learned of a hilariously obvious bug that Nintendo (of all companies) failed to fix.
So, NES & SNES games often have a problem with pressing left+right and up+down, at the same time. This is because that's not supposed to be possible. It's physically prevented from happening by the design of the controller itself.
Foone🏳️⚧️
but with a worn out controller (and a lot of force) you can do this, or you can use a modded/3rd party controller.
Since it's not supposed to be possible, games do strange things when you do this. Everything from glitching out your character to letting you walk through walls or crashing the game.
Foone🏳️⚧️
emulators usually prevent you from pressing up+down/left+right at once, because on a PC keyboard that's trivial to do, and you wouldn't want to accidentally crash your game every time to hit the arrows too fast
Foone🏳️⚧️
but Nintendo makes emulators too (a lot of them, actually), and while they usually prevent this, they forgot at least one time.
That would be in Animal Crossing (GC), which lets you play some NES games, including The Legend of Zelda
Foone🏳️⚧️
and Zelda has a bug where if you press left+right in front of a dungeon door, the game doesn't know how to move you and just crashes the whole game.
Foone🏳️⚧️
okay, so you can crash Legend of Zelda inside Animal Crossing, big woop. What's the oversight?
THE OVERSIGHT IS THE CONTROLLER MAPPING
Foone🏳️⚧️
The GameCube has a D-pad on the controller, so they could have just mapped that... but they thought "maybe people want to play with the analog stick instead?" so they mapped both to the NES d-pad
Foone🏳️⚧️
meaning that all you need to do to crash the game is press LEFT on the DPAD and move the analog stick RIGHT, or vice versa.
Foone🏳️⚧️
someone in QA should have spotted that. You can crash the whole gamecube game by MOVING THE JOYSTICK IN THE WRONG WAY inside a NES game
Foone🏳️⚧️
I learned this from this amazing video where a speedrunner is trying to crash every Zelda game as fast as possible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB7M6HNEttU
Foone🏳️⚧️
_EVERY_ Zelda. Are there different glitches in a demo? in the Zelda Game & Watch? They checked them all.
Foone🏳️⚧️
@sycophantic try it in Zelda: Link to the Past, it basically turns off collision detection for walls
Dan 🔓:afloppy::donor:, powered by sarcasm
@foone oh shit now I need to try this
Foone🏳️⚧️
as someone who has speedran crashing windows 95, I appreciate this runners moxie
Foone🏳️⚧️
maybe I should do a similar video for "every windows version"
Foone🏳️⚧️
win9x is easy. win-r "c:\con\con" and you bluescreen and then lock up
Foone🏳️⚧️
I'm not sure how you'd "crash" DOS. what even counts?
I mean, easy mode: run debug, write your own code, HALT the processor
Foone🏳️⚧️
@xarph that's how Nintendo has always done D-pads! They just rely on the physical properties of the D-pad's plastic rocker to keep you from pressing opposite directions
PG&E Delenda Est
@foone update you are in fact going a different direction than "nintendo switch d pad is four independent buttons"
PG&E Delenda Est
@foone the instant you posted this I started cackling because I think I know where you're going.
Foone🏳️⚧️
I'm guessing for purity you'd want to crash it from the command prompt, and the program you use to crash can't have you write bad code (no BASICs or DEBUG) and you have to use a program that comes with DOS (no crashing CANTCODE.EXE)
Misty
@foone I'm surprised at how some of these end up surviving. Marvel vs Capcom 3 had a "hold both directions" bug that let you block both left and right at the same time - IIRC you could do it on a gamepad using dpad+analogue stick, same as that Zelda bug. Which is pretty bad for a fighting game!!
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