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> This sort of “escape hack” isn’t possible for human players because you have to do too many precise actions too quickly, so in the video it’s performed by a separate computer wired up to the gameport.

Well, someone did the credits warp manually, at least: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxFh1CJOrTU

The video in the article shows basically shellcode injection, but that's not timing-sensitive, it'd just take longer for a human. And, as seen above, similar things are possible for humans, if just less convenient to do so.

⬐ wtfishackernews

He also injected flappy bird into SMW manually. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0

⬐ oh_teh_meows

> The video in the article shows basically shellcode injection, but that's not timing-sensitive, it'd just take longer for a human. And, as seen above, similar things are possible for humans, if just less convenient to do so.

Wow that just gave me an idea for a story. Humans found out they are mere pawns in a simulated reality, discovered a 'hack' to alter reality, but the 'hack' would take hundreds of years to complete. So generations of humans toiled over at completing the 'hack', passing the baton through each generation.

There could be so many possible storylines from this - corruption/destruction of reality, dictator wanting to change the past, or a cult hell-bent on changing reality, or sorcerers practicing 'magic', or a lone protagonist who's on the verge of completing that hack after hundreds of years, but suffer from ethical conflict and existential crisis.

⬐ IgorPartola

Check out Off to be a Wizard. You will enjoy it.

⬐ oh_teh_meows

Sweet! Thanks I'll check it out.

Here's the author taking the world record (now superseded) at glitching mario world into the credits to "win" the game in 3:07:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxFh1CJOrTU

This is on a real console, not an emulator. They overflow the snes into the controller registers to achieve arbitrary code execution by hand. They do this by placing koopa shells at pixel-perfect locations to spell out ASM, overflow to the controller registers, and press a specific combination of buttons to jump to the sprite table and their literal shellcode.

At the start of this year there was a crazy few weeks where different speedrunners were competing to execute the "credits warp" in the quickest and most efficient way. It started at around 6 minutes, now it's down to around 2 I think, most of which is the game's intro. Fun stuff. SethBling was the first person to ever execute it on a real console.

Here's a video explaining it, from a different speedrunner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAHXK2wut_I

⬐ cheald

"literal shellcode" made me chortle. What a delightfully wonderful hack.