I just heard about the most ridiculous anti-piracy measure gone awry. It has to do with Mega Man X on the SNES (specifically the first Japanese version of Rockman X).

Asian pirates were a problem back then and Capcom wanted to screw with them in the best way possible, by fucking up their game if you played a pirate copy. They did this because they knew how pirates worked. Many SNES games had SRAM for save data at certain registers. It was so common that pirates always included SRAM at these registers and if a game didn't use it, they just let it sit empty. This streamlined the pirating of games.

Capcom knew this and so they did a trick. The game wouldn't have SRAM at these registers, but they would still attempt to write to it at random intervals while you played. After some data was written they would attempt to read the same value back, and if it matched they would know it was a pirate copy and do all sorts of crazy shit in the game. Like making it so you couldn't shoot and slide, or making you warp to the beginning of the game after you finished a level, or having you take damage when climbing a ladder...all sorts of hilarious shit. They even put in checks to see if the code was tampered with, and if they detected it was, the results were even more punishing.

Of course since the actual game didn't have SRAM at these registers there was nowhere to write or read, so the real game wouldn't screw with you. It knew it was a legit copy.

But there was a problem, Capcom punked themselves. The game was a 12mb game. 12 isn't a power of 2 so to fill the memory of the SNES they took 4MB of data off one of the chips and mirrored it into memory to get 16mb. This was common practice to initialize memory banks back in the day.

However, doing this filled the registers normally used for SRAM. Since there was no SRAM in the game that shouldn't be a problem right? Well, not really. See, on first revision of the game in Japan, the game would try to write to these registers and fail, *however* the next step was to read that data from these registers. Because they mirrored the 4mb, there *was* data in those registers and every once in a while it just happened to have a match of data in it!

No, it wasn't as sure-fire as if it was a pirate cart, but real retail carts would sometimes trip the piracy code by chance and all sorts of shit would happen to legit customers. Hilarious.

To rectify this Capcom had to literally wire resistors and wires onto all the boards of the first rev of the game to stop it from happening. Subsequent releases of the game fixed it by only reading/writing values that they knew wouldn't be in that 4mb of mirrored memory.

Anyway, I found this fascinating and funny, and had to share.

I'm here now. I left LJ for much the same reason symbioid did. I'm currently in queue to import all my old LJ posts here. I wasn't sure if I'd stick around here as getting things set up and looking somewhat like I used to I figured would be a pain. Well, it wasn't fun but I got 90% of what I wanted it to look and function like. Mainly I had to hide about half the interface, heh.

That's good enough for me to at least stick around. I need a place to write out things. I know only Dave really reads any of it so if he's here now, that's fine. I'd probably be more bummed about transferring off of LJ if everyone I was friends with was still there, but that hasn't been the case in well over 5 years.

So here I am.

Been digging into maps again. One thing led to another and I was on the Wiki page for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM, lolz). There was a map there with various areas colored, basically land owned by various government agencies one of which was the BLM. So I thought, what if I knocked out all that land, we could see the actual amount of ownable land in the US. Now this doesn't include things like State or County Parks, but you get the idea.

The interesting bit is the west is mostly not-ownable. I think this was what the yahoo's in Nevada were pissing about with grazing on BLM land. Nevada barely exists in this image.

The other interesting part is there is very little government owned land in the rust belt, and zero in Iowa.

I always kinda felt that population growth in the US wouldn't be a problem since there was lots of land out west for people to move to. And while that's true since there aren't may people who live out there, it's also somewhat untrue because so much of it is simply not ownable by anyone.

Many times people ask me why I like Phantasy Star so much. I think if you played it when it came out you'd perhaps understand how groundbreaking it was. Best graphics of the time. Multiple planets. Woman as the main lead character (and not a bimbo one at that). 3D dungeons. Many frames of battle animations. Destructible terrain. All of these were firsts and way ahead of their time.

But one thing I always thought of that was also way ahead of it's time is a character called Lutz (Noah in the US version) that was human. When you play the game, Lutz is referred to as both a "he" and a "she". This is done at different times during the game. Most people totally miss this because, well they probably don't play it as much as I have (and there is a female heroine in the game so it's easy to gloss over).

This always made me think that Lutz was supposed to be androgynous, but I had no way to prove it. So I've always referred to Lutz as both "him" and "her" just to go with the game.

However, I just found this interview from the mid-90's on the making of Phantasy Star with the creators of the game. Reiko Kodama (lead designer) is asked about Lutz. She says:

"Since so many people have asked whether Lutz is male or female, let me say a little about that. In the original story drafts of Phantasy Star, Lutz was a hermaphrodite, and as Alisa grew up, Lutz could become male or female. I thought that was interesting so I depicted Lutz that way."

MIND BLOWN.

Holy shit, after all these years, my intuition was correct. I've never actually heard anyone else refer to Lutz as anything other than a "he" before, except for myself. The fact that I've been holding on to this view of Lutz all these years and basically "got it" is the coolest thing ever!

Like I said, Phantasy Star was way ahead of its time!!

This winter I'm going to be doing a massive update to my arcade cabinet, which next month turns 10 years old (crazy when I think about it). I worked a bit this weekend on parting out some of the hardware, and tonight I worked on CPU's for the new rig I'm going to build.

CPU's are interesting because min/maxing them really depends on the task. The newest Intel chips came out a couple months ago (aka Haswell) and didn't go over so well for gamers. Haswell wasn't a very large jump for games over Ivy Bridge (the previous gen Intel chip) because Haswell is mostly a power consumption upgrade and thus it doesn't overclock as well as Ivy Bridge.

At first I thought, well, less power is nice, but I'm building this for a MAME cab so I need POWAH! Ivy Bridge is cheaper so I figured since the results are similar and the OC potential of Ivy is better I'd just go Ivy Bridge.

But not so fast. What I should have done is not read about _game_ use, but _emulation_ use. Different things! See, one thing Haswell adds is faster single core speed. This actually takes more power but the increase is fairly large. Given most emu's run single core, this greatly benefits emulation. So much so that the increase between Ivy Bridge to Haswell is about 20% for emu's. Much more than the flatline that normal gamers would see with the same setup.

And that makes it very worth it for me. Research time well spent.