Suggestion for a new cheat type

[Bugfinder]

People have reported that in a quite large number of games, whenever you start emulation the game behaves the same way. That can be explained because the game was "turned on" at that moment, so the random number generation is perhaps based on the latest score, or the number of games played until that moment. When you just start emulation, these numbers are always the same.

I suggest a cheat type to generate a random byte/word between two parameters and poke the result to a given location. For example:

Code: Select all

:gamename:65004000:0000FF08:000000FF:00000000:Generate byte ($00-$FF) at $FF08

:gamename:66004000:0000FF09:00007FFF:00000000:Generate word ($0000-$7FFF) at $FF08-$FF09

In the case of word, there is need to care about endianess, right? That thing about swapping bytes. This cheat could also be assigned to run right after loading the game, or be assigned a key to it and have it activated at a later time, at the user convenience.

Please regulars, post your comments.

[kelvSYC]

I thought random number generation was based on some sort of real-time clock.

[ianpatt]

I thought random number generation was based on some sort of real-time clock.

In some cases, yes. Often it's just based on something simple like the number of clock cycles or frames.

As for the idea, it's very easy to do, but I'm not sure how useful it is. If other people also think it's a good idea I will add it.

[kranser]

I think it's a good idea, as long as it will be relatively easy to add cheats to a lot of games for 'Randomise Gameplay', assuming that the factor which determines play (time, score, etc...) can be determined.

Sometimes, NVRAM plays a part in gameplay - I don't know if it's possible to randomise NVRAM locations - without causing problems though!

Kranser.

[Bugfinder]

St?phane gave me a great idea, that might well perform better than a random cheat. He suggested me to add some lines to a game's entry in hiscore.dat to save the byte locations I want to be reused in the next game. So far I have tried with sf2ce and newfant and they work fine! Perhaps this will be a better solution...