By now, simply taking over a game and replacing it with a brand new app was beginning to feel a little predictable. So this year, TASBot decided to show off a new skill. At the AGDQ marathon, the bot set out to edit new features onto a game that’s still running in active memory. TASBot wanted to be magnanimous with its new capabilities, too, allowing human players (and livestream viewers) the opportunity to edit the game on the fly.
But just how did TASBot – and the team of coders behind it – intend to turn an old game of Super Mario World, running on a standard SNES, into a heavily editable game of Super Mario Maker? Luckily, we had a behind-the-scenes invite to the event and the opportunity to find out.
I spent most of last week watching AGDQ (and donating, of course), and this particular segment blew my mind.
These exploits always impress me. I always feel like my programming skills are sub-par after watching a video like this. It is hard for me to even look at a system and start to think about how to abuse an exploit let alone in such an elaborate way.
Think of it this way – these guys intimately know the SNES hardware. They know the game code back to front. The exploit is convoluted, but humanly possible to create. The rest is understanding memory layouts, custom chips, and raw machine code. Yes, it is ridiculously hard, and probably impossible to get to their level of skill over night, but if you learn how to program the SNES in general, you’ll be much closer to appreciating the nuances of what they are doing. They are overwriting the program in memory with their own custom code/patches, which is impressive but pretty well understood, I guess. For me, the amazing part is their creativity.