Retro Game Exploits

Discussions center on glitches, bugs, and hacks in classic console games like Super Mario World and Donkey Kong, where players use controller inputs for code injection, reprogramming, or speedrun feats showcased in videos.

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Keywords

hiwiller.com youtu.be youtube.com PC index.php ROM tgrcode.com SM64 gameinternals.com IMO mario games game super played snes video nintendo controller hardware

Sample Comments

mzs Sep 17, 2019 View on HN

This comment explains a bit: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/09/how-a-basement-hacker...

Natsu May 6, 2014 View on HN

I bet someone could make it into a Gameshark code.

eru Apr 6, 2022 View on HN

That's exactly what eg the game Shovel Knight is doing.See eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjENktnbCaE

layer8 Sep 30, 2025 View on HN

Some old console games have bugs that effectively allow to reprogram them to whatever you want, just by pressing the right buttons on the gamepad in the right sequence at the right time (due to the bugs leading to out-of-bounds memory writes or similar). In this particular case, SMB is being reprogrammed into streaming Bad Apple from controller input, where the data being streamed is input via thousands of button presses per second.You could in theory perform this on the original SNES hardwar

daveofiveo May 8, 2024 View on HN

Super Mario World code injection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0

D_Guidi Jan 2, 2020 View on HN

amazing stuff, give a try also to the video from the snes conversion programmer

arianvp Jul 6, 2012 View on HN

That moment you expect an 'up up down down left right left right B A' easteregg but it's not there... time to fork this T_T

oceliker Mar 19, 2021 View on HN

Somebody should do a speedrun of this game. Is copy pasting considered tool assist?

MrJagil Dec 15, 2015 View on HN

Tangentially related I would recommend everyone to check out some Speed runs of the mario games. It is astonishing what people pull of, hacking in it's purest sense.https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/ is a good source for it, but every mario game ever has been speedrun and it's easy found on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPcV9uIY5i4Video is about exploiting Super Mario world, on SNES. The result is that the exploiter then proceeds to make 2 new games inside SMW: Pong and Snake.Those games don't exist inside SMW. They were uploaded using controller inputs. All it takes is 1 hack.