Favorite frying results

[Colmino]

E.T. turns into Nihilist E.T. There are no phone pieces to be found, and no zones except for the "Call Elliott" zone. Poor E.T. wanders around lost and alone, and eventually dies, unable to get back home.

 

While I await the Harmony cartridge, I've basically been tiding myself over with occasional glimpses of E.T. Quite by accident, I fried the game due to a bad attempt at turning the console on. And the result was very like what you describe - no zones except Call Elliot, and while there were more of those than normal, there were fewer zones on the whole. However the phone pieces were in fact available.

[+FujiSkunk]

I stand corrected. It's been a while since I fried any games.

 

Of course you're no closer to a happy ending, given no "call home" zones.

[Supergun]

The reason I discovered & occasionally did "frying" when playing Atari was because in essence what it was doing was giving me more fun out of some of my games. During dry spells of not acquiring more Atari carts, I would just play the hell out of my favorites & experiment with them to look for what was to me at the time; more content. It sounds crazy by today's standards, but back then, strange screens, weird sounds, unusual effects was entertaining, especially when you were bored.

 

I remember trying to get "lost" in the "Atari Worlds" of games that seemed like they at least might have limitless areas to explore. Like Star Voyager, Riddle of the Sphinx, Pitfall, etc.

 

And to this day, I still try to "999" my Atari games.

[Colmino]

Speaking of getting lost in unintended areas of old Atari games, one of my favorite things to do was find the "city in the sky" in Mountain King. Proud to say I found my way up there back when that game was still new. Since the results of clambering among the ladders up there are essentially random, you never really know how it's going to turn out.

[Nukey Shay]

 

The 20fps nature of Adventure confounded me for a while. I had uploaded a video to Youtube which included a clip of Adventure, but 60fps is still a relatively new thing there, and 20fps was very incompatible with Youtube's native 30fps (the rest of the video was 60fps), so it is only recently that the clip is able to be played correctly.

That's due to flicker, not FPS (which is still 60 NTSC or 50 PAL, or the image gets whacked and the game basically unplayable). Since the objects onscreen are only shown for 3 successive frames out of 60 or 50 before new objects are selected from the cache, results are crummy whenever there's more than 2 present in the room displayed - worsening in relation to the total number present.

 

Superior code that would be most compatible with a capture device would flicker sprites only when they share a common scanline with a 3rd, 4th, etc...and a slight variance so that any given sprite is not always cached identically for frames when it is displayed (or you run the risk of a sprite becoming completely invisible to the capture).

[H.E.R.O.]

I used to do it for Vanguard & you could carry the E powerup with you until you hit the end of the level.

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

The 20fps nature of Adventure confounded me for a while. I had uploaded a video to Youtube which included a clip of Adventure, but 60fps is still a relatively new thing there, and 20fps was very incompatible with Youtube's native 30fps (the rest of the video was 60fps), so it is only recently that the clip is able to be played correctly.

 

It's actually pretty remarkable just how few 2600 games run at anything less than 60fps, given how eager devs are these days to use the extra processing afforded by lower framerates. Presumably this is because the 2600's limitations mean that there is not often any benefit. Still, I point to a case like Space Attack, which is a better game on the 2600 than the Intellivision original, mostly thanks to the slicker 60fps presentation.

Princess Rescue is 20fps. Slows to 15 fps when a koopa shell is kicked onscreen.

 

So the "frying" technique is basically toggling the power switch really fast (or nudging it sideways if it's going bad) correct? Or is it lifting up one edge of the cart slot until the game glitches? One thing I find ironic is to toggle the power with no cart in the system. You get a totally unique vertical bar pattern every time, often accompanies with grating audio.

 

I'm more familiar with graphics going fubar on the NES at random intervals, something that happens very rarely now due to my new Blinking Light Win cart loading tray. Blinky screen syndrome, or sometimes just the graphics getting so effed up but you're already this far into the game and don't want to reset so you keep on playing until it either freezes or the graphics get so corrupted you can't see what your player is doing anymore.

Edited September 2, 2015 by stardust4ever

[Colmino]

That's due to flicker, not FPS (which is still 60 NTSC or 50 PAL, or the image gets whacked and the game basically unplayable). Since the objects onscreen are only shown for 3 successive frames out of 60 or 50 before new objects are selected from the cache, results are crummy whenever there's more than 2 present in the room displayed - worsening in relation to the total number present.

 

I am familiar with the flicker (sprite turn-taking) you describe. Not applicable in the case of my clip (have a look) which has only the player and a single dragon. The frame judder phenomenon I referenced was due to the fact that the video footage in question was 60fps in fact, yet effectively 20fps (because it's Adventure), which Youtube's re-encoding process would convert to 30fps, which is incompatible. With no frame blending - and there wasn't - the resulting frame cadence was 4:2:4:2. This problem can no longer be observed because within a couple of months of Youtube's transition to 60fps capability, all videos originally at this framerate were retroactively re-encoded, including mine.

[Colmino]

So the "frying" technique is basically toggling the power switch really fast (or nudging it sideways if it's going bad) correct?

 

The act of toggling the power switch repeatedly is actually redundant. Back in the day, I found that the following technique sufficed: With the power already on, flip it off and then back on once, with a 0.25 second interval. Flick-flick. If the rhythm of 0.25 seconds is uncertain, watch the seconds on a clock tick by and figure out how long it takes to count to four between each second.

 

The odds of getting a result that is both unintended and usable seem to be about one in 20, with heavy dependence on the game and sometimes the company. As was noted earlier, whole swaths of games from certain eras and/or certain companies seem to have absolutely no chance of giving a usable result, and this surely owes to some overarching similarities in the cartridges' guts.

[Supergun]

Yes, frying effects are most often achieved by quickly & frantically turning the power switch on & off. Pulling, slanting and reseating the cartridge itself can also cause strange effects. For me, some of the games required a lightning fast power cycle in order to produce effects I wanted, so in those instances my preferred My preferred method was to plug & unplug the connector of the AC power plug right where it plugs into the console. Which usually results in a spark show, which was part of the reason I always assumed the term was called frying in the first place!