Were you ever able to create your own Gameshark codes?

[Calavera]

I was looking up the PS1 Gameshark and remembered how Game Shark and other cheat devices would always claim you could make your own codes. Was anyone ever actually able to get that to work? I feel like it was no where as simple as they made it out to be and you had to really know what you were doing to make a functional code.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

I never had a Gameshark or a Game Genie. I was so good at games I never needed to cheat. Yep.

[melancholy]

So this is going to sound dumb, but yes, I actually did, but I cannot remember for the life of me what game I made it for or what the code did. I’m thinking it was a PlayStation game, but I can’t be sure. I just remembering using an emulator to do the code search and was successfully able to find the correct line of code that changed, then being able to take it to an actual console and it worked. I’m almost positive it was PlayStation.

[ian]

I never had a Gameshark or a Game Genie. I was so good at games I never needed to cheat. Yep.

Zoidberg beat me to reply. My answer would have been identical.

I do recall looking up cheats for certain games from magazines and then later online, but I never had a device specifically for cheating. I was more about playguides for particularly hard games than cheats.

[Roofus]

Never made a code from scratch on real hardware. Changing a "Start with 10 lives" code to start with say 50 is easy enough. Making new codes on an emulator is easy though.

[Hawq]

Fidled with an Action Replay back in the day & got some infinite life/health codes to work in the 16 bit days, think by the time I got a Playstation they were easy enough to find, think some magazines even had them in if you couldnt find then anywhere else (memory is hazy so not 100% on that last bit)

[ian]

Never made a code from scratch on real hardware. Changing a "Start with 10 lives" code to start with say 50 is easy enough. Making new codes on an emulator is easy though.

I imagine you just remaking a game from scratch the second you found something you didn't like.

Rumour has it you had Morrowind playable in 24 hours of solid coding, but it was still buggy so you singlehandedly rewrote the whole game from the ground up in a week!
At least that's what I heard...

[pixel]

Never made any codes either. But I'm still impressed by the N64 Gameshark. That thing felt like a piece of hacker equipment. I remember the included VHS tape and how complicated it all felt:



We messed around with Goldeneye codes for a while. Trying to get single-player maps to work in multiplayer, that kind of stuff. It felt like such a leap from the 8-digit Game Genie codes for more lives to these long, sprawling hex codes to make fundamental changes to the game.

I loved cheats as a kid. Honestly, cheating is probably the only reason I ever got good at platformers. Skywalk in Mario 3 or never losing rings in Sonic were my favorites.

[pixel]

Galoob also had a mailing list for new Game Genie codes. I got subscribed to that and remember getting new Genesis codes in the mail. Those helped a lot with Contra: Hard Corps.

[ian]

We messed around with Goldeneye codes

Fucking goldeneye is like a war flashback.
As a kid, getting them all was hard... except for one that was fucking impossible.
I had to get my cousin to help me get invincibility, I simply couldn't do it no matter how much I tried.

It wasn't untill a few years later that I was able to do it myself to unlock on a friends cartridge, and even then was an afternoon of frustration and channeling the force spirit of my cousin remembering just how good he was when I watched him do it a few years prior.

Honestly, I never want to have to beat Facility on 00 again at all, let alone in a stupidly small amount of time. In fact, FUCK GOLDENEYE! Greatest game of all time sucks!

As for your other mentions of Mario 3 and Sonic.. I didn't beat Sonic till I was a teenager despite the first sonic on Master system being the first game I ever played and haven't finished any early 2D Mario game... I just run and jump till I'm not having fun. Usually it's when shit starts flying AND swirling AND falling AND jumping at me all at the same time that I check out because I'm no longer enjoying the experience. The earliest 2D Mario I actually finished without cheating or help was Yoshi's Island (if you can call it an early 2D Mario game) and even that wasn't until the game was a couple of years old.. rentals on SNES games were cheap because the 64 was already out and that's when I fell in love with the SNES.

Ahh memories.

[Skynet]

We messed around with Goldeneye codes

Fucking goldeneye is like a war flashback.
As a kid, getting them all was hard... except for one that was fucking impossible.
I had to get my cousin to help me get invincibility, I simply couldn't do it no matter how much I tried.

It wasn't untill a few years later that I was able to do it myself to unlock on a friends cartridge, and even then was an afternoon of frustration and channeling the force spirit of my cousin remembering just how good he was when I watched him do it a few years prior.

Honestly, I never want to have to beat Facility on 00 again at all, let alone in a stupidly small amount of time. In fact, FUCK GOLDENEYE! Greatest game of all time sucks!

As for your other mentions of Mario 3 and Sonic.. I didn't beat Sonic till I was a teenager despite the first sonic on Master system being the first game I ever played and haven't finished any early 2D Mario game... I just run and jump till I'm not having fun. Usually it's when shit starts flying AND swirling AND falling AND jumping at me all at the same time that I check out because I'm no longer enjoying the experience. The earliest 2D Mario I actually finished without cheating or help was Yoshi's Island (if you can call it an early 2D Mario game) and even that wasn't until the game was a couple of years old.. rentals on SNES games were cheap because the 64 was already out and that's when I fell in love with the SNES.

Ahh memories.

As much as I love both GE and PD, I don't ever want to have to get all unlocks ever again

[ian]

Perfect Dark I found much less difficult to unlock everything, but I was older and had played quite a lot of FPS by the time it came out, and the 7 million hours of Goldeneye as practice probably helped me breeze through it... Well not breeze, but every cheat and full stars on every training mission and weapon compared to goldeneye invincibility was comparatively a breeze.

I don't think I could do it ALL again, but if I was to try it would need to be on the Xbox remake and not the 64 original.