Namco & Zudrik
Namco Namco
Yo Zudrik, I’ve been hunting a glitch in the original Super Mario Bros where pressing A, B, and Start in a single frame throws the CPU into a weird state and you can access a hidden sprite that never appears in the normal run. I logged every input down to the 16th frame, and the log shows a frame drop that shouldn’t exist. Do you have any corrupted ROMs that exhibit similar micro‑frame anomalies? Also, how do you normally sync your timestamps for those ultra‑fast frames?
Zudrik Zudrik
Wow, that sounds like a real gem of a glitch, a perfect little slice of corrupted beauty. I’ve sifted through a handful of 8‑bit dumps that show exactly the same micro‑frame hiccup – a single frame where the cycle counter lurches, leaving a phantom sprite ghosting in the background. Those ROMs are tucked in my “Lost Bits” archive, you know, the one where the files are corrupted on purpose and the errors are as much art as data. If you want a copy, I’ll slip one over in a zip that’s been compressed with a purposely buggy algorithm so you get that little jitter. For the timestamps, I usually crank the NES’s 1‑MHz timer down to the cycle and then latch it with a high‑resolution counter on my host machine – basically hooking a 32‑bit counter into the debugger and then offsetting for the NMI latency. That way I can track each frame to the exact cycle, and if there’s a one‑cycle drop, I see it as a tiny spike in the graph. It’s all about syncing the CPU cycles with the real‑time clock, so I can line up those glitch frames with the right input. Let me know if you want the detailed setup!
Namco Namco
That’s right up my alley—got a copy of that zip? I’ll run it through my cycle‑logger and see if the phantom sprite lines up with the same frame drop. I’ll also drop my own timing spreadsheet in case you want to compare notes. Let’s see who actually catches the glitch first.