For those who can't play a video game without dissecting it
Momentum on the Disgaea investigation has slowed down, but I think I’m pretty close to a breakthrough. I just need to find out where a texture gets sent to the GE, but I haven’t been taking the most productive approach. In the meantime, I’m going to talk about a project on the backburner.
The Nintendo 64 version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has a documented oddity; inputting certain names into the profile corrupts the profile text, as well as every string on the UI.
It’s hard to tell if this is an intended feature, a bug, or both. But curiously, there is a pattern to the corruption. A while ago I took the list of names affected, dropped them into an excel sheet, and stared at it for a while.
Sample:
AANGELEG -> HRFXKLYVFFB
AANGENOMENEN -> HRFXKNRIKZO
AANGEROL -> HRFXKRDKWTV
AANSTUIVING -> HRFIIVUPSXT
AANTRAD -> HRFJBNGVICJ
AARSKOERNING -> HRJVLROLITS
AARTSBRO -> HRJWHOVNTOG
AASE -> HRKWLPTIGOG
ABADIA -> HSH BLGXZSU
ABAISSERA -> HSHEKHWJVEX
ABATO -> HSHPDWSPNZW
ABATTIRENT -> HSHPIMBCZDL
ABBAIERA -> HSILOXLEXAH
ABBI -> HSITEZCKMIN
ABFAERBENDER -> HSMEROYUXFW
ABGEERNTETER -> HSNXXVZOSWN
ABLINGS -> HSSIQAUYPLN
ABROTINE -> HSYKCURTJXE
ABSTEIGE -> HSZD VTRMDH
AC A -> HTVUG NJPDD
ACABDAR -> HTWKYJEKXAP
ACCABLERAIENT -> HTYTPZHGYVS
ACCUSAVATE -> HTYMVKAXZNK
ACIDIZE -> HTDJUNCSZNK
The interesting part is that it almost behaves like a cipher. Looking at the first character in isolation, you can treat it as a Caesar/ROT cipher, but if I remember correctly, subsequent characters’ offset depends on the preceding characters, and eventually it was pretty hard to eyeball. The above gist also seems to have a decoding function for them.
Someday, I want to take another stab at figuring out why this happens, i.e.: whether this is a bug, buggy feature, or something intentional. The PSX version of the game has a notorious bug that got us tonyhax, so I feel like this is likely a bug that happens to behave very interestingly.
I have relatively little experience reverse engineering N64 code, so I want to offer a symbolic bounty: if you can locate the code handling profile name entry, i.e. where this corruption happens, and point me to the appropriate location in any applicable regional version of the binary, I will award you one (1) banyaszvonatcoin^[1]. Send an e-mail to banyaszvonat@proton.me .
I will also potentially publish your results on the blog with credit, if desired (and it’s original research). If this task can be cleared by a simple google search, I will post a link to the research and a shoutout for the tip. In this case both the tipster and the publisher of the original research will get a banyaszvonatcoin.
[1] banyaszvonatcoins are lovingly hand-crafted and possibly cryptographically signed PNG tokens of recognition that are awareded to specific usernames, trade names, or any other self-applied or commonly-known identifier (you do not have to be people to be eligible for a banyaszvonatcoin). They carry no value whatsoever.