{"id":1431,"date":"2019-09-05T01:49:07","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T01:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/?p=1431"},"modified":"2019-09-05T01:49:07","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T01:49:07","slug":"1431","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/2019\/09\/05\/1431\/","title":{"rendered":"J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finished J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (SNES)<\/p>\n

This is an action-RPG based on the book series, pre-Peter Jackson movie IP.<\/p>\n

This game has some cool moments and good atmosphere and potential to be good. Still, it was held back by many technical problems. This game ended up being a rabbit hole into something else.<\/p>\n

A couple weeks ago, I cleared the last boss, the Balrog using the full party (minus Gandalf, since having him in your party prevents you from beating the boss; also Boromir is E_NOTIMPL) and finished the game but didn't get such a good ending because Merry and Pippin died in the boss fight. They die really easily.
\nSo last Saturday, I booted up the game with the intention to resume at the boss fight, attempt it again and keep them alive.<\/p>\n

However the password I had written down was rejected by the game. I swear to goodness I wrote it down correctly. I went upstairs to my computer, reproduced the situation with an emulator. It turns out, the game will indeed give you invalid passwords and that's what happened here. So I went about trying to figure out how to \"fix\" my password.<\/p>\n

The password system itself involves encoding a bunch of the game state in a certain way with a checksum. This game is a bit unusual in that there are no saves to the cartridge, it hashes together literally all the state into a 48-character-long password. It took a bit of effort, but I figured out how to derive the password. From there, how to un-glitch my password and preserve the progress I had (items, character stats, door open+close state) while letting it be accepted by the game. With this, I was able to re-attempt the boss fight and get the good ending!<\/p>\n

After trying many<\/a> different passwords looking for patterns, I cracked the password algorithm. It was not too much more work to put it into a program in case other people run into the same issues.<\/p>\n

I posted the program to Github https:\/\/github.com\/clandrew\/lotrpwcheck\/<\/a> .<\/p>\n

As for the ending itself it was pretty cool, there is a scene where you meet Galadriel and she shows you the mirror. Although they never released a Vol II for SNES, I can see the next one picking up where this one left off.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finished J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (SNES) This is an action-RPG based on the book series, pre-Peter Jackson movie IP. This game has some cool moments and good atmosphere and potential to be good. Still, it was held back by many technical problems. This game ended up being a rabbit hole into something else. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,63,94,131,150,176,178],"class_list":["post-1431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-action-rpg","tag-finished","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-played","tag-retro","tag-snes","tag-software-development-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cml-a.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}