The game genie did not give you a menu, you inputed codes which would persistently modify the memory map of the cartridge allowing for things like 99 lives or max Hp. The “menu” you describe was a booklet containing every game and a list of code changes.
Of course you could write in your own codes and make your own hacks but a lot of the time you ended up with garbled graphics or an unbootable game. They did keep this developer documentation to a minimum and this was before the internet. Although my local BBS had an ascii document detailing game genie’s internals and how to write your own codes, it was far from the reach of most 10 year olds
The game genie knockoff clone (I forget the name but remember the ads lol) had all of the codes in memory and as such gave you a menu to choose from
>Of course you could write in your own codes and make your own hacks but a lot of the time you ended up with garbled graphics or an unbootable game.
My favorite one I ever randomly got was on one of the Mega Man games. The bullets had no momentum but still worked. You could "place" a bullet and the enemy would walk into it and die.
I managed to figure out hacking NES Game Genie codes pretty well at about 14, even without any documentation besides the Genie book itself.
I'd read enough library books about computers to understand binary and hexadecimal. So from the existing codes in the Genie book (like 5 lives / 99 lives / etc), I figured out how those values were coming from some of the letters defining binary/hex values. So I could extrapolate to more codes for different values. And from there I realized the other letters must specify the memory location, so I could bump that too and change some different stats that weren't in the book. I particularly had fun with Final Fantasy 1, where I figured out how to set inventory values and even tried out-of-range values and got items that didn't exist.
What I didn't know until years later was the difference between 6-letter (3 byte) and 8-letter (4-byte) codes. The additional byte in the longer code specifies a value such that the override takes place only if the memory location already equals that value. The purpose is to handle bankswitching (memory mappers), to have the code active only when the correct memory bank is. In practice, what this meant was that randomly trying 8-letter codes almost never did anything (1/256 that you happen to hit the right value) and so I only tried the shorter ones, and found a few weird effects from them.
> The game genie did not give you a menu, you inputed codes which would persistently modify the memory map of the cartridge allowing for things like 99 lives or max Hp. The “menu” you describe was a booklet containing every game and a list of code changes.
Yes definitely, I meant the booklet as the "menu" (just like many restaurants give you a menu that is like a booklet) and decided to call it that so it would be more relatable, but yes it was just a series of codes, but codes you read off the paper similar to a menu (or maybe better, a dictionary or index?)
I never used the knockoff clone, but now I'm feeling some very, very delayed FOMO :-D
(Edit: I think the story below was for the original Playstation, with it's action-replay expansion port module. Should still have it somewhere in storage )
I also remember it having a serial or parallel port (at least the european Action Replay did), which you could hook upto a PC and with some debugging-software, do things like runtime memory manipulation, breakpoints and other nice debugging tools.
I think you could even run your own (small) binaries by sending them to the cartridge/addon, but this was ~20+ years ago, so the details lack me.
Of course you could write in your own codes and make your own hacks but a lot of the time you ended up with garbled graphics or an unbootable game. They did keep this developer documentation to a minimum and this was before the internet. Although my local BBS had an ascii document detailing game genie’s internals and how to write your own codes, it was far from the reach of most 10 year olds
The game genie knockoff clone (I forget the name but remember the ads lol) had all of the codes in memory and as such gave you a menu to choose from