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Donkey Kong 64 and infamous memory bug

Painguy

Painguy

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
1,024
California
So as I'm sure many of you know, DK64 technically only need 4MB of ram to run (which is kinda crazy when you think about it), but due to some glitch the game wouldn't run without the expansion pack. RARE decided to just throw in the 8mb expansion pack instead of debugging the game since they were close to release. Did the cause of this bug ever get found? Can someone ask playtonic what caused this or at least what their hunch was? (I don't have twitter) I figure it was some mismanagement of the MCU, but it'd be nice to hear from the the source.
 
Hero of Legend

Hero of Legend

Member
Oct 26, 2017
13,612
Yeah it was Chris Seavor who revealed that IIRC. Sadly it's never been revealed just what that bug was, but it had to have been game-breaking to do such a costly act of bundling the pak in all copies.
 
hyouko

hyouko

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,221
That must have been an incredibly rough decision to make for whoever was calling the shots at Nintendo/Rare at the time... eat the costs of 4MB of RDRAM on each game sold, or fail to have a tentpole game for the holiday season. At least I think they were able to make it work for them, since later games like Perfect Dark and Majora's Mask needed it, too. I'm sure it expanded the potential audience for those games a fair bit.

I have no idea what the bug could have been. If it was a memory leak, you'd expect it to eventually crash the 8MB version too, given enough time.
 
Bakercat

Bakercat

Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,154
'merica
I always heard that the game would run on the 4MB ram, but the glitch would randomly cause the game to crash at any point and they could never find the cause or whatever, so they tried the expansion ram and they never saw the problem again.
 
Marjorine

Marjorine

Member
Oct 27, 2017
749
I had no idea about this. I can't even imagine the shitshow when they made this call. Big companies tend to treat nickels like manhole covers, so this for sure freaked some people out.
 
Dr. Caroll

Dr. Caroll

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
8,111
Nintendo had very strict quality control. The real issue was ensuring the game would pass certification. Nintendo would rather extensively test a game. In fact, I think their US, European, and Japanese divisions would test games separately. If they encountered a single serious bug or crash, the game would be rejected and would have to be resubmitted. For this reason, I remain rather puzzled how Indiana Jones passed certification. Maybe it didn't? Maybe Blockbuster games didn't require Nintendo's seal of approval, and maybe that's why the PAL version of the game was canned after multiple delays?

DK64 is a rather sloppily put together game with a wide assortment of technical issues, some of which were fixed in the PAL and JAP versions.
 
Hayama Akito

Hayama Akito

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,326
Fun fact: Space Station Silicon Valley freezes randomly on a N64 with an expansion pak. The opposite story.
 
Ginger Hail

Ginger Hail

One Winged Slayer
Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
3,136
Weirdly enough, this came up in conversation with some friends today. I'm guessing shipping all those Expansion Packs was less costly than missing that holiday window for them.
 
Dr. Caroll

Dr. Caroll

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
8,111
Hayama Akito said:
Fun fact: Space Station Silicon Valley freezes randomly on a N64 with an expansion pak. The opposite story.
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This problem is exclusive to the American version. Someone goofed.
sssvovo5e.png
 
Lpchaim

Lpchaim

Member
Oct 25, 2017
126

Deleted member 12790

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
24,537
I remember speaking to a guy once who wrote code for the microprocessors inside of missiles, he told me that weapons programmers have a very different approach to bugs than most developers. If, for example, there is a memory leak for a certain process, their solution was usually to calculate the amount of time they needed for a specific type of process then crammed enough ram in so it'd take longer to run out of memory than they needed. Rational was that these types of things explode, and thus don't have to perform correctly all the time, only correctly for long enough.
 
SirNinja

SirNinja

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 17, 2017
8,228
Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States
Whoa, I never knew about this. The game looked so good back then I figured the expansion pack was being put to its fullest use.

At the very least, it got an expansion pack into the hands of a lot of N64 owners before games like Perfect Dark (campaign) and Majora's Mask required them.
 
Dekuman

Dekuman

Member
Oct 27, 2017
19,026
Packing in the 4MB expansion was also kind of brilliant in a way as it helped other games that supported it.
 
Madness

Madness

Member
Oct 25, 2017
791
Whatever it was, I am glad I got a free expansion pak out of it. Came in handy for games like Perfect Dark and Majora's Mask etc.
 

LevityNYC

Member
Oct 25, 2017
78
That game was like 80 friggin dollars in the US when it came out 20 years ago...they cou'dnt have been hurting too bad even if they included the expansion pack.

When I hear people complain about 60 dollar games today...
 
daTRUballin

daTRUballin

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,139
Portland, Oregon
Hero of Legend said:
Yeah it was Chris Seavor who revealed that IIRC. Sadly it's never been revealed just what that bug was, but it had to have been game-breaking to do such a costly act of bundling the pak in all copies.
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I'm going to correct you here and say that it was Chris Marlow who revealed it, not Seavor. But it was in one of the Conker's BFD developer commentary videos, so I can see how one can misremember that. I looked it up to confirm because I was sure it wasn't Seavor. :p
 
Jon Carter

Jon Carter

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
5,746
I seem to remember the game being pretty expensive in Europe, but my memory could be fuzzy. In any case, the inclusion of the expansion pak made the game seem like a bigger deal. You'd think the game was so big and ambitious that it pushed the system to its limits.
 
Drain You

Drain You

â–˛ Legend â–˛
Member
Oct 27, 2017
4,986
Connecticut
LevityNYC said:
That game was like 80 friggin dollars in the US when it came out 20 years ago...they cou'dnt have been hurting too bad even if they included the expansion pack.

When I hear people complain about 60 dollar games today...
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I'm not going to argue for or against this statement, but I gotta say I feel like I remember SNES and N64 games costing a lot. I'd love for someone to chime in with cost adjusted with inflation or whatever. I think its possible SNES/N64 games were much more expensive than todays $60 games, atleast in the US.

PS: I could be talking out my ass.
 
JMTHEFOX

JMTHEFOX

Banned
Oct 30, 2017
888
Brooklyn, NY
Good thing that they bundled the expansion pak with all regional versions of the game. I'd imagine it would be a massive disaster had the game been released without it completely.
 
big_z

big_z

Member
Nov 2, 2017
7,797
people figured out that super ghouls and ghosts ran a lot better with a simple code tweak.
I wonder if someday someone will rummage through dk64s code and try and figure out what's causing it to freeze.
 

Deleted member 9035

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
8,686
Lpchaim said:
Heh, as fate would have it I was just chatting with some friends about the infamous Wing Commander "Thank you for Playing Wing Commander!" message just now. You know, that one time when the devs just couldn't seem to figure out why their game would throw an error message on exit so, naturally, they hex edited the message itself by hand to that much friendlier one lmao. Article has got lots of similar cases and is a joy to read through, do it y'all!
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Wow! Some of those are completely absurd, like the #define const.
LMAO
 
Inugami

Inugami

Member
Oct 25, 2017
14,995
Has anyone even gotten DK64 to boot at all without the memory expansion?

I was under the impression that when they couldn't fix the issue without the ram cart they took advantage of some features they only could with it, thus you can't really not it at all without it anymore.
 
NotLiquid

NotLiquid

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
34,774
hyouko said:
That must have been an incredibly rough decision to make for whoever was calling the shots at Nintendo/Rare at the time... eat the costs of 4MB of RDRAM on each game sold, or fail to have a tentpole game for the holiday season. At least I think they were able to make it work for them, since later games like Perfect Dark and Majora's Mask needed it, too. I'm sure it expanded the potential audience for those games a fair bit.

I have no idea what the bug could have been. If it was a memory leak, you'd expect it to eventually crash the 8MB version too, given enough time.
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Actually according to Kirkhope, back during the DK64 days, Nintendo used to pay their developers based on how many cartridges were printed, regardless of how many were sold. Since DK64 was going to be their big title for the season, Rare themselves basically broke bank on the game.
 
petran79

petran79

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
3,025
Greece
Krejlooc said:
I remember speaking to a guy once who wrote code for the microprocessors inside of missiles, he told me that weapons programmers have a very different approach to bugs than most developers. If, for example, there is a memory leak for a certain process, their solution was usually to calculate the amount of time they needed for a specific type of process then crammed enough ram in so it'd take longer to run out of memory than they needed. Rational was that these types of things explode, and thus don't have to perform correctly all the time, only correctly for long enough.
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DK64 exploded too!
 
PacoChan

PacoChan

Member
Oct 28, 2017
71
KojiKnight said:
Has anyone even gotten DK64 to boot at all without the memory expansion?

I was under the impression that when they couldn't fix the issue without the ram cart they took advantage of some features they only could with it, thus you can't really not it at all without it anymore.
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If you try to boot without the expansion pack it will show you a message telling you that it is required, with a rotating sprite of an expansion pack on the screen IIRC.

But I was very interested in the subject a while ago and I did some reverse engineering to the ROM. I found the code that checks if it has the expansion pack or not and I bypassed that check to see if the game boots. Sadly, the game doesn't boot. With expansion pack it uses more than 4mb so I guess it just crashes without it. I didn't go deeper so this is what I know.
 
Deft Beck

Deft Beck

Member
Oct 26, 2017
844
Space
NotLiquid said:
Actually according to Kirkhope, back during the DK64 days, Nintendo used to pay their developers based on how many cartridges were printed, regardless of how many were sold. Since DK64 was going to be their big title for the season, Rare themselves basically broke bank on the game.
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This explains why the game was so padded out with meaningless tat. They wanted a bigger game without really thinking about how to do that well.
 
daTRUballin

daTRUballin

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,139
Portland, Oregon
Deft Beck said:
This explains why the game was so padded out with meaningless tat. They wanted a bigger game without really thinking about how to do that well.
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I remember someone from Rare once said that the reason why a lot of their N64 games tended to be pretty huge in size was because they wanted kids that could only afford a game or two per year to have longer games they could invest more time into so that having a couple games like that per year would be worth it. Or something along those lines. Pretty cool of them, I must say! Despite some of the criticism some of their games got for being too big, at least their games served kids (and just gamers in general) with low family income well with plenty of content to play.
 

Chronus

Member
Nov 2, 2017
460
Drain You said:
I'm not going to argue for or against this statement, but I gotta say I feel like I remember SNES and N64 games costing a lot. I'd love for someone to chime in with cost adjusted with inflation or whatever. I think its possible SNES/N64 games were much more expensive than todays $60 games, atleast in the US.

PS: I could be talking out my ass.
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Oh they certainly were. I remember perfectly how much my copy of the original Donkey Kong Country for the SNES cost. We have adopted the euro since then, but it was the equivalent to €90. I saved for ages in order to buy it. So much, in fact, that DKC2 already had a release date.

Edit: This is WITHOUT taking inflation and all that jazz into account. A direct price conversion.
 
Lkr

Lkr

Member
Oct 28, 2017
9,525
I never knew about this. I remember as a kid renting DK64 from a blockbuster 20-30 mins away from where I lived and getting home just to realize I couldn't play it. Went back the next day and they let me borrow the expansion pack. I ended up renting it again a few months later and remembered to ask for it that time. After all of that, I don't think I ever ended up owning a game that flat out required it and never actually owned it until I was older and collecting shit
 
Ketchup

Ketchup

Member
Nov 5, 2017
170
hyouko said:
That must have been an incredibly rough decision to make for whoever was calling the shots at Nintendo/Rare at the time... eat the costs of 4MB of RDRAM on each game sold, or fail to have a tentpole game for the holiday season. At least I think they were able to make it work for them, since later games like Perfect Dark and Majora's Mask needed it, too. I'm sure it expanded the potential audience for those games a fair bit.

I have no idea what the bug could have been. If it was a memory leak, you'd expect it to eventually crash the 8MB version too, given enough time.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's likely it crashed on a soak test (leave the game running for 24 hours) which means the 8meg ram if there was a leak meant it lasted long enough to past that test.
 
ASaiyan

ASaiyan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,228
DK64 is one of those games that seemed incredibly well-made (well, in a "functional" sense at least?) when I played it back in the day, despite how big and ambitious it was for the time.

Then as an adult I started watching speedruns and my mind was blown by how utterly busted it gets if you just try to break it. Like, the whole game is held together with wet cardboard and nervous smiles. Walls, floors, door locks - they're all fully negotiable. Lol.

The Expansion Pak story makes me giggle every time. It's part of why I'm not a programmer, because that's totally the kind of bullshit fix I would do after not finding the bug and getting frustrated.
 
Het_Nkik

Het_Nkik

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,406
Dr. Caroll said:
For this reason, I remain rather puzzled how Indiana Jones passed certification. Maybe it didn't? Maybe Blockbuster games didn't require Nintendo's seal of approval, and maybe that's why the PAL version of the game was canned after multiple delays?
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I bought the game directly from the LucasArts website back in the day so it's not like Blockbuster was the only place that had it. And the box has that Official Nintendo Seal of Quality which I thought was the certification check.

Also, I'm mad because the reviews I read didn't mention it was buggy. I remember there was a level that ended with... a large bell, or something. Climbing around buildings, going through windows, then a large bell at the end. Maybe it was snowing, too. Anyway, after beating the level, the game would just crash.

Is there any way to continue past that point or is the game unbeatable as released?
 
Dr. Caroll

Dr. Caroll

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
8,111
Het_Nkik said:
I bought the game directly from the LucasArts website back in the day so it's not like Blockbuster was the only place that had it. And the box has that Official Nintendo Seal of Quality which I thought was the certification check.

Also, I'm mad because the reviews I read didn't mention it was buggy. I remember there was a level that ended with... a large bell, or something. Climbing around buildings, going through windows, then a large bell at the end. Maybe it was snowing, too. Anyway, after beating the level, the game would just crash.

Is there any way to continue past that point or is the game unbeatable as released?
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The game is 100% finishable as far as I'm aware. It does have a number of 100% reproducible crashes and soft locks, though. Heck, you can soft lock the American version about 30 seconds into the game by walking up to a stone block, going prone, and then grabbing it. This was fixed in the leaked PAL version. It's a great shame that the N64 version was rushed because it introduced a lot of improvements over the PC version.
 
SABO.

SABO.

Member
Nov 6, 2017
5,872
IIRC Donkey Kong 64 had a premium price tag in Australia. $80 instead of $60.

Worth it.
 
WillyFive

WillyFive

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
6,979
daTRUballin said:
I remember someone from Rare once said that the reason why a lot of their N64 games tended to be pretty huge in size was because they wanted kids that could only afford a game or two per year to have longer games they could invest more time into so that having a couple games like that per year would be worth it. Or something along those lines. Pretty cool of them, I must say! Despite some of the criticism some of their games got for being too big, at least their games served kids (and just gamers in general) with low family income well with plenty of content to play.
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Yeah, I appreciated that a lot back then. I also like that Ubisoft fills in the same hole nowadays.
 
Kevers

Kevers

The Fallen
Oct 29, 2017
14,575
Syracuse, NY
The expansion pack being included was a big reason I bought that game to begin with. I don't think I ended up playing anything else that required it.
 
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