No one would think of leaving ‘Super Mario 64’ on for 14 months. But whoever will find a surprise

It is tradition that the classic Super Mario Games continue to provide secrets that, despite the time elapsed are there awaiting to be discovered. Sometimes Easter Eggs They are almost private jokes, sometimes programming errors with funny effects: One of the last discovered requires a lot of patience to float. Specifically, you have to wait 14 months.

It has been the youtuber Kaze emanuarExpert in bursting (or improve) Classic Nintendo Games who has made a video in which he talks about failures or curious effects that arise when we leave the game without touching during very long spaces of time, such as the seven days he explains in the video about these lines, or even beyond. And there is a technical explanation.

In ‘Super Mario 64‘, Several elements are scheduled to act in cycles using internal counters that constantly increase and determine when they must execute an action. Normally, these counters are restarted every time the element ends their task, ensuring that the movements and patterns are repetitive. But there are some secret counters whose figure is not restored after completing their function; Instead, they continue to increase while the game is active.

When one of these counters finally exceeds its maximum value, which only happens after many hours (or even years) of uninterrupted play, causes unusual errors or bugs. For example, Emanuar documented that, if it remains in the star selection menu for approximately 2.25 years without turning off the console, the accountant in question reaches its limit of 2,147,483,648. When overflow happens, the player is blocked in the menu and cannot perform any action for another 2.25 years of real time.

Similar situations with Accountant overflows can trigger other unexpected effectss, such as the reproduction of usually inaccessible sounds within the game. Are Easter Eggs technicians who are impossible to find in a normal, but fascinating game for the community of Speedrunners and programmers that examine the strangest limits of the game.

14 months and counting

A little -known enemy of ‘Super Mario 64’, the shark called Sushi, lives at the level of the great dock. Sushi emits a characteristic sound that is repeated every 16 Framesbut the sound file is longer than this interval. Therefore, under normal conditions, the clip is never heard complete: when it begins to reproduce, it is quickly cut to start again, leaving the final part of the audio hidden.

Emanuar discovered, taking advantage of an internal level timer bug, that if the game is left on for about 14 months (the necessary time for this “secret accountant” to exceed its maximum limit of 32 bits), the system stops sending orders to Sushi. For the first and only time, the shark reproduces the entire sound file From beginning to end, allowing listening to the complete sound effect for the first time. After this reproduction, Sushi is silent, since the logic that controlled his loop is disabled.

This detail is the product of the operation of internal accountants who manage physics and events within the game. The same phenomenon occurs with other controlled objects with counters, such as the wings of the flying ships on the path of the rainbow, which stop moving for the same reason after thousands of active hours. These events can only occur in extreme circumstances and emulators have to be tricked to simulate excessive play time, but there are, as curiosities for useless data mining.

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