by TimTim » Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:03 am
OH YEAH!
This thread reminded me of the GameShark Pro for N64. It was probably one of the most influential gaming/coding related things of my life. I was 11 or 12 around the time I got a GameShark, and out of the box it could only use the default codes (or you could look up new ones online), but it also came with this video that explained how to create your own codes. (Watching the whole thing is worth it, but you can skip ahead to 5:20 for the code generator stuff - worth it if you're a nerd.)
So I watched this video a few dozen times, at least, while I saved up my money so I could get the memory expansion pack for the N64. I think it was almost $40, and it went in the front of the N64 (if you were ever wondering what that little rectangle slot was for in front of the cartridge) and doubled its memory to a whopping 8 MB!!! It also allowed for smoother gameplay and enabled some fancy stuff for games like Donkey Kong 64. But the main thing I got it for was to access the code generator in the GameShark.
You could do some really cool stuff with it. Just watch the video to see how it worked. But long story short, it got me interested in how games and computers work at a very early age. It really helped me gain some insight into how electrical signals become 1's and 0's and do all kinds of crazy combinations of stuff to display and control everything on the screen. I had also taught myself how to convert hexadecimal to decimal and vice versa without having any clue what it actually meant. It was just a means to an end, and I had a blast playing with it!!
Man those were good times.