If the goal is to p0wn Jafar, you should have hacked his health to 1 by tracking the reduction of his health after hitting him.

I remember, as a kid, we played this game to death. We even got the special credits that happen if you collect all 70 Red Gems scattered throughout the game (10 per stage), which MUST be done in a single session because they aren't encoded into your level password.

Keep in mind that this dude just spent all this time doing what is essentially the same shit a game shark/game genie cartridge does, just to teach us about reverse engineering. Mad respect.

You got lucky here, as most games that used passwords did not, in fact, keep a list of valid passwords. Instead, the passwords were actually directly related to flags such as boss kills, items you owned, and where in the game you were. The easiest example of this I can think if is Faxandu (and Metroid) where you're effectively programming the ram with your desired weapons, magic, armor, usable items, starting gold, exp level (which is what actually determined your starting gold), and starting location. AFIAK, most games actually did it that way, instead of the way Aladdin seems to have gone, and many of them had a checksum as part of the password, and that in and of itself was what determined if the password was valid.

Doesn't the '0x10' mean 16 in decimal? It even says so in the debugger. Shouldn't it have been 0x0A?

Man's just found out how to use Cheat Engine

This brings so many memories. As a kid I never went past the second level , I was 5

This was one of the fastest games that my brother and I beat. I'm a little baffled that you never beat this

It wasn't that they didn't have a lot of space to save your save game (though technically a true statement, when they did); it was that the save games were stored in battery backed-up RAM in the cartridge. It was far cheaper to exclude the battery and RAM leaving just the game ROM in the cart.

Isn't it awfully nice to be running in an emulator with live debugging tools? Thanks for confirming that it's probably impossible to get that far without making some changes.

This was super interesting to watch as a fan of these old games. Great video fam!

Very cool! :) For anyone who wants more like this there's an excellent mini-series from Double Fine productions where Brandon Dillon hacks Zelda 1 from the NES and writes his custom ROM image back to a modified cartridge so they can play his mod on original hardware. The first video in the 4-part series is called: "Devs Play" S01E04 - Legend of Zelda (Part 1: Explorer's Club)

Awesome video! Been doing the same thing with an old sega rpg Buck Rogers Countdown to Doomsday, found the level select code and was super pumped to find a test level left in by the devs where you can choose what types of enemies to fight and with what equipment etc

Nothing delights Jafar more than knowing you had to cheat to beat him

Genuinely good explanations & visualisations for a topic scary to many people! A wonderful introduction to get hooked on this technical stuff!

Reminds me of the game genie. Exactly how I used to find the infinite lives and ammo numbers. It allowed for searching for number in the hex after each death or weapon use. Great vid!!

Glad to find this channel, you are hilarious and explain your thoughts well, thank you for creating!

Ohh, man. You've just brought back memories. I had Aladdin on Sega Genesis and the level where you're escaping the collapsing cave on the magic carpet comes to mind. Glad somebody else is talking about old Aladdin video games, despite your troubles lol

That's so good! Thanks for that. I also watched the baby monitor videos

A reverse engineering tutorial using the tools you use for this video, would be awesome. Not necessary to be a snes game but something to begin with.

Reminds me of the French TAS I did on Family Feud for the SNES. The answers are stored in memory as string and sorted by most popular to less popular (except for fast money). The strings also contains capital letters and lowercase. When you answer, the game will look only for the order of the capital letters and, if your answer has the correct order, you can pretty answer something stupid and it will work.

This is great explanation...hope to see more videos on using such toools

It wasn't about room to save a game in the 90's, it was the added expense of adding battery backed SRAM chips to the cartridge vs password systems in software.

wow you have learned programming to reach this day ! gloriously finishing aladdin . job well done XD

This was one of the first games I ever beat. The carpet ride through the Cave of Wonders was so stressful it gave me hives no bs.

Man, I vividly remember getting my butt kicked by this game constantly when I was a kid. I'd spend hours trying to beat it, and as far as I recall, I eventually returned the cartridge to my friend (we used to swap SNES games a lot back in the day). Watching you kick the game's ass like you did... it's just gorgeous.

This is a great video! Although I've played the same game on Sega Mega and on PC, but it's a bit different. First level almost looks equivalent, but the last one is definitely not against the big snake. It's probably a different game. Awesome video! Thanks.

I remember seeing some kids finishing this game, they were revered like gods on Earth.

Game hacking is one of the best learning resources, Ty for uploading content!!!

Cool! This is so much easier/faster using an emulator! i did something similar in the late 90's on a playstation 1, but, on bare metal. My brother was obsessed with the new southpark rally game, and wanted to unlock everything, there were no "cheat codes" available at the time; the "cheat codes" were memory address:value pairs. I used an action replay card to connect the psx to a PC running a remote debugger. It was a bit time-consuming to have to reboot the game off the CD every time it crashed, but I got there in the end. Process: unlocked one car new track and did a save game. Reboot the playstation, took memory dump before and after the previous saved game loaded, checked the diffs and found the memory locations and values. A bit of fuzzing and unlocked everything :-).

Man, that takes me back to my teenage years, hacking infinite lives or invulnerability into games on my C=64. That really honed my skills at debugging other people's code.

Now this is the kind of stuff i love watching

If you had difficulty with the SNES Aladdin, all I can say is, be prepared for the Genesis version. It's 10 times harder. That one will take a lot more hacking. No passwords or progress saving there. Getting to the end without a game over is required.

Definitely had trouble with this game as a kid, but I was able to beat it normally a few years ago. The hitboxes for grabbing ledges etc are kinda janky but once you get used to them it’s doable. Lion king though… that game is still as impossible as ever lol.

I wish I had this kind of info when I was a kid. Companies made third party tools for Nintendo and I remember GameShark was one of the most popular ones for Pokemon on the GBC/GBA. Good times

I have several of these game hacking videos and what you see me do is actually change the code where I overwrite the byte(s) that subtract lives or change it into adding 1 (which you can still die) or do a complete hack hook; Which I had to do in getting to the kill screen of pacman video.

Can you please show the process of this? Like how you got to edit memory for an emulated game (im assuming its emulated). And I can only assume the mem addresses were constant so you didnt need to do any pointer maps or anything like modern games require ( due to OS paging etc ). If possible, could you show in depth videos on how to hack more modern games (non multiplayer titles) cos I really want to get better at it but i only ever get as far as finding a value in current memory and then changing it and then losing the address when the game reloads (cant find the pointer offset)

Very interesting videos. Do any of you know if the “light bulb” screw in security Wi-Fi cameras have had the firmware checked to see if there are any back doors to the manufacturer’s or any other security concerns? Thanks for the videos.

Veni, vedi, feeli... Awesome! Childhood memories reloaded. I never made it further than the point where you fly away from the lava.

What tools and software did you use for emulation and hacking and live hacking?

I haven't played that game in a long time, though my version was for the Genesis. I would definitely like to see you do a series on making a game for an old system like the NES or SNES. Even though I was a Genesis kid I think the 6502 would be a lot easier to program for than the m68k.

this was one of my favorite games growing up too. I couldn't beat it either. 🍻to you beating it mate.

I also do the same kind of cheats with ps4, editing the memory values, the easy stuff were infinite money as your just going to search it from memory. Doing infinite lives can be easy or hard to do, if iy relies on value sure easy stuff but if its not you basically have to do assembly and basically disable a instruction responsible for increasing/decreasing life.

That's how I started as well, by hex-editing games in the 90s. Fun times!

Back in the day, my gameshark on gameboy had an option to create cheats yourself which involved starting the game, changing only the value you wanted to edit (ex throw an apple, gain a life, etc) and then pressing a button on the gameshark. I assume this attempted to inspect memory to see what changed and try to tell you the address. Pretty neat.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out how you were losing to Jafar and then I realized, "he isn't using the towel" and/or "he doesn't have the towel?", or maybe it's a sheet? Aladdin uses it in the movie as a parachute in the one jump ahead song IIRC, and in the game it's a permanent upgrade you get in level 1 or 2. You only have one chance to get it, but once you have it, this becomes literally the easiest game on the SNES. It let's you hold R (maybe L? I can't remember, it's been years man), but it let's you hold a shoulder button to hover in the air for a bit. Makes the platforming infinitely easier, and the Jafar battle a breeze. Give it a try, your inner child will thank you. ✌️

wait so you are telling me that you never, NEVER could beat aladdin from SNES? really? i actually could pass it like for ever

Man, I can't remember how often I speedran this game as an 10 year old. I only had 3 SNES games. Aladdin, Yoshi's Island, and Mario Paint. I also had Mega Man X for about a day until my dad saw that it involves me shooting people with a gun, so he returned it to the store. So, endless Aladdin and Yoshi's Island speedruns it was! Thanks for the interesting video that also induced a bunch of nostalgia! Also: I literally never realized what the pass code screen was! I always started from the beginning and had to play until the end! Thanks to you I finally realized what this weird screen was supposed to do. LOL

Used this techinique a lot like a decade ago but then I got into software where you can't just simply modify memory directly from outside so I had to change the actual code e.g. in this case changing the actual rom to never subtract any hearts instead of just setting the value from outside.

I ran through this doing no damage runs at like 6. I used to do a Lion king, Aladdin into all SMB games in a row as a kid. Was it amazingly fast and good? no but easily beatable.

outstanding sir!!! bravo!!!

I'm pretty sure it's easier and faster to beat the game with infinite lives and apples than it is to reverse engineer the password system to levelskip to the end

Awesome video, would you do a course about how to hack and reverse engineering software/firmware?

Where can I find the full video of this where you did it live?

Thanks for sharing this video. Interesting stuff, but most important to show how you load this game in debugger program. Is it working under Linux? Do you debug inside emulator?

Nicee, what emulator did you use? i spent lots of time looking for secret levels in nes games, and found hidden unfinished levels in robocco wars

This reminds me of using a GAME Genie for Sega Genesis. They had a tool for creating your own codes that used a similar system

This video has taught me something very important: my sense of fairness outweighs my intellectual curiosity, thus despite being a software engineer, my solution to the Aladdin conundrum would've always been to get good and beat the game fairly instead of busting out Cheat Engine at al.

Would it not be possible to reverse the deduction of hearts when hit, thus making Alladin gain HP on getting hit?

We used to play with ArtMoney application in order to mess with application memory in RF when I was a kid.

When will you release the C++ zero to security tutorials? I remember when you posted a discussion that you were working on it and it got a lot of approval.

Wow. I am very impressed by the quality of this video! Thanks a lot for your efforts. I am a newbie programmer, and I definitely appreciate your logic. Alright, I'm off to watch your other videos! 😊

I remember that as part of one of the megaman games(Maybe 3?) where there was a grid where you placed red dots, I actually reverse engineered it by writing down the passwords and what it corresponded to and found there was a pattern, and if I remember right there /was/ a checksum type thing, luckily it was a very basic one. I could do stuff like give myself all the weapons and max E-tanks. It was probably one of the easiest passwords to crack, more complicated ones probably encrypt the values somehow so there's no obvious pattern. When it comes to memory editing, The old style games were so much easier to hack, most of the values had static addresses so once you found them they'd always be in the same spot, with modern games with dynamic memory allocation the addresses can move all over the place, even mid game, and then you have to try to find the pointers to them that could be a dozen levels deep, it makes it exponentially harder to make something that works consistently, I think that's why a lot of hacks for modern games involve hacking the game code directly instead of the values. Because game code moves around significantly less often(though not never). It basically works by first finding the right value at least temporarily, then monitoring which bit of code modifies/accesses that memory address, then injecting new code that either records the correct base address that can be used as an offset for other cheat entries or injecting code to modify the value directly. I've only had limited experience doing that It does have the advantage that it makes the game itself help you, while locking a memory value basically has the cheating program run on a timer and just keeps resetting the value over and over again rapidly. There's also a few games that are aware of memory hacking and game genie type stuff and do a basic encryption of the memory values and sometimes have a checksum so they can't be cheated so easily. I know pokemon games had this past the first couple gens, maybe the ones in the GBA era?. I think it was an xor bitmask with a checksum, it was annoying. I got past it a little, but not reliably, because the bitmask was different from game to game maybe based on trainer id or something, I basically had to figure it out and decrypt/encrypt manually, there was probably an easier way. It kind of took the fun out of figuring it out. I used to also figure out how to hack saved games which sometimes works better and sometimes i'ts easier to hack the memory. Though later games sometimes use either encryption or compression(which often has the same effect as encryption if you don't have access to the decompression code). It was really annoying the ones that used Seeded RNG based bitmasks, so you needed to know the RNG Algorithm and the seed number to decrypt it. I only had luck cracking that /once/ as I recognized the software was written in VB6 and I just happened to /have/ VB6 and they used the built-in random function, then I had to figure out the beginning of the bitmask and then I ran a simple program to brute force the seed number by just running through every possible number until it spat out the right sequence. I got incredibly lucky they didn't decide to go even more overboard, and they used a fixed seed number and not one that was different every time.

I remember playing that game as a kid! I don't remember if I beat it but that jafar level definitely looks familiar

Subbed, thanks for this awesome video!

What program do you use to inspect memory?

That reminds me of how I created my own Gameshark codes back then

Nice! Which hex viewer/editor you used?

So much effort to figure out the password system, when you could have just searched for a RAM address that increased when you advance to the next level. Poke that address to some higher number and boom, after finishing level 1 you get put to level 9 for example.

This threw me back to when i used to hack in Flash games using Cheat Engine xD

This is one of the better hacking videos. Now if you could show how to cross refrence values, set breakpoints when an address is accessed, and how to nop the instructions which allow death you can obtain true immortality.

Hahahaha, I didnt know that you do live streaming on twitch. Definitely gonna follow you. Nice video man

This video felt a lot more beginner friendly actually understood that the lives was an unsigned byte.

I grew up playing Aladdin on the SNES and the only level that truly gave me any trouble was the escape from the Cave of Wonders, those lava waves are brutal, but I did overcome it in the end. What I *THOUIGHT* the video was about was hacking Aladdin on the Genesis to end the insanity because that game is bullshit hard from cover to cover

If you put in the password and hit enter, what told the system you pressed start?

Can you tell me which program did you use ?

That bit at 2:00 had my sides in stitches

What program did you use to see the game's memory? Was it just a certain emulator?

What are the apps used during the hacking process? (sorry if it's obvious)

I'm guessing for infinite lives you could set a watchpoint for a write on the memory location that contains the apples, then when triggered, follow the code back to where it subtracts one and patch that out with nop or alternatively patch the code so it always writes a non zero value to that memory location so the apples never decrease.

Reminds me of the time I made a zero-day cheat for Pokemon Silver to catch shiny pokemon. It was fun.

"Hacker": 0x10 - 1 == 0x9 Me: Huh?

That last boss looks super easy. I used to play this game, but never played it much. I really liked the Lion King on either SNES or Genesis, I forget, but I think they're different games but not sure. I liked the one most people considered better though, I remember that.

Thank you for the casual remider how much i hate hearing 'Lets go'

Great video! One other idea instead of giving you 0/255 hearts is to remove the subtraction command that will cause you to lose lifes when hit :)

It is very easy to hack all games if you have an Amiga 500 game console and Action Replay MK-III cartridge 😊 Good old times !!

That looks like a 16-bit int for the hearts in LSB which would make that 64k hearts...but I might be mistaken.

Could you explain why a .bst (save state) has far fewer memory addresses than what the memory viewer shows? For instance, why are you able to see the memory address for apples in the live viewer, but it doesn't show up when you do a hexdump of the save state?

I might be remembering it wrong as a kid but I thought SNES Alladin wasn't that hard I thought I beat it using only like 1 or 2 continues ( I was probably 7 or 8), but SNES Lion King that game is fuckin brutal.

NICE. What memory scanner were you using? Just one built into an emulator?

I went and learned the game and beat it legit. Seeing someone hack a game to win doesn't impress me anymore. Seeing someone beat a game legit impresses me now.

I just recently bought one of those little Chinese handhelds and it includes this game, I had one go and thought ‘Narp’, what were they thinking to make it so insanely tough?

How did you find the apple value by searching 0x10(16) which turned into 9 lol

This is pretty much how the old game genie worked back in the day. You would scan memory for values, then change the value in game to deduct which your looking for

What are you using to debug?

this was cool actually, im a dev but have never done reverse engineering, reverse compilation, or any low level hacking. I found it pretty educational

Very informative and nice to watch even for a noncoder

Hey please make a video on the tools and setup you used for this video. And how to get started with hacking NES games.

You should make a video on malware development in c and or c++

Very nice but how do you access game memory?