Exceptional Memmory (September 5, 2009)

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Finder of things, Doer of stuff
Gamasutra recently ran an interesting article on dirty programming tricks in which various programmers and developers revealed cheats and coding hacks that they used to make sure games and other programs shipped on time. The article attracted several industry members who've also chimed in with their own stories in the comments, including Ken Demarest - a veteran of the original Wing Commander, both secret mission add-ons, Super Wing Commander, Ultima 7, Bioforge, and more. Here's what Ken Demarest had to say about working on Wing Commander:
Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."
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Original update published on September 5, 2009
 
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Oh my goodness, that's hilarious! XD

I never would have guessed that this pleasant valediction was only to disguise a nasty bug!
 
Its not a bug, its a feature.
That stuff is fun in games, but when companies do the same with operating systems, things get nasty.
 
Ha, good thinking! Have had some games over the years that crash on exit, never bothered me. In most cases it even speeds things up as normal exit might take 10 seconds, crash is instant :)
 
ROFL :D

That's funny and quite clever. I remember playing other games from the same era as WC1 that had similar messages when you quite and went back to DOS. I wounder if they came to be due to similar issues.
 
So if you ran another program afterwards, and it crashed inside EMM386, would it also say "Thank you for playing Wing Commander." also?

Might've made for some interesting bug reports back in the day.

I wonder how other EMM386-workalikes did...
 
Worf said:
So if you ran another program afterwards, and it crashed inside EMM386, would it also say "Thank you for playing Wing Commander." also?

Might've made for some interesting bug reports back in the day.

I wonder how other EMM386-workalikes did...
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I think it was internal to WC1 somehow, so it wouldn't have affected the player's other programs.
 
I remember reading about how early games needed their own memory managers to squeeze every last bit of useful memory out of the systems of the day, it's quite likely that it was.
 
Reminds me of something: read WC2 file module.000
There are some interesting pieces of text among the code such as:
this is a playtester.
this is a playtester on drugs.
uy more games like Savage Empire
oblahdee oblahda
life goes on
I want this game to ship!
Boy is this boring!
this shouldn't show up
So there I was, stripped nude to the waist with Gloria whi
Brian is a queer
Bruce is just a big sissy boy!
ou should not see this
Hey bud, let's spark a doob!
this, its a bug
This should work
Go there
Kill that
Go home
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