SpritesMind.Net

So the other week I ordered Pier Solar, and was cleaning out my X'Eye to make sure that the cartridge slot still behaved as it was supposed to. It's historically been kind of finnicky! Anyway, the method I'd been recommended for cleaning a test cartridge with alcohol (in my case, I used Flashback), then once it was dry inserting and removing it from the cart slot and swabbing off whatever dirt and grime came out with it.

So, the first couple of times I got nothing. No big surprise. Very last time, I got it to boot. Which is great! But in the meantime, just before getting it to boot, I got this really weird thing:



I don't really know what to make of this! I don't know whether this is part of Flashback or part of the X'Eye. It certainly seems to be some sort of "oh damn the game crashed" debug screen, but the game basically booted straight to this.

What am I looking at? Has anyone seen this before?

That's from the game. Basically, what happened is, the CPU tried to execute an invalid instruction. "Line 1111" is telling you the instruction that was being executed was from a reserved area of the instruction block, and an exception was triggered to handle it. The exception handler for the game printed the error to the screen.

Basically, there was probably an error reading some of the data from the cartridge, which caused the crash.

Yeah I've seen that one a lot, but I used to play a lot of Flashback. It's just a register dump, it crashed. You can induce that crash a lot by doing the "walk through walls" trick (walk up to a wall as close as possible, tap the dpad away from it to turn around and face the other direction, then run away from it and immediately turn back into the wall, you'll pass through it).

Neat. Alright, thanks!

AFAIR the Blaster Master sequel has a pretty nice in-game crash screen too. Came up a lot when messing around with the Pro Action Replay.

I believe Robocop Vs Terminator and Shinobi 3 do too. There are probably plenty of others.

Charles MacDonald wrote:I believe Robocop Vs Terminator and Shinobi 3 do too. There are probably plenty of others.

How could you forget about Mortal Kombat?! :3

I once got similar screen in Zero Tolerance when I played it overclocked.

TmEE co.(TM) wrote:I once got similar screen in Zero Tolerance when I played it overclocked.

I got similar screen in Demolition Man. The reason was a bad contact in the slot. And was able to change color of letters by pressing a button.