Save Glitch runs are possible
2 years ago
United States

So after hearing about some arbitrary code execution possibilities in Castlevania Chronicles via the Tonyhax research, I took a look at some possibilities! (if you're wondering what Tonyhax is, look here: https://orca.pet/tonyhax/)

Chronicles allows you to name your save and it turns out that the game doesn't actually have any checks for that field. You could potentially write whatever you'd want there and have it call code to warp you Dracula.

Unfortunately, there's no way to go beyond the character limit in the save name that I can find from within the game, and thus there's no way to do anything cool beyond manually writing save exploits with external tools. That's just plain hacking, and if we're going to do that, we might as well take a look at how the save system is structured and try to exploit it instead.

Turns out, the save system is extremely basic. There's no checksums like in other PS1 games, and absolutely no sanity checks, so you can use some hardware quirks and other games to doctor a glitched save that warps you to Dracula, all from within a PS1 or PS2, like so:

Make no mistake - this is a parlor trick or meme run at best, and a poor consolation prize to the fact that this game could have easily had arbitrary code execution zaniness with a bit longer of a name option!

I don't think it needs a category or anything as I doubt anyone would ever be seriously interested in running the game this way - but it is possible.

China

Arrrrgh this is something groundbreaking. If not for the fact that I knew nothing about save editing I'd probably check it further...

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