I have been asking alot of people on xbox live if they knew what a game genie was. T my surprise most people dont know what the hell im talking about. And its not just the kids, older ones too =(

I submit to them as game genie 101; THIS THE GAME GENIE

i can still remember the graphic without any internet help... red guy, arms in the air, leaning off to one side... i remember trying to guess random codes to see what itd do... never anything cool...

hahahah, same
Stared at those codes for a long time, trying to determine a pattern.
I used to try random code strings on my genesis, hoping for something totally cool to happen, usually just resulted in console lockup....

i still have my game genies (NES, SNES, genesis, and gameboy)

best code i ever found was for super mario bros, made all the bad guys act like mushrooms

Game genie was remarkably simple (at least the NES one). A code was just an address + value. The address was in ROM program code space, and the value was patched over whatever was there. There are programs to convert address+value to game genie and vice-versa.

So for example, you could have a code that made you start with 9 lives instead of 3 - it just overwrote the initial value in the game. (Of course this was copied into RAM and you'd still lose lives..)
Or an unlimited lives code - it would just change the machine code for minus one life to do nothing.

Really a very cool idea, I don't know why nintendo wanted to stop it so badly (probably just because it wasn't licensed).

the other game genies worked the same way, i was playing with some x-port emulators the other day and they have a feature where you can "find" new codes by searching the memory space

yup I used to have game genies for all of my cartridge based system... those things were awesome.

unfortunately most gamers today consider the PS1 to be a "classic" console which IMO is ridiculous... they did have Game Genie but it was little more than a save game loader

I'd love to see a similar system for modern consoles... at the very least something that could do save states in the memory would be tremendous.

PS1? Thats nothing. Theres a game store in the UK, gamestation, they were always awesome for retro (i picked up a turbo grafx, 2 Megadrives/Genesis,a SNES and god only knows how many games).

That was up until a few months ago. They then had everything moved around and the "retro" section was changed to , and limited to it seems, PS2/Xbox and Gamecube. How rubbish is that. Even worse was that nobody in the store (apart from one dude who is frigging awesome) knew what a dreamcast was. or a turbo grafx. or an atari 2600. they just sorta looked at me like i was making shit up.

action replay had some cheat benefits, i had it for dreamcast and GBA, i think there was one for PS2 that would let you cheat too

the trouble is for the CD/DVD-based consoles you need to set up the GG/AR device with a boot cd (the dreamcast AR was a boot CD with a large memcard) but consoles now dont want to let you use any kind of boot disc because of piracy

well, theres always homebrew and trainers

still got tons of old stuff in my local gamestation, nes ,snes, ataris, tons of neo geo games etc etc

oh how nostalgic, that wonderfull game genie book and the other little paper books that you had to buy. i smell mine and it reminds me of such a happy childhood.

Game Genie was awesome! Specially for beating 3 day NES rentals

oh yes... the game genie. had one for my nes...
then i had a gameshark for my playstation..
no longer do things like that exist. cheating was always fun. even if developers didnt put codes into the game... there would still be codes via game genie and game shark.

i remember messing with this one emulator trying to find out how to make my own codes.. i did a few for smb that would keep lives at one value. youd have one value.. then youd do something to decrease it, then it would search for values that decreased, and repeat a few times and it would narrow down the options, then you just put whatever value you wanted in, and tah dah.

WHOOOOOSH....

^that's the sound of the THE POINT going right over your head

I get that shit all the time.

Game Genie was awesome!