DKC Atlas Forum

So I have experimented with the Castle Crush soft-lock. I have done everything imaginable and I have discovered some new sprites/items your long turns into. I will include images when I get to it. But for now here is the basic list.

Klubba:

Krook spawns and kills you:

Balloon String:

Irregularity Detected:

Game Crashes:

K.rool Duel Spiked Cannonball:

Level inches down one pixel at a time:

Screen turns random colors predominantly yellow:

Kleever:

Death Music Plays:

Crazy Lines on Screen:

Kong Falls Offscreen:

Kong Moves Across Screen Instantaneously:

Game Freezes but Krook’s March Still Plays:

Squitter:

Squitter turns into Kleever:

Tilemap Background changes Themes:

Tilemap Background randomizes Castle Theme:

Game Lags:

Killed Enemy Noise on Loop:

Kleever Swings:

Death Monkey Noises on Loop:

K.rool

Neek

Rattly

Barrel

Dead Krow

Krow Egg

Kutlass spawns and wildly runs back and forth:

Completely Normal Rambi:

Nothing:

Blue and Gray Camoflauge Screen:

Spawns Neek:

Spawns Extra Krook Hook:

Spawns Spiny:

Popping Balloon:

Barrel Explode Animation Twice:

Mr. X!

More to come! I don’t have pictures for all of them. This is just off the top of my head! I had all of these soft-locks done a week ago and now I’m posting them while I’ve just started studying. Let me know if you’ve found any I haven’t! Also I have another weird glitch in Castle Crush that I would like to share soon.

This deserves a whole new post! I managed to spawn something that looked like Mr. X to me! I wasn't recording and the game crashed soon after. I am currently attempting to replicate this!

Good luck, and I hope the glitch doesn't break anything!

The Soft-Lock usually crashes the ROM. Sometimes it wipes the ROM, or even renders it unusable. I have a lot of spare DKC2 ROMS on here. I haven't been able to replicate the Mr. X one, but I am trying!

If you manage to find anything interesting maybe you could attach some save states so I can further investigate the state of the game. I have only managed to produce about half of those crashes over the years.

Cool! I will!

I have determined that 1.1 creates better and more variety of crashes than 1.0

I have recently started using e roms and j roms and u roms and 1.0 1.1 of the lot and they generate different glitches. I am led to believe that you can spawn absolutely anything in the game. I'll post sooon. But after save stating at a certain point right now I had a commonly reoccuring thing. A spike object spawns. The screen goes down a bit goes up a bit and then inches down. Or the interesting anomaly that all of the crashes in which the tile map or tile map showed up in front of the tile map or text etcetera they would appear and then the sprites would flicker with the extra tile map and then the tile map would disappear and then shortly thereafter the enemy sprites. After a bit they'd come back and then immediately afterwards the game would crash.
VideoViking had a theory about the farther up the invisible object was, the worse the game would crash. Perhaps the corruption of the rom might commence. Who knows. I might hack it like I said before, but what I think the world needs is an explanation for this glitch. What causes it to reference it? Would the same happen to any animal barrel and invisible object? I'll get back to you on that.

Will you be posting a video about this glitch? Findings and all.

EDIT: I would also point you to Mudhole Marsh, where you can also trigger the invisible DK Barrel. For this to work, the B-A-R-R-A-L-A-X code must be activated. One of the treasure chests in this level conceals a DK Barrel; if you're quick, you can pick up air. Use it as a compare-contrast to the Castle Crush glitch.

I will be posting a video. And thanks to the reference! Do you think the ids are different due to the fact we don’t need beetles? There’s already videos covering the diversity of the different sprites, so I’ll be focusing on something different than that.

I got a rom to mudhole marsh. I got the invisible object, and it acted like a normal invisible object caused by beetle-clashing. Sorry to disappoint you. I think the key is to get an invisible object and an animal barrel together. I think the game has some sort of ids for transformation. The invisible object reappropriates these ids to give you any sort of results. Perhaps the crash is caused by a fail-safe in the coding, or something else. With Klubba, (that one specifically), if you touch a wall, the game crashes. Because otherwise you'd go through the wall. And I have spawned the animal barrel so that it zips me upwards upon transformation. Sorry I couldn't figure it out VideoViking.

I knew that the crash glitch wouldn't work in Mudhole Marsh, I've done this one before. The reason I brought it up was because maybe there's a clue into how invisible objects were handled. Consider the following:

1. Mudhole Marsh is a horizontal level, Castle Crush is vertical.
2. Mudhole Marsh requires BARRALAX code, Castle Crush does not.

There's a channel on YouTube called Displaced Gamers; Chris looks into game code, history, archeology and premises - in addition to providing live patches through Game Genie codes. My hope is for him to investigate the glitch in depth, perhaps provide a solution. If you could reach out to him on this topic, that would be wonderful.

Here's his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DisplacedGamers

I'll see if I can get around to that soon. I'll also see what I can figure out about that as well if that's what you're looking for. Parrot Chute Panic and Lava Lagoon have klick-klacks. Do those count as vertical levels? I feel like it has to do with the crushing properties itself potentially.

I'm lost. What do Click-Clacks have anything to do with the glitch?

Invisible objects are an anomaly. They shouldn't exist.

When an object is carried, a pointer to the carried object exists in RAM address $0D7A. This is supposed to reset to zero when no object is being carried, but the Castle Crush glitch involves picking up an object at the same time it is destroyed, leaving the game in a fragile, inconsistent state. I don't know the exact details, but I can see that if this $0D7A ends up pointing to data that isn't an object structure, RAM corruption will most likely occur somewhere. This is because attributes of this non-object will be manipulated just by the sheer fact that it is being "carried" (a normal object's X- and Y- coordinates are updated as it is carried around the level by the player Kong), which means unpredictable things happen. This most commonly results in a crash. Crashing happens because the 65c816 CPU's program counter ends up in the incorrect place, and data is interpreted as code, or a CPU instruction's parameter (operand) is interpreted as a CPU instruction (or opcode).

Fail-safes generally don't cause crashing*. They prevent crashing. The "An irregularity has been detected" message is an example of a fail-safe.

* I say generally, because some game devs intentionally program games to crash or softlock in certain cases as an anti-piracy measure.

VideoViking wrote:I'm lost. What do Click-Clacks have anything to do with the glitch?

From what I've read here, a glitch with a similar outcome to the Castle Crush glitch (called "Click-Clack clashing") can be performed with Click-Clacks in other levels, leaving the Kong in their carrying animation with no object as long as Y is held.

Thanks for the explanation, Matt!
Here is a link to the various kinds of ways in which to get an invisible object.
https://dkcspeedruns.com/DKC2_Tricks#Invisible_Barrel
Also, there are two other ways to wrong warp. I'll get a link soon. Thanks once again! Mike Kanis has an explanation for wrong warping that I will put up here soon as well. I emailed him with a long winded explanation of everything necessary to know, VideoViking.

Mattrizzle wrote:Fail-safes generally don't cause crashing*. They prevent crashing. The "An irregularity has been detected" message is an example of a fail-safe.

* I say generally, because some game devs intentionally program games to crash or softlock in certain cases as an anti-piracy measure.

This might be hard to explain, so bear with me.

In the old days of computing, when there is no storage device that contains an OS, the motherboard will spit some message like "Disk boot failure; reset or insert disk and press any key to continue." (don't remember the exact message anymore, it's from the ancient days of DOS) Where is this message coming from?

And how does this relate to SNES games? Generally, does the console contain something similar to the above description when a cartridge isn't detected or refuses to boot, due to faulty receptors, a bad battery or corrupted ROM. All the console does is display a black screen. But some games do spit out some kind of message if an irregularity is detected, but the game has to boot first. By mentioning that game developers intentionally program games to crash as an anti-piracy measure, this makes me wonder if the games themselves contain their own BIOS or secret mini-OS detector as part of that fail-safe. I once got that irregularity message from a legit DKC2 cartridge many years ago. But that couldn't have its own BIOS, the SNES is just a video game console. Or could it?

I really need to know more about this. It would be really weird if the SNES actually had a secret OS consumers and gamers weren't meant to use. Like it had MS-DOS, Linux or UNIX as a mere error handler. Or maybe Nintendo created its own BIOS, I don't know. That would be one hell of a research project.

This glitch has always creeped me out. Interesting theory. I think it could be possible. But then again, this glitch still creeps me out. I was experimenting with it, and two other outcomes I've seen are possible. Blue, black camo screen instead of black crash screen.
Here's a video I made for my recent discoveries. Play it at several times normal since I didn't edit out the boring bits. And what makes this different from the other invisible objects? Your theory may be untrue, but who knows. I feel like the checksum analysis was a check only by rare and killer instinct and dkc. That was not the snes (I may be wrong) the rom was either performing the checks or coding the console to. I feel like nintendo won't give away their development secrets, though. I feel like it makes sort of sense. Here's a video. One thing that disturbs me. I can't figure out what I am from 0:26-0:30. And the same stuff loops. I couldn't create anything different than shown. Diddy's Kong Quest 1.1 last level visited, Castle Crush. Do any of you have a completed game save? I reset mine to keep everything organized. I need it to plug it into the snes9x version that supports lua scripts. That way I can really dig into it. It doesn't support my normal save states from normal snes9x. I once saw that after the crash, the (c) 1995 Nintendo from the intro showed up. Which was weird. It only happened once. Also, the video is at 2x speed.

I know this just sounds silly, but I do know about old computers. I just don't want to sound like some kid addicted to technology. I know about the history and everything and have even set up windows 95 in a dual-booting format.

VIDEO:

VideoViking wrote:And how does this relate to SNES games? Generally, does the console contain something similar to the above description when a cartridge isn't detected or refuses to boot, due to faulty receptors, a bad battery or corrupted ROM. All the console does is display a black screen. But some games do spit out some kind of message if an irregularity is detected, but the game has to boot first. By mentioning that game developers intentionally program games to crash as an anti-piracy measure, this makes me wonder if the games themselves contain their own BIOS or secret mini-OS detector as part of that fail-safe. I once got that irregularity message from a legit DKC2 cartridge many years ago. But that couldn't have its own BIOS, the SNES is just a video game console. Or could it?

I really need to know more about this. It would be really weird if the SNES actually had a secret OS consumers and gamers weren't meant to use. Like it had MS-DOS, Linux or UNIX as a mere error handler. Or maybe Nintendo created its own BIOS, I don't know. That would be one hell of a research project.

I highly doubt the Super NES has any OS or built in error handler. The closest thing to the latter is that any message that appears as a failsafe could have a pointer in one of the hardware vectors (e.g. COP, BRK, NMI, etc.) stored in the SNES header. Then the BRK or COP opcodes can be placed at specific places in code. Alternatively, they could just be invoked using comparisons, branches, and jumps like most other things in the game.

Maybe "softlock" would be more appropriate to describe these failsafes, as the game could be programmed to intentionally enter a loop that cannot be exited aside from resetting the console (which is essentially what the error messages in DKC2 do, only in this case, there would be no transition to a different screen). What occurs with the Castle Crush glitch is most certainly a crash though due to its unpredictability.

In the case of a cart being unable to boot, what happens could be the result of faulty pins, damaged ROM chips, or a number of different issues with the console itself, resulting in the console being unable to read the RESET vector which tells the console where to start the program counter at when powering on.

Always a pleasure to read your posts, Matt! They're always very informative. I think you're right, but it would be cool if VideoViking's theory was true. There are three ways to get invisible objects, four if you add castle crush, and two other ways to wrong warp out of levels. I'm also forgetting something here. But does anyone know what was in that video of mine that was moving and got killed by the crusher? Help! Also, you can get an invisible object in DKC3. I'll post when I find use for it.

Completely unrelated, but it reminded me of it. This crash which I can't investigate without a actual save on a rom. (lua script) And of course, the team tossing. It reminded me instantly of this because of the former, (obviously), and the latter of the Castle Climb! The infinite team tossing is frame perfect, it took me a while to get all the way up there in a single go. For an example of the Castle Climb, here you go! But the first five seconds are confusing. Also, there's a wrong warp speedrunners use related to the soft-lock to exit the level in about twenty seconds.

New discovery! After actually transforming to rambi and taking damage by the spiny while in the barrel, when I came out Diddy's stars we're still spinning. Nothing else. They disappeared after a while, but it's still confusing. Any ideas? Any any idea why after the crash (c) 1995 Nintendo showed up?