#it is so funny i was told i was viewing loz the wrong way by the same guy and im jsut..ok sure jane

[trixstriforce]

now me personally, i would never be caught dead saying making zelda a playable character is a bad idea, but thats just bc i have good takes and amnot boring so thats just me

[allaroundnerd]

Codetober Day #13

13. Give us your most nerdy computer fact

Technically it's past midnight because I got caught up trying to repair my computer chair and the cylinder is rusted in, but I'm still considering it day 13. Here's my most nerdy fact and how it's applied.

Binary is a base-2 number system (I promise I'm getting to something cool), meaning it only uses the digits 0 and 1. Because it's base 2, each digit is a 2 to the x power, similarly to how we view the numbers we use daily, which is the base-10 decimal system. We all know the ones, tens, and hundredths places, but if you consider them as 10^0, 10^1, and 10^2, you see why we call it that. For example, the number 289 is (2 * 10^2) + (8 * 10^1) + (9 * 10^0). Side note: anything to the 0 power is 1. Now apply that to binary: 101 is (1 * 2^2) + (0 * 2^1) + (1 * 2^0), which is 4 + 0 + 1 = 5. Now you know how to decipher other number systems like Hexadecimal (base-16, uses 0-9 and A-F) or octal (base-8, uses 0-7). But that's not the cool fact:

This translates into some fun interactions in video games. I'll give you 1 basic example and a funny "glitch." If you played the older LoZ games or any game around that time, you may have noticed that your inventory stack limit was 255. An odd number to us, but to a computer, it's the largest number expressible in 8 bits (one binary digit is one bit here), and we only had so much space to go with. If you use my breakdown above, you get this: (1 *2^7) + (1 * 2^6) + ... + (1 * 2^0) 128 + 64 + 32 + 16 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 255.

Now, there's actually different TYPES of integers (numbers) we can express in binary. Signed or unsigned. You're familiar with negative numbers. Signed integers are how those are expressed in binary, the first digit determines what sign you get (for those who know, I'm using one's compliment since it's a bit easier to explain and I THINK this is how these "glitches" happened. If I'm wrong, please correct me.) Unsigned integers can't be negative, but signed integers can be with this method based on the leftmost bit. If it's a 0, the number is positive and calculated as I showed above. If it's a 1, it's negative and calculated the exact OPPOSITE way, meaning 0 bits are counted and 1 bits are ignored. Using my 101 from above, unsigned would read that as 5, signed would read that as -2. Now, when counting in decimal, if you hit 9 and want to keep going, you add 1 to the higher place and get 10. Binary is the same way: 1, 10, 11, 100, and so on. You may be getting where I'm heading, but just in case (and I enjoy explaining this because I'm a nerd), let's keep going.

Signed integers can "overflow" since we're changing that left most digit. Let's say we have 8 bits: 01111111 or 127 in decimal. If we add 1 to this, we get 10000000. In an unsigned int, this is 128, easy. BUT if we're using a signed int, this actually flips to -127. We call this overflow and it can make things behave...unexpectedly. NOW I can tell you about the glitch!

A beloved game of my childhood was Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. I remember beating it and loving the experience, but then I was told of an exploit involving the final boss. You can actually "heal" him to death. The "Cure" spell is meant to heal the living, and the Dark King is alive, but if cast with a sufficiently high magic rating, it will heal for so much that it flips the first digit, causing it to deal more damage than anything attack you could throw. If you look hard enough, you can actually find this in multiple games in the SNES era. Hope that makes up for the late entry!