I’ve been watching video game speed runs, specifically Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and the user beats it in less than 15min by using a glitch called Stale Reference Manipulation. How can someone even discover that or do it? Do you need hardware besides the game console to do it?
In: Technology
No, they would discover it completely by accident, often by trying how to recreate a glitch. So Link has his boomerang, and I’m not too familiar but it can carry objects (or actors) with it. When he throws his boomerang, it briefly switches places with that actor, and sometimes a glitch happens and the actor now has past values for its postion, direction etc. If you know how to regularly cause that glitch, you can cause arbitrary code execution because you can change the actor Link or his boomerang is carrying.
You can do some of this by smartly using just faults the software, but to do truly arbitrary code execution, you need to modify the game itself (such as changing the item in a treasure chest).
Overall, it seems like the second would disqualify most speedrun catagories.
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