Watch any internet video on the subject to see an example of such strange game behavior.
Why does this happen?
EDIT: oh my this blew up didn’t it? Thanks for all the replies!
In: Technology
A cartridge communicates with the system with dozens of little gold plated pins. When you tilt the cartridge, you unseat some of the pins from the connector, making intermittent contact with some. This sends garbled signals to the console, especially with the graphics as there wasn’t much error correction
“this is a sentence with the first letter of every word removed.”
“his s entence ith he irst etter f very ord emoved.”
by removing communication lines (letters) some words disappear, some become misspelled weirdness, and some become whole new words.
Now imagine sending the garbled second line to someone who just learned english and asking them what it means.
The computer inside the N64 will only do what it is told, but if it is told “his s entrance it he first setter f very rod moved.” we see behavior we term glitches.
There are many pins inside the cartridge that “talks” with the console properly. If you tilt the cartridge even by a little bit, the piece of information/memory will not be processed properly. It like taking away a part of the brain that helps you remember to talk properly. The more pieces you tilt or “part of the brain you take away,” the more weird things it would do or “talk more and more like baby until you don’t understand anymore.”
The only cartridge you are allowed to tilt is Superman 64. No one cares if that gets ruined. Heck, throw it out a window.
Inside of the cartridges, there are gold pins that conduct electricity (gold is highly conductive).
This electricity carries information. These gold pins force the electricity to flow in a certain direction at certain times, if they are fully connected.
But, you probably know that electricity can “jump” between two conductive points, if the current is strong enough to bridge the gap. When tilting the cartridge, you create a gap, but the electricity is still strong enough to make it across. However, the electricity doesn’t have something to control where it goes, as it has to leave the gold pin to “jump” to the console receivers. Because of this, the information can be lost or scrambled, and sometimes can flow down the wrong pin receivers. This is why you get graphical/audio errors.
This can damage the console and the cartridge, although it is unlikely as the current flowing isn’t very strong. Just know that if you are wanting to tilt a cartridge, do with knowing the risk that you may break either the cartridge, the console, or both.
The cartridges haves pins so that the console can send small amounts of electricity through the cartridge and back to the console. This way the console can “read” what is written to the game cartridge.
The game’s content is “written” to the cartridge. When read properly, the signals get sent through the console and the game is played.
The game’s content is code and assets. Code is instructions about how the game should be played, how the things in the game interact with each other, how the things in the game should react when different buttons on the controller are pressed, etc. Assets are instructions that describe what the music should sound like and what the graphics should look like (Sprites, 3d models with textures).
When you tilt the cartridge, you interfere with the ability for the console to read the cartridge correctly. This means the instructions get a little bit jumbled up. Even small changes in instructions can make a drastic difference in the result.
Here’s a metaphor. Letters and words can also be thought of as “instructions”. Because they instruct you how to read and understand the content that I’ve written. But even small changes, such as a single letter being different, can have a big effect. Imagine someone says to you in a text message: “I have bad news, your son has died.” instead of “I have bad news, your son has lied.”. In a conversation we could keep we could keep texting each other back until the confusion is resolved. But the game can’t. It hasn’t to keep going on as if the mistake was correct.
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Unlike other consoles, the N64 *doesn’t* run any code directly off the cartridge – instead it copies it to memory and runs it from there. During normal gameplay, the console may not be reading from the cartridge at all. In theory, you could just remove the cartridge entirely and keep playing the game normally, with only a few glitches occurring whenever the game tries to load some extra data from the cart.
The only reason you can’t do this is because of a pin on one side of the console. That pin exists for the sole purpose of detecting whether the cartridge was removed, and shutting off if so. By titling the cart, though, you keep this pin connected (to prevent this shutdown) but disconnect the other pins so that data can’t be transfered from the cart anymore. The game keeps running thanks to the code in RAM, but all attempts to load additional data from the cart return garbage.
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