My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Sunday November 7, 1999

Oh no. I finally went and bought a GameShark

I finally bought a GameShark yesterday. Even without many explicit hints, but given the way I remembered things working, I quickly figured out how to patch myself lots of credits. (Not that I need that). And I found some sites that tell me more useful information, most noticeably the location of the garage.

I was moderately pleased with the GameShark as a product. When advertized it never emphasizes some of the monitor aspects it actually does have, and a recommendation that an Xplorer was a better product had me worried about whether I would be able to do the exploration I wanted with a GameShark. I never managed to find a magazine ad for an Xplorer, so I have bought the readily available GameShark instead.

The GameShark does have memory search capabilities, although only for 16 bit quantities or "strings" string is restricted to case-insensitive letters and digits. It cannot search for 32 bit quantities nor arbitrary patterns of bytes. (Actually, I think if you search for a number less than 256 it may do a byte search, which may not be what you want).

I did spot the string "Day %4d" in memory which suggests two things.

1) Gran Turismo may be written in C/C++. 2) If you get to day 10000, the display may get messed up.

Oh well. I've got to take the web documents I found home so I can begin creating nifty cars that I don't deserve to have. I might some day play a game (I now more-or-less define a simulation game as obtaining all 17 gold race cups) where the only non-prize car I use is the Nismo 400R. I don't think I'll ever get too deeply into hybrids.

A few days ago I realized something else. You can apply racing modification after weight reduction. I had not realized that. I had always assumed they were mutually exclusive, but, in fact, although in some sense it's a "waste of money", you can max-tune a car and add racing modification afterwards.

A new game I've started now is The most recent game I have completed is the platinum game. This started from day 39 of the gold game, as I go with prize cars instead of using GTO'95MR.

Lucky for me I've won a Skyline in that game, so it can clean up things (principally the Mega) that the Impreza cannot. I might still try the Impreza in the All-night ii, however; my backup plan was to win the All-night ii with the Impreza and use the Nismo GT-R LM in the Mega. Perhaps I will use the Chaser LM in the All-night i. Ick. But I find it difficult to imagine I can win that with the Impreza, and that's what you need to win to get one of the best LM cars in the game, and have a comfortable way of winning the Grand Valley 300 and another good LM prize car. Too bad Cerbera LMs don't seem to show up in these minimal games. I wonder if that is because I do not enter the UKvsJP with a British car, or even buy any British car at all?