Talk:Game Genie

Which sentece's tone i s incorrect? 2000Thebuilder (talk) 16:03, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Unclear sentence
This sentence is very unclear, "To keep demand up, the booklets would only last a certain number of months/issues." It is so unclear I can't fix it. Did the booklets disintegrate after a certain time? (I think not.) Was it the demand for the device, the booklets, or the subscriptions being manipulated? Someone who is knows the details of this should take a wack at rewriting this.

As someone who owned a GG and wanted to subscribe (but never did - Thanks Mom!), I can remember that with a subscription you received all the newest books for the term of your subscription. However, I do not think the statement above is correct. If memory serves me right (I will consult the GG Manual as soon as possible to be sure), there was an order form for ordering any of the extra booklets. This would make the unclear statment removable as it is incorrect. User:LinkP

If I had to make a guess, I would say you could only buy it for a few months. I agree that the sentence is very unclear.


 * I restructured the article and rewrote the section discussed above as best as I know. I know some about the Game Genie, but not a lot -- I think there's a lot more that could go into this article. --Pagrashtak 18:33, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

---

Code creators club link doesn't seem to work.. link to archive.org version?? User:Os

Trivia
I distinctly remember there being an ad for the NES gamegenie. Therefore I removed the comment saying that the GG one was the only one advertized. --Thaddius 16:40, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
 * The comment said that the Game Gear version was the only one never advertized. (I would be willing to believe that, but I cannot prove it.). -- Calcwatch 02:02, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

http://www.videogamesource.com/genie/ somone add this link

Availability and Popularity
There seems to be a lot of information about how Game Genie was advertised. I am curious as to where it was sold, did you have to mail away for it or could you buy it at a toy store? I had a Game Genie for NES and I was the only one of all my friends to have it, and it had been bought at a garage sale. I bring this up because I'm curious on how popular Game Genies were in the past. KittyKat 1987 03:00, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

KittyKat - it was sold very widely in retail stores throughout North America, Canada and other territories. If I recall the total sales of all Game Genies were about 3m units, maybe more.

The article states that the SNES Game Genie does not work with the SNES Doom port. I can attest that it does, I had both as a kid and even created cheat codes for Doom. That I'm sure about, the only thing that I can't remember is if the flap at the top of the device would lock into place on the Doom cartridge, as it did any other game.

68.185.248.62 06:40, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Um... Canada is part of North America. But yeah, I managed to buy a NES, Game Boy and SNES one at Zellers here in Canada as a child. --Thaddius (talk) 12:30, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

This need to be updated to say that Game Genie's are currently available for Nintendo DS http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/12/2701223/belkin-game-genie-hands-on the URL says belkin, but the article says Hyperkin, don't know if they are same company or not. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.37.200.6 (talk) 18:45, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

NES is wrecked by game genie use
Did anyone care to report a source that says the pins of the nes are bent back and wrecked as a result of using this advice, it seemsto be a very un balalanced article mentioning only the good 130.15.112.169 (talk) 17:36, 17 February 2009 (UTC) found it130.15.112.169 (talk) 17:58, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

While obviously my personal experience with the game genie is irrelevent to the wiki, I have to say that I've used the game genie on many different NES consoles, and it never 'wrecked' any of them - HOWEVER, it did seem to exacerbate the 'games don't fit' problem, where one has to move the cartridge around more to get it to work - but over time this has happened to absolutely every NES I've ever used, regardless of game genie usage. It is a problem of the front-loader NES design not the game genie. 71.236.178.126 (talk) 21:14, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

The Game Genie PCB is thicker than a normal NES cart. I've measured this, .063" for GG and .047" for normal NES cartridges. It's operated in a different position than a normal NES cart, so maybe the thickness is needed, but who knows. 2602:306:CEA1:C4B0:9D13:EF2:3E57:C0A5 (talk) 00:53, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Game Gear Game Genie doesn't do what article says?
I have an original Sega Game Gear and Game Genie for it and in the article is says "The Sega Game Gear's Game Genie had a more complicated design than those for other systems. When inserted into the cartridge slot, another slot would pop-up to insert the Game Gear cartridge" but my Game Genie doesn't do this. Nothing moves in it internally when I looked at it and fiddled about with it. You can pull the game cart out or push it in without the Game Genie being attached to the Game Gear. And the item works perfectly. So I don't understand what the writer of that part of the article means by this? Anyone care to explain? --Live Steam Mad (talk) 13:13, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Game Boy
It works excellent on my Game Boy Color and Pocket, despite what the article says.

81.186.253.47 (talk) 11:09, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Intro's Explanation of How the Genie Works
The introduction explains that it does what it does "by means of directly altering the binary code of a game". This makes it sound like it is actually modifying the code on the cartridge. While the game *is* being modified in the in-memory copy of the game (which *is* also in binary), this wording leaves a lot to be desired. It would be better to say, in some way, that it is modifying the game's values in the NES's memory. While the original explanation is not false, it does not really give any insight into how it actually works.

Not to mention, someone else even noted that this part is not cited. A more informative explanation can be gleaned from Hack-A-Day here: http://hackaday.com/2013/10/07/how-the-game-genie-works/

This page even links to the patent for the Game Genie on Google's patent database. I'm not sure what could be a better citation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.108.1.139 (talk) 12:47, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

CHR vs. PRG
Most Nintendo games contain PRG and CHR ROM. Can the Game Genie modify only PRG ROM or can it modify both?

Answer: only the PRG rom. The CHR rom was a separate data/address bus and it was not feasible (or necessary) to do both; would have made the GG chip substantially more expensive due to extra pins. Almost no other systems used separate buses like this on the cart port — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.70.232.139 (talk) 09:26, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Game Genie and save-enabled games
I have a question regarding this piece of unsourced information:


 * Sega, on the other hand, was a full endorser of the Game Genie, with their official seal of approval. One of Sega's requirements for this, however, was that the Game Genie wouldn't work with games that have a save feature, such as the Phantasy Star or Shining Force series.

I have never heard this before, and doing a cursory search reveals no source that could be used. The only thing I found was a discussion here that led me to believe that it was more of a technical issue that would interfere with the writing of save data (due to the fact that Sega used bank-switching to swap ROM out in the area where saves were written to), not that the Genie "wouldn't work with [such] games". Putting a "citation needed" tag for now, consensus may deem it not necessary. -- LocalH (talk) 06:22, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Rewrite
This article needs a complete rewrite. This sentence: ''Nintendo's SNES and NES consoles used a Lock chip to prevent unlicensed (or grey import) games which was unaffected by the Game Genie, which simply passed the chip connections through to the cartridge without interference. Hence the Nintendo Game Genie devices did not act as a country converter. '' is cryptic and frustrating to read. The grammar throughout the article is extremely poor. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.230.119.26 (talk) 20:30, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

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Game character
Codemasters/Big Red included Game Genie as a magical genie character in some of their games of the time, e.g. Wild West Seymour and Crystal Kingdom Dizzy. He sometimes served as a chatty way to prompt the user for an in-game password, and was sometimes just an in-game character. Equinox ◑ 00:34, 14 May 2017 (UTC)


 * I should further note that this character appeared in games on platforms (e.g. the ZX Spectrum) for which no Game Genie hardware was ever manufactured (though there was comparable hardware from other manufacturers, such as the Multiface). Equinox ◑ 05:29, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Removed the nonsense about Yoshi's Island working
Was no citation provided and entirely contradictory. It states the SNES Game Genie was revised so that certain expansion chip games like Yoshi's Island can work, but then goes on to state that it lacks the connections for the side pins that games like Yoshi's Island with its Super FX chip utilized.

It can't be both. It either has those connections and is compatible with things like Super FX cartridges, or doesn't and isn't. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:6000:A645:2100:45A1:F72E:C256:6CAD (talk) 20:18, 18 July 2019 (UTC)