Creating the Longest Possible Ski Jump in “The Games: Winter Challenge”
mrwint.github.ioThis game and the Summer Olympics had a huge wow factor when arriving to PC gaming - nice memories!
Also, it seems the same graphics engine was further used (and refined?) in baseball games - with the Hardball series. These, of course, had little traction in Europe. How was it in baseball friendly geographies? How did the popularity of the baseball games compare to the Olympics titles?
Impressive work and dedication. I was expecting you to discover a glitch that would easily break the record but sadly the game seems too well made for that. The glitch at the end did look quite promising. I guess we can't really rule out integer overflows for certain, so maybe one day we'll have enough compute to brute force all the combinations.
The trick is to start in second gear.
I have spent countless hours on Ski JUMP in Winter Challenge with my best friend in the days. I still remember that 108.5 was the max jump we were able to achieve
The previous post in this entry is even more impressive!
Very condensed tl;dr: winter games had a DRM that makes the game perform poorly if you enter wrong code; most of the cracks (including an "official" crack from 1996) skip it wrong and therefore you have a broken game; that includes gog.com version.
This person actually released a "patch" for gog.com version of the game.
I really like how well he explains the details and his "Sidebars" describing some core functionality of the underlying architecture. Link to that: https://mrwint.github.io/winter/writeup/writeup.html
> The previous post in this entry is even more impressive!
Yes, it also got a very warm reception here on HN:
I'm just astounded they achieved those graphics, and had the inspiration to do it too.
My PC joystick had a rapid fire mode, and if I remember correctly, it was possible to achieve huge jumps leveraging this.
That seems weird. I would expect optimizer to be able to do anything a rapid fire joystick could, so if the simulation code could be tricked that way, should it not have become apparent during the brute forcing? The other option is, of course, that you exploited a problem with the input handling instead. But then, the result presumably could not be stored in a replay file, right? Otherwise, again, the optimizer could have found it, after all. Were you able to replay those huge jumps?
I have not tried reproducing, but IIRC on my jumps the skis on the player were not even visible on the top part of the screen during the jump, so higher for sure
What button did you have our joystick automate?
Same as op. My joystick could automate both fire and opt button
Never was much into the winter challenge, although I remember the copy I had also had the broken ice skating segment. I remember that downhill worked, not sure about the others.
Was a big fan of the summer one though. I could get gold medal in every discipline on highest difficulty level except for the horse. I could never figure out the horse one. I think I managed to beat it only once, ever.
I’ll never forget loading the game 20-50 times in an attempt to get the bug that made the license code work. Endlessly loading. Checking the code on the paper wheel. Fail. Do it again. Kids these days will never know that pain.
All these articles make me want to buy it for PS5 :D
IIRC, in Winter Challenge's bobsled, you could make the sleigh go really fast and then deliberately crash by letting it "jump" over the outer edge of the track into nothingness. We always did this; lots of fun. I think another way was to simply have the sleigh flip over on one side and then slide until Game Over, or maybe even get it entirely upside down? As wanting-to-be "cool kids", me and my sister always preferred the "jump" though.
Ski jumping was fun, too, and I think I was a horrible shooter in biathlon. Fond memories on a 25MHz 386SX (and of all those other pirated games, in the early Post-Soviet Eastern Europe) for sure!
That's a lot more involved than the c64 version I remember!