Hacker News

Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

• 71 Comments
• Does that hardware traps overflows or something?

    I had read an article about how DOOMs engine works and noticed how a variable for tracking the demo kept being incremented even after the next demo started. This variable was compared with a second one storing its previous value
  
  

  Doesn't sound like something that would crash, I wonder what was the actual crash

  By shultays 10 minutes ago

• About a year ago I was looking at Crash Bandicoot timer systems and I found that Crash 3 has a constantly incrementing int32. It only resets if you die.
  Left for 2.26 years, it will overflow.
  When it does finally overflow, we get "minus" time and the game breaks in funny ways. I did a video about it: https://youtu.be/f7ZzoyVLu58

  By jbreckmckye 9 hours ago

• There's a weapon in Final Fantasy 9 which can only be obtained by reaching a lategame area in less than 12 hours of play time, or 10 hours on the PAL version due to an oversight. Alternatively you can just leave the game running for two years until the timer wraps around. Slow and steady wins the race.
  https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Excalibur_II_(Final_Fan...

  By jsheard 9 hours ago

• So the invisible 12h timer runs during cutscenes. During Excalibur 2 runs, I used to open and close the PS1 disc tray to skip (normally unskippable) cutscenes. Never knew why that worked.
  (I also never managed to get it)

  By lelandfe 8 hours ago

• I’m going to wager that the cutscenes are all XA audio/video DMA’d from the disc. Opening the disc kills the DMA and the error recovery is just to end the cutscene and continue. The program is in RAM, so a little interruption on reading doesn’t hurt unless you need to time it to avoid an error reading the file for the next section of gameplay.

  By jonhohle 7 hours ago

• That’s a solid guess. And if that’s the case, that’s actually pretty good error handling!

  By Insanity 7 hours ago

• I recall that handling disc eject was an explicit part of the Tech Requirements Doc (things the console manufacturer requires you to comply with). They'd typically check while playing, while loading and while streaming.

  By Jare 2 hours ago

• > Never knew why that worked.
  I'm guessing the game probably streams FMV cutscenes of the disc as they play, and the fallback behaviour if it can't find them is to skip rather than crash.

  By p1necone 7 hours ago

• Oh yeah. The sword you pick up in Memoria. The problem there is that the PAL version runs slower; the way PSX games "translated" between the two video systems was just to have longer VSync pauses for PAL. So the game is actually slower, not interpolated

  By jbreckmckye 9 hours ago

• Longer vsync pauses but larger frame time deltas so it’s basically the same speed of play. The only thing that was even noticeable was the UI lag.

  By reactordev 8 hours ago

• Erm. No, like lots of games during the era quite a lot of stuff is tied to the frame rate, so the 50Hz region game just runs slower than the 60Hz one as next to nobody bothers to adjust for it. The clock for the hidden weapon does run at the same rate for both unfortunately, hence it being harder to get in 50Hz regions.

  By fredoralive 3 hours ago

• Incorrect. I’m looking at the source code. It’s not perfect but it’s not just “slowed down to 50hz” like people claim.

  By reactordev 30 minutes ago

• Wouldn't a slower tick make it easier as you get more wall time to do the same challenge.

  By mungoman2 3 hours ago

• So that's why it's called Excalibur 2!

  By debo_ 8 hours ago

• You really managed to make the whole video without making a single "crash" pun? (Those freezes come close enough that you could call them crashes...)

  By stevage 8 hours ago

• I think many games were that way. SotN definitely has a global timer. On a native 32-bit system it makes sense, especially when the life of a game was a few months to a few years on the retail shelf. No player is going to leave their system running for 2.27 years so what’s the point of even tesing it?
  Who knew at the time they were creating games that would be disassembled, deconstructed, reverse engineered. Do any of us think about that regarding any program we write?

  By jonhohle 7 hours ago

• Can be more than timers too. There's a funny one in Paper Mario where a block technically can be hit so many times it'll reset and award items again. Hit enough times it'll eventually crash. Of course it'd take around 30 years for the first rollover and 400 or so for the crash. https://n64squid.com/paper-mario-reward-block-glitch/

  By Gamemaster1379 6 hours ago

• Let's say youre pedantic with code. Ive been trying to be lately - clippy has an ovefflow lint for rust i try to use.
  Error: game running for two years, rebooting so you cant cheese a timer.
  Does this make the bug any better handled? Bugs like this annoy me because they arent easily answered.

  By technion an hour ago

• they're still made like this. Just now I made a frame counter that just increments every frame on a int64. It would eventually wrap around but doubt anyone will still be around to see it happen :|

  By lentil_soup 43 minutes ago

• Isn't this common in the computer game scene? Shouldn't you asume your game will be disassembled, deconstructed, reverse engineered?
  Although for old games released before internet was widespread in the general population, it might have not been this obvious.

  By jraph 3 hours ago

• aslong as it doesnt lead to online cheats having such code is fine. if someone wants to reverse the game find an obscure almost untriggerable bug and then trigger it or play with it. 2.6 year game session is crazy if its not a server, and if its a server, thats still really crazy even for some open-world open-ended game... its a long time to keep a server up w/o restarts or anything (updates?).
  looking at the various comments, there might be even some kind of weird appeal to leave such things in your game :D for people to find and chuckle about. it doesnt really disrupt the game normally does it?

  By sim7c00 6 minutes ago

• Great video, just subscribed

  By ThrowawayTestr 6 hours ago

• Props again to the id team. No doubt something like that engineered by most folks today would have died long before the 2 year mark due to memory fragmentation if not outright leaks.

  By piker 4 minutes ago

• Literally unplayable, someone should fix that.
  Doom is actually such a good game, I always go back to it every few years. The 2016 reboot is also pretty fun, but the later two in the series didn’t do it for me.

  By Insanity 7 hours ago

• This caters for people who prefer the classic Doom style of gameplay in FPS games:
  https://www.reddit.com/r/boomershooters/

  By jjbinx007 2 hours ago

• Same. Something about the metroidvania design with the home hub of the later ones didn’t give the same feeling. It should be run, kill, find secrets, end, next level.

  By jama211 3 hours ago

• Same. And love those brutality mods.

  By xmonkee 7 hours ago

• Fun fact: Doom is now a Microsoft property, along with Quake, StarCraft, WarCraft, Overwatch, all of the adventure games from Infocom and Sierra, and of course Halo. Microsoft pretty much owns most of PC gaming. Which is what they've wanted since 1996 or so.

  By bitwize 6 hours ago

• They own the past of PC gaming, as well as Call of Duty but that is more popular on consoles than PC nowadays. Those listed are small time compared to Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Roblox, Apex Legends, Marvel Rivals and a number of hard-hitting games every year such as Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3 etc.

  By kodarna 2 hours ago

• > Microsoft pretty much owns most of PC gaming.
  So valve next?

  By nurettin 4 hours ago

• They missed that window when Sierra was still the publisher for Half-Life. Besides, Valve is not a publicly traded company and Gabe Newell as former manager at Microsoft has no interest in getting back together. Valve is betting everything on Linux right now to be more independent from Microsoft.

  By Lightkey 2 hours ago

• As long as Gabe is alive, no way.

  By tomwojcik 3 hours ago

• We must find a way to extend his life indefinitely.

  By HeckFeck 15 minutes ago

• 2016 remains one the greatest single player FPS games I've played (Titan Fall 2 is the other)

  By shpongled 5 hours ago

• Since we've hugged the site to death, have an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250916234009/https://lenowo.or...
  Sadly it appears that archive.org didn't capture all of the site formatting, but at least the text is there.

  By LorenDB 7 hours ago

• Just be glad you knew what the bug was before you started. After 2.5 years... "Shit, I forgot to enable debug logging"

  By spjt 6 hours ago

• Notably, DOOM crashed before Windows CE.

  By jraph 3 hours ago

• Yes, great achivement!

  By wingi an hour ago

• 2038 is going to be a fun year.

  By JoshGlazebrook 9 hours ago

• That seems much closer than it did in y2k.

  By jonhohle 8 hours ago

•     [ 25 ] Now [ 13 ]
  

  yep

  By aaronbrethorst 2 hours ago

• Everybody is sleeping on 2036 for NTP. That's when the fun begins.

  By kevin_thibedeau 7 hours ago

• Assuming correct implementation of the NTP spec and adherence to the "eras" functions, NTP should be resistant to this failure in 2036.
  The problem being so many micro-controllers, non-interfaceable or cheaply designed computers/devices/machines might not follow the standards and therefore be susceptible although your iPhone, Laptop and Fridge should all be fine.

  By wiredpancake 6 hours ago

• This is a level of testing that exceeds what the testers I know commit to. I myself was annoyed the five or so times yesterday we had to sit and wait to check the error handling after a 30 second timeout in the system I work on.

  By Zobat an hour ago

• Literally unplayable

  By johnjames87 19 minutes ago

• I am going to need to see this replicated before I can believe.

  By 0cf8612b2e1e 9 hours ago

• Was this specific to the PDA port or the core doom code?
  @ID_AA_Carmack Are you going to write a patch to fix this?

  By ustad 2 hours ago

• The easy way to e-Nostradamus predictions:
  "See this crash?
  I predicted it years ago.
  Don't ask me how, I couldn't tell you."
  p.s. I had an old iPaq that I wouldn't have trusted to run for longer than a day and stay stable, kudos for that at the very minimum.

  By serf 9 hours ago

• I had an iPaq for a while and I don't remember seeing OS/hardware crashes.

  By prmoustache 2 hours ago

• This headline gave me a heart attack... I misread the site's name as Lenovo, and as I'm responsible for a whole lot of their servers running for years in a critical role... heart attack.
  Maybe I need my morning coffee. :)

  By jeffrallen 4 hours ago

• Seems to be a PocketPC port of Doom, with no source given or even a snippet of the relevant code/variable name/etc. shown at all.

  By ranger_danger 9 hours ago

• Yes. I think it it seems like it was the os that overflowed, and not Doom in this case.

  By unixhero 9 hours ago

• It's also running on very old hardware, potentially with some electrolytic capacitors that have dried up. And, there's always the possibility that it's a gamma ray [1]!
  [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221011-how-space-weathe...

  By nomel 9 hours ago

• They explained it was in the game code though?

  By jama211 3 hours ago

• To me, that error message was caused by some panic, and then the OS began gracefully shutting down the application in this case DooM - which would not have been done by the program itself. Therefore I conclude it was the OS.
  I am not an OS developer, so I take my own conclusion with a grain of salt.

  By unixhero an hour ago

• Literally unplayable.

  By moomin 2 hours ago

• It's good it didn't took a billion years to overflow. That would have been quite a long wait.

  By DeathArrow 4 hours ago

• Has this ever come up in a TAS of custom levels?

  By casey2 7 hours ago

• glitchless?

  By ZsoltT 5 hours ago

• Not a comment on the post, but I sure wish Jira would load even half as quickly as this site.

  By sunrunner 9 hours ago

• It takes serious hardware investment [0] to pull that off.
  [0] https://lenowo.org/viewtopic.php?t=28

  By antsar 9 hours ago

• > Host it on the Fritzbox 7950 instead?
  It's a router.. oh my god that made me laugh

  By skilled 2 hours ago

• Perhaps it's hosted on a disposable vape?

  By andrewinardeer 8 hours ago

• Commenting on my Epic from an LG Fridge.

  By gmane 8 hours ago

• It's not loading for me at all.

  By stevage 8 hours ago

• We recently moved to Linear and couldn’t be happier, can recommend!

  By 9dev 5 hours ago

• Is this a joke because the site isn't loading at all?

  By hughes 8 hours ago

• At the time of writing the comment it was practically instantaneous for me and the comment was genuine. Now it seems to be having trouble and I'm choosing to retroactively make the comment a joke about Jira ;)

  By sunrunner 8 hours ago

• Came back to check this since the tab never loaded. I'm guessing traffic caused some issues?

  By SpicyUme 8 hours ago

• I’m guessing HN hug of death. Probably smarter than just auto scaling to handle any surge traffic and then get swamped by crawlers & higher bills.

  By Insanity 7 hours ago