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Whenever Samus approaches a Bombu, the screen fills with static to show electrical interference with her visor. According to programmer Zoid Kirsch, as the game's developers worked on this detail, a big issue that came up was the memory use of the noise texture since the GameCube only has 24 MB of RAM. If they used a low resolution texture (64x64) to save memory then the static effect would come out blurry and not crisp.
To solve this problem, one engineer came up with the idea to use the memory holding the Metroid Prime code itself, and they discovered that machine code is sufficiently random to pass as a static noise texture. In the final game, whenever Samus' visor is affected by electrical noise in-game, the player is actually seeing the bits and bytes of the Metroid Prime software code itself being rendered on the screen. This same technique was originally employed by game designer Howard Scott Warshaw during the development of the Atari 2600 game Yars' Revenge.
To solve this problem, one engineer came up with the idea to use the memory holding the Metroid Prime code itself, and they discovered that machine code is sufficiently random to pass as a static noise texture. In the final game, whenever Samus' visor is affected by electrical noise in-game, the player is actually seeing the bits and bytes of the Metroid Prime software code itself being rendered on the screen. This same technique was originally employed by game designer Howard Scott Warshaw during the development of the Atari 2600 game Yars' Revenge.
Zoid Kirsch tweet:
https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590012270071152640
Correction by Kirsch:
https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590037731065102336
https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590012270071152640
Correction by Kirsch:
https://twitter.com/ZoidCTF/status/1590037731065102336
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