Simultaneous Defeat Glitch

356 / 0 = 4294940287

I think you just solved the universe with that equation!

seen this before LOADS of times. kewl.

Huh, I’ve never known about this before. Interesting the bug testers never would have discovered it what with all the exploding enemies in the game.

Pretty normal glitch. I wonder how this didn’t come up in beta testing…

Yeah, one would think that it would have happened at least ONCE to the beta testers considering the number of enemies that explode or burst into flames upon defeat.

What would cause the game to spew out such a random number for experience when something like that happens and why is it so darn high?

Is it always exactly that much XP, or is it a variable amount? That’s perilously close to the magic number 4294967296, but it doesn’t differ by what appears to me to be a meaningful amount. It could potentially be accounted for by random seeding, or possibly by Ness having 27008 total XP when that bug occured.

Do you retain them thar EXP pts upon continue?

Woah, I didn’t know a glitch like that was possible. Then again, there is that one that makes you go through walls and go anywhere in the game so… wow. EarthBound has some freaky glitches.

I’m assuming that Ness didn’t actually get that EXP, because if he had, it would have shown something like 80 level-ups afterward, right?

Um…if you don’t mind my asking, Darien, what’s wrong with the number 4294967296? I don’t really know about these things.

There’s nothing “wrong” with it, per se. It’s 2^32, which is an important number computer-wise. Any time you see a “magic number” that’s close to (or a factor of) 2^8 (256), 2^16 (65536), or 2^32 (4294967296), it’s a sign that the problem involves the size of the variables used to store the information, and possibly an over/underflow.

How did I not know about this? This is awesome, thanks for posting.

@Darien: omg, you might be onto something there!

What Darien said.

It occurs to me that it might be trying to say that Ness *lost* 27009 experience points. If the experience number is being treated as signed (i.e. it can be positive or negative), those high numbers are the negative ones – by convention, the bottom half of the numbers representable by the n-byte container are positive, the rest are negative (see here for details).

But since the program isn’t expecting to print out negative numbers, prints it as a really big positive one.

Just a thought.

I actually looked into this a while back. The actual number calculated from the division by zero is 0xFFFFFFFF. I can only assume that the largest displayable number was meant to be 0x0098967F (9999999) at one point, but was changed to 0xFFFF967F (4294940287) later for no particular reason. Any number greater than 4294940287 will be displayed as 4294940287 instead.

For those who are interested, this maximum number is defined at C1/0E11.

Nitrodon – interesting! Thanks for looking into that.

Yeah Nitrodon! Mystery solved!

Hey, I did this during the EBFGP event.

“Ness lost the battle”
“YOU WIN”

GAME OVER, YEAAAH!

Oh, OK, just wondering. Thanks!

Lol, that happened to me more than once during my first playthrough. XD

What is up with the really glitchy screen at the beginning?

It’s just something that happens with lots of videos recorded from SNES emulators.

I was testing a hack and this happened.
It was pretty awesome.

4294967296

Highest 32 bit integer. Seen this number a LOT on Kingdom of Loathing during the time of Black Sunday, when using a certain item with 0 currency would boost you to this amount due to it trying to take currency from you, and rolling over to the negatives and thus kicking you to approximately this number.

So, not very fun for the coders.

If he was in Peaceful Rest Valley, then why did he restart at Ness’s house?

The person who did this probably didn’t save. So he went back to the first bit in the game.

crazy! vc ta lutando e morre e depois vouta! e com 4294940287 exp mas vc não usufrui desses pontos.um glitch inutil mas funny!

Odd. Just odd.