OpenTTD is an open source simulation game based upon Transport Tycoon Deluxe

In the original Transport Tycoon (but not OpenTTD), if you would build a tunnel from one end of the map to the other, the amout of money to pay gets so large that it triggers a (signed) integer overflow. So you can start your campaign with billions of dollars!

The original TTD was super stable though. I remember once I was able to crash it by building a very tight loop for a train, that it crashed with its own tail. This was the only time I saw the red font with debugging info.

Windows Solitaire had this two. If you kept dealing without playing, once you'd spent over $32,768, you'd instantly be in the positive nearly that much.

An impressing feat, considering it was written in assembly.

I don’t understand (or maybe I’m just too used to online sarcasm) are you calling BS on this claim? Or is it actually possible.

I don't think that was sarcasm, Chris Sawyer wrote most (all?) of his games in pure assembly since the 80ies. The outworldly quality of this feat is legendary. TTD, and also RCT and RCT 2 were incredibly stable games. I played them for months and months as a kid, and never encountered a crash.

Ah! Now i remember. This was on the flooded tracks! So: tight train loop, and then flood tracks and then the game borked. Probably flooding came before train movement and it caused bad deref.

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards on the Apple ][ let you bet negative amounts of money in the casino and make money by losing on purpose!

For those looking for something similar in the new version, in OpenTTD sandbox options are supported: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Sandbox%20options . Not as fun as the easter egg but still practical. And to be fair, the original had cheats too.

I don't read it as sarcasm, but more as a genuine achievement

This is meant as a compliment. The lower level the language, the easier is to make a mistake in it, leading to instability. The stability of the product, then, is a testament to the ability of its creator.

Chris have indeed written the game in Assembly, however, this is just one aspect of the truth. He actually used a kind of higher level generator or macro system for the game. But, still assembly, at the end of the day. Just not written by hand in Notepad, like how CS students do in class. Or was that just me?

Frankly, if two different people had written two similar games, and one had chosen assembler and the other python, I would assume the assembler game to have fewer bugs simply because the much higher skill level.

I program in Python.

I remember discovering something like this in the first (?) Sim City. I must have been like 10 years old at the time. For some reason I had built so many police stations that the upkeep (was it 100 per station) was so high my monthly losses overflowed to profits.

It is only in hindsight that I now understand what happened there.

It makes me wonder, is it possible to write something this complex in assembly today, given modern security features.

Not that you'd want to, given that OpenTTD has networked features and you'd want something that makes it easy to validate/isolate remote payloads.

Then you have to bet carefully, to avoid winning by accident.

Most assemblers have higher-level features like macros built in to make it easier to write. Once you start building abstractions (as Chris surely would've done) it becomes more manageable, but of course, still more work than writing C.

Instead of talking about that, spare a thought for the awful x86 memory segmentation mode[1] --- now that sucked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_memory_segmentation

In my headcanon it’s not a bug but a feature. Once you have that many police officers most of them have nothing to do but terrorize the civilian population with civil forfeiture to the benefit of the budget.

Thank you