Proposing With A Contra ROM Hack

contra

We’ve seen marriage proposals via modified Nintendo games before, but most of these put the proposal just after the first level. It’s one thing to have the old man in Zelda present your SO with a ring, but it’s another thing entirely to beat the game before getting on one knee. That’s what [Quinn] forced [Amy] to do when he proposed by modifying the ROM for Contra to display a proposal right before the end credits.

By tearing open a few cartridges, [Quinn] found himself with a bunch of EPROMs and NES cartridge PCBs. After grabbing the Contra ROM off the Internet, [Quinn] edited the game’s end screen to his proposal. This was then burned onto a 1 Megabit EPROM, soldered onto a cartridge, and put into the NES for his now-fiance to play. Once [Amy] and [Quinn] finished the game (without cheating, by the way), [Amy] saw her proposal and [Quinn] pulled out the ring.

NES Lovers Grew Up And Now They’re Coding For Palm

In case you missed it back in June, the Palm Pre was rooted by extracting the Root ROM from a Palm tool used to reset a device with damaged software. A lot has been learned from examining the code inside that ROM but we’re most amused by one thing in particular. If you grew up in the 80’s there’s a pretty good chance you know the Konami Code by heart. So did the developers of WebOS, the firmware running on the Palm Pre. By inputting the familiar (UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA) set of gestures the handset enters Developer mode for connection to the SDK which was leaked last summer but is now in open release.