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View topic - Wanted: all passwords for Populous

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  • Joined: 02 Jun 2005
  • Posts: 27
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Wanted: all passwords for Populous
Post Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2005 2:47 pm
as the title says
i'm looking for all the 5000 passwords for 'populous' + possible cheats to make my hints and tips binder more complete

who will help me
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  • Joined: 08 Jul 2001
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  • Location: Paris, France
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Post Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2005 2:49 pm
Search "populous password" on this same forum and find:
http://www.smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4324

Note that the file the person posted is now available, but I'll bring it back later tonight (got a copy at home) if useful.
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  • Joined: 02 Jun 2005
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Post Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2005 2:55 pm
Bock wrote
Search "populous password" on this same forum and find:
http://www.smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4324

Note that the file the person posted is now available, but I'll bring it back later tonight (got a copy at home) if useful.


i'm sorry to say that my english is not that good neither are my pc skills so i don't really know what i can do with that file
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  • Joined: 19 Oct 1999
  • Posts: 14687
  • Location: London
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Post Posted: Sat Nov 19, 2005 1:53 am
I was looking at this game just now and realised that it has a very silly way of decoding level passwords - it generates the password for every level until it finds the one you entered, or reaches $1400 = 5120 at which point it gives up. Passing this level has no effect - it just starts giving you passwords that it won't accept when you enter them later. If you pass level 65535, you just go back to level 0 (or some other low-numbered level, since progression is rarely +1).

The password for level 65,535 is DOUASER but you can't use that. The last level you can enter is 5119, for which the password is DOUASICK.

If you enable Meka's debugger, enter
b w d3a4
and then proceed to enter a wrong password (eg. "A"), it will break on each tested password, shown in the RAM viewer at a nearby memory address (I think d3a8, I'm not bothered to check now). The last letter of the password will be lowercase, any letters after that must be ignored. Thus, you can find all the passwords if you really want to.

I'm sure the original poster is long gone but I thouight it's worth posting this. It probably isn't too hard to disassemble the code to find how the passwords are generated and to generate them all programatically to avoid having to sit down and write out all 5200.
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  • Joined: 01 Sep 2005
  • Posts: 28
  • Location: Melbourne, Australia
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:21 am
I don't know how much has already been done on this, or if anyone is really all that interested, but I spent a couple of hours yesterday taking a stab at working this out. I haven't got anything too useful yet, but I thought that I might as well post what little I've figured out so far. I might have another go at it tomorrow when I can spare the time; it's work, work, work today, though. I like being able to pay my rent ;b

- The decoding program is in bank 0 (mapped to slot 0)
- The accompanying data is in bank 9 (mapped to slot 2, starting at $B5AF)
- The subroutine at $2CF7 copies the "B"th lowercase-terminated string after address HL into memory starting at IY, and also capitalises the terminating character. This seems to be used only to copy a "syllable" string into the current test password string at $D3A8. Note that it seems to frequently copy a "syllable" over part of another.
- The subroutine at $2CDD calculates a checksum for the current test password, which is copied into $DFFB after the subroutine returns. It also leaves HL pointing to the second character after the current test password, which may or may not be signifigant.
- The subroutine at $2CE8 loads a 16-bit value from $D3BB, adds $8005 to it, and stores the result back to $D3BB
- The subroutine at $2BC0 has the effect of calculating: HL = (HL * 109 + $24DF) & $7FFF. So far I've only found this being used on the value in $D3BB.
- The "upper level" logic (what we're interested in) seems to be stored around $3000-$3100.

Nezuji :)
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  • Joined: 20 Dec 2004
  • Posts: 739
  • Location: Lyon, France
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Post Posted: Sun Nov 20, 2005 1:16 pm
I remember playing level 453 on the megadrive version.
After three hours fighting against the computer, I put back the game in its box and never brought it out again lol
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  • Joined: 20 Sep 2019
  • Posts: 33
  • Location: Italy
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Post Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2022 11:05 pm
Does anyone know how the worlds flow, and specifically at which world do the changes in scenery occur?
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  • Joined: 29 Mar 2012
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  • Location: Spain
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2022 8:35 am
Aleste wrote
Does anyone know how the worlds flow, and specifically at which world do the changes in scenery occur?


which changes do you mean?
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2022 11:42 am
The level number is the seed for lots of stuff (world type, rules, etc). The algorithm for how they are linked is unclear though. I think I looked into it a bit years ago (to show stats on the password generator) but it wasn’t easy to figure out.
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