[ICEknight]

I've just noticed how the music in the title screen of Excitebike cycles one of the instruments whenever you reset the NES, and that made me think about the different reset system between Nintendo's consoles and other systems such as the Playstations, which seem to always handle the reset via hardware.

Not only Excitebike, but Rad Racer showed the vehicle select menu instead of the main title, and I also remember how Tetrisphere was said to show some kind of animation when holding the N64's reset button... So I was wondering if you guys know of any other games that do this kind of "more than just a system reset" stuff.



Yes, I know it's not such an exciting topic.

[Ichiban Crush]

After you beat the game, reseting Rad Racer has been known to re-run the ending sequence.

[Smeg]

You have to reset the Genesis to complete the fifth stage of X-Men. Christ that one pissed me off forever.

[Carnivol]

Animal Crossing has this character "Mr.Resetti" (or something like that) yell at you and warn you if you reset the game without saving first.


Also, lots of N64 games will bring you straight to title screen if you hit reset, so you can abuse that to skip the thousands of branding screens that some games has.

[TheRedEye]

[Smeg]

I broke one of my Genesis controllers, and it's quite probable that Mojoworld was the reason.

[adaml]

[Skrybe]

Super Mario 64 has a wipe effect when reseting the game, and Treasure Master on the Nes skips past the lengthy rules screen.

[BMF54123]

The N64's reset button is unique (as far as I know) in that it doesn't perform any kind of hardware reset, but rather sends a reset request to the software, which in turn performs its own unique reset routine. This allows for some pretty neat effects (or even hidden scenes like the one in Tetrisphere), but if the game totally freezes, the button is useless. =P

The NES and Genesis, on the other hand, do perform a CPU reset; however, the contents of RAM are not cleared, and thus games can check whether or not a reset has occurred by looking for a pre-existing value or string at bootup (for example, Kirby's Adventure looks for the string KIRBY at $517). Most games that record a high score will perform a similar check.

Newer consoles like the Gamecube and PS2 essentially do a full hardware reset. Since they use memory cards, there's really no reason to hold anything in RAM. The BIOS (which always loads first) most likely takes care of clearing RAM and resetting registers and whatnot before it even reads the game disc.

Fun fact: X-Men is the only Genesis game that is incompatible with the Nomad, since the system has no Reset button! Way to go, guys!

[James]

[BMF54123]

Something semi-interesting I forgot to mention: the Reset button functions differently between the original and top-loading NES. Whereas the original resets both the CPU and PPU, the top loader only seems to reset the CPU, so holding the button will freeze whatever was on the screen last. This has some interesting results in games that use split-screen/raster effects, since the necessary IRQs no longer fire...

[ArnoldRimmer83]

[taiki]