Mortal Kombats I-III are known to have a secret menu that can be entered, by anyone, from the title screen. Mostly filled with location statistics, lead developer Ed Boon put it in to check on the game's performance in the field, but it also has some fun features like showing off all of the fatalities and endings.

All of the codes are entered from the title screen in attract mode, with only the P1 and P2 block buttons (here they're written as P1 and P2). The timing is tight and must be finished before the screen ends: MK2: P1x5, P2x10, P1x2, P2x8, P1x2 MK1: P1x 5, P2x10, P1x2, P2x1, P1x2, P2x3, P1x4 MK3 (also works in Ultimate): P1x5, P2x10, P1x3, P2x1, P1x2, P2x2, P1x3, P2x3

The main link of the post is to the Cutting Room Floor's page on MK2, but there are also pages for MK1 and MK3. Our blog Set Side B did a post on them back in 2022.

The Substack Rings of Saturn is a good place to look for secrets, they use reverse engineering techniques to find undisclosed and undiscovered codes. One recently found, believed to be hitherto unpublished, unlocks (nearly?) all the characters for Dynasty Warriors on Playstation. From Character Select, it is Up, Down, Down, Right, Right, Left, Down, Square, Circle, Up, Up, Triangle.

In Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, the Marketplace opens for morning business at 5 AM each day. However, the island's shop inventories change at 6 AM. This means, for the one hour between them, you can still buy the previous day's morning food special before it is swapped out.

Yesterday the Devteam (it is always THE Devteam) released version 5.0 of legendary and venerable rogueike compuer game NetHack. It is 39 years old.

Nethack (I am more used to writing it without the capital H) is a venerable roguelike computer game, and by some measures the greatest roguelike of them all. Long before Caves of Qud or Dwarf Fortress it was, and still is, a game of surprising depth, and for many years no other games were anything close to it. Even today, few games do.

The history of the game is recounted on the excellent Nethack Wiki. (unaffiliated with Fandom, yay!) It got its start as a remake of Jay Fenalson’s Hack (1981), itself a recreation of Rogue (1980), and which was remade by Andries Brouwer (1984). The first version of Nethack ”NetHack,” was 1.3d, posted to Usenet by DevTeam leader Mike Stephenson in June 1987.

Nethack 3.0 (July 1989) saw major changes to the gameplay. Nethack 3.1 (January 1993) greatly changed the dungeon, and in large part all following versions are modifications and elaborations upon it. In the time since sometimes there have been great pauses in its history. Nethack 3.2 arrived April 1996; Nethack 3.3 in 1999; Nethack 3.4 in 2002; Nethack 3.6 in December 2015; and now, Nethack 5.0 on May 2, 2026.

Here is a list of major changes, though it contains significant spoilers, and a note tells us that this is a renamed changelist from 3.7. With 3.4 the Devteam switched to a Linux-style numbering system: even minor numbers (like 3.6 and 5.0) are releases for wide play, and odd minor numbers (like 3.5 and 3.7) are development versions mostly intended for work and bug testing. Even so, as with all major versions of Nethack, bugs almost certainly exist in this version. Nethack jumped past version 4.0 probably because a notable fork called itself Nethack 4.

Three major architectural changes made in this version: the code now supports C99, bringing its source to the cusp of the 21 century. Much better support for cross-compiling exists now, building it on a system it’s not intended to run on. And the old yacc/lex special level construction system has been replaced with Lua. This make Lua a build requirement.

The interview is with the podcast Floppy Days. Compute's Gazette was the king of the type-in program magazines, an entire industry that's gone now. James Nagle swooped in and grabbed the trademark when it expired, and is planning a general retro-computing magazine. He plans on reviving the Gazette, but not Compute itself.