yappa!

what indeed!!!

bit flopping our way to wr

there was a glitch in someone's mario64 speedrun some years back that stumped everyone for a very long time, where mario suddenly teleported up in a very unexpected way. For years people tried to figure out what could have caused it, and someone even offered a money bounty for reproducing it it. But eventually it was concluded that it would've been genuinely impossible based on careful analysis of the footage and game code.

But, that same analysis revealed that it would have been possible if one single bit of data in the game memory was flipped randomly, for some electrical reason.

Bit flips like that are very rare, particularly with the type of memory that the nintendo64 uses. And, usually if it happens, you wouldn't notice, something more benign happens, or the game would just crash. But they can happen more frequently if the memory chips are exposed to radiation, and the increase of background radiation caused by solar flares can in fact increase the chances of a bit flip. So the conclusion was that a solar ray is probably what caused the warp to happen.

Now, the thing to understand is that this thread is really just people joking around. Even if a solar flare did cause a bit flip in your console, to reproduce the run, you would need it to flip a very specific bit at a very specific time in the run. This would require predicting both the exact time and exact microscopic location of a ray of radiation, which is i think basically impossible. But the event that people are referencing with their jokes did happen! It was an interesting situation of incredible chance, which is why people still talk about it.