Digging the Secrets of Mortal Kombat 2

Around 13 years ago, when i was a lil' chap doing my fourth grade, i came across this rather awesome game at my cousin's place.Having only played the 8-bit games on my NES machine, i was rather mesmerized by this fantastic beat em up game called "Mortal Kombat 2". The story was way cool and since i hadn't played its prequel, there was this strange mystery surrounding the game. Being a hardcore fan of the Street Fighter series then, i really loved all kinds of beat em up games. The moment i finished seeing the intro of mk2, i knew that this was pretty different and way cooler than anything i've ever seen.



Playing it was pretty difficult back then. I wasn't used to playing with computers much (didn't own one till 1995). My cousin taught me this neat trick win the game easily (which would be the first "hack" i ever used). All i had to do was make the character duck (by holding the 'down' arrow) in a 'Very Easy' mode game. The opponent wouldn't be able to attack you then.He/She would just come near and start punching above your head. All you have to do is keep punching him while ducking. That's a funny programming flaw which can be easily exploited. Anyway, i defeated most of the guys till i reached this huge four-handed guy by the name of "Kintaro"!.


He whopped my ass !!!. The trick didn't work with him at all. He would pounce on you and crush the poop out of you!... he would block most flying kicks and retaliate by hammering you down to the ground. He was one bad-ass and still remains in my list of toughest game opponents ever. Anyway, i had to leave my cousin's place without winning the game. I wanted to keep going to his place... poor me !


Aug 1995 !! ... whoopee ! ... i got my first PC!!." Pentium I 133 Mhz - 1.3 Gb HD - 16Mb SD RAm ". The hottest machine of the age. The only games that came with it was this quiz game in encarta encyclopedia called Mind Maze... but no mortal kombat 2 ...Anyway, i started collecting games from my pals. And one day i get this game from my cousin called Ultima 7:The Black Gate, which would change my life forever (alas, that is an another tale). Finally it was around 1997, when i finally get hold of Mortal Kombat 2. Same Story... Kintaro kicks my ass. This was the time when i started playing with Hex editors. You needed Hex editors back then if you had to patch games. Life wasn't all that easy then... you had to manually replace hex codes on .exes yourself (ofcourse, with instructions) to get things done. Mortal Kombat is a game with a lot of secrets... from new characters to hidden layers and most of them were documented on the Internet.


"Hexedit mk2.exe"- my mind says. I needed to know what was in this small file... I don't quite remember the hexeditor that i used then... all i could see was a bunch of numbers and alphabets (hex) and some strings on the side. I began to follow the strings ... follow ... follow ... Tic Toc ... Tic Toc ... Whoa !! Whats this i see ??... i notice text from the game - texts like "Lui Kang Wins","Fatality" etc. Nice. I notice the names of the secret characters as well. But there's something else as well...


More Secret Characters and Finishing Moves !!! ... Some of these characters are the programmers themselves ... On of them (Tanya)later appears in MK 4(which i didn't know then). Treasure!. Did some searching on the Internet and found nothing related to this. Sure, there were lots of info about the already know facts. And so, i post my first thread in some mk2 forum. The response was dumb ... No one was interested. I couldn't do anything about it... i was just a kid back then who only knew how to code stuff in BASIC. Assembly was way out of my league... I give up



Now here i am, 13 years later, playing that old game after a long gap. I think i'm able find out more about those secrets that i had discovered eight years ago. There's still nothing about it now. I owe it to that curious lad from the 90's. I can speak asm now (though not fluent)

Just a little time and concentration, that's all it takes to be ...'God'.


I'll keep posting my progress on uncovering those hidden secrets, if it all i make any ;-)

Rescued my OS

Installed Softice again ! ... and it didn't bite this time ... my advice to anyone who's trying to install on windows xp would be to always use the "manual" mode and start the Softice debugger using the 'net use' command. Also revived my slack honey...
Had lost her MBR record thanks to windows bitch. Now i can get back to making fun of fedora users! Muhahaha

Astala Vista Iraq !

My new work ... Here's what you can make with images of George Bush,Terminator poster,a petrol hose nozzle and 20 mins of Adobe Photoshop CS3 ;-)

Creating Your Own Skrull Picture

As promised, here's how i used photoshop to create the "skrull" image

Step 1: Obtain pictures of a Skull, Yourself and/or a human brain.

                       [   Skull   ]

                     [   Brain ??   ]

                        [ Face /Ass ]

Step 2 : Use the 'Transformation' tool to adjust all the images. Use the skull as a base. The brain image needs some serious tweaking. Modify the 'perspective' in Transform mode to match the skull. Your picture forms the topmost layer.


Step 3: Start removing parts of you image. Make sure you show off the important features of the skull (socket,teeth etc.)


Step 4: Use the liquify tool to properly align your facial features with the skull. Don't worry if the image stops looking like you... we'll be doing some serious filtering :-)

Step 5: Entropy !! ... use your brush and make some senseless nasty impressions over the image

Step 6: Use photoshop's filter gallery on the whole image/or each layer. Experimentation can really yield some cool results. I used the "glowing edges" filter on the skull layer and my picture,varying the different attributes for each ...

Step 7: Show Off ... i'm sure you won't be needing a detailed explanation for this :-)

Remembering Alan Watts

Nothing inspires me more than the word of Alan Watts. I remember the first time hearing one of his seminars on mp3. It was on the topic of meditation. His style is very unique - peppy and funny, but at the same time very focussed and refined. What he had to say was very different from other speakers who usually tend to focus a lot on the 'benefits' of meditation than the real practice . Its sad to see that most people have not heard of this great philosopher and his works...


Some of my favorite Alan Watts quotes ...


“The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.”


“Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”


“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”


“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

Reinstallation Day !

Nothing bores me more than reinstalling an OS ( especially Windows ). This time its thanks to good old Softice and its row with my video card :-P. Tried my best to revive her but in vain. Even did a Repair Install, which didn't work as usual. I'm going to limit my Softice adventures to a virtual machine. Virtual Machines and their snapshot features can be a life saver at times !

New Art Work

Completed a really disturbing piece of art today ... What do ya get when you Photoshop a brain,a skull and a picture of me ??? ... ART !! .... I'll discuss how i created it 'in detail' tomorrow.

Harry Potter Book !!

Funny how the Potter book got leaked even four days before the date of release ...
Found a link to the book floating around on one of the sites i frequent ... Didn't download it though :-P

Check out the news article -> PotHead Leaked



.... Anyway, i'd rather do Pot than read Potter :-P

Favorite Album Of 2006

Without a doubt, Tool's "10,000 days" has to be one of my favorite albums of all time. Its packed with a lot of really neat songs. My most loved ones being - Vicarious, The Pot , Roseta Stoned , Right In Two and the title track. 10,000 days is 75 minutes of pure alternate metal !.


This album is pretty different from their earlier works. Most songs are 6 min+ in length as usual.Maynard sounds a bit different and he was just too amazing in "The Pot" and "Vicarious". "10,000 days" is more focused on current day affairs unlike albums like Aenema which still remains my favorite Tool album. The band hasn't released any videos for the album. There are a couple of amazing unofficial videos available on the Internet. I really enjoyed the unofficial video of "The Pot".


Anyway hats off to you Tool for an another great album !!!

Photoshop Day

I've almost completed the prelude to my first comic. Thank the programming Gods for photoshop!!. Spent the whole day listening to Infected Mushroom and playing around with photoshop. Scanned some old family pictures as well ...

Planning on a comic

I've always wanted to make a comic of my own (who doesn't ?). I've got a basic idea about what my work is going to be. Its about people from a different world and their strange ways of life. These people can't talk and ... (why spoil the suspense now eh?). Its sort of like Frank Abbott's famous work called 'Flat Land', but with a whole new wavelength. Haven't thought of a name for it yet ... but its going to be more of a combination of 'Zen' and 'pure toilet humor' !


This is my initial work of the cover page... pure vector art... its really simple but very expressive and novel. Maybe you've figured out the whole concept of the work from this page...

(If this somehow reminds you of Star Wars, don't tell George ;-) !)




Anyway, stay tuned for the first release ...

Strange Drawing

A week ago, one of my Brazilian online buddies sent me this picture saying that he had drawn it while he was in a trance... don't know if he was meditating or was on pot or something ... he wanted me to check it out and interpret its meaning ... he figured out that since i'm Indian i'm supposed to know this cryptic stuff (stereotype eh?)...

The only interpretation i seem to make is that it has something to do with birth ... the four legged spiders don't make much sense ... does anyone recognize those symbols ???

The Yin Yang

As a kid, i've always found the "Yin Yang" symbol pretty cute. I really couldn't relate any meaning to it then. I had the impression that it was some sort of a logo for 'Feng Shui'. Last week i happened to listen to one of Alan Watts' seminars on the Yin-Yang. Yin Yang is really about duality ... duality in which there is not only an opposition between the two poles/extremes, but also a kind of inherent co-operation between them. Watts gives a simple analogy to make his point clear. Darkness and Light - the definition of one is dependent on the other ... if there was only one of these poles then it simply would cease to exist !! ... confusing eh ? ... lets put it this way -fishes are not aware of the fact that they are in a liquid medium( water ) because they've never been on land (alive i.e)... so these poles or extremes need each other to exist.

Check out some Yin-Yang correspondences

Yin	Yang
Earth	Heaven
moon	sun
autumn, winter	spring, summer
things female	things male
cold, coolness	heat, warmth
darkness	brightness
inside, interior	outside, surface
things small and weak	things large and powerful
the lower part	the upper part
water, rain	fire
quiescence	movement
night	day
the right side	the left side
the west and north	the east and south
the front the the body	the back of the body
the hours between noon and midnight	the hours between midnight and noon
exhaustion	repletion
murkiness	clarity
development	incipience
conservation	destruction
responsiveness	aggressiveness
contraction	expansion

Memoirs Of Flytrap

Flytrap was my main project for college. Its a neat little honeypot that works in a distributed fashion to kick cracker asses !! ... Hoping to improve its ass kicking skills soon ...

Until then, be enthralled (or disgusted) by some of the art I've created for her...



[ The Wallpaper ]




[ The Logo ]

Greetings All !!

I welcome you all to my domain - Alternate-Reality. Working on a lot of stuffs these days... from assembly language programming to making comic books!!. I'm in a kind of "buffer" zone of my life now... done with college and ready to take on the world ( and the chicks ;-) ). Well not that ready to take on anything be true. I love my life now - i do what i feel like doing.. sort of like how a paper boat moves around in a small lake ... the way it allows itself to be pushed away or guided by entropic currents ... i don't think the boat really cares about where it reaches ... or how it ends up at its destination. !! Enough with analogy !! . Anyway, i'm as free as a cow in a North Indian Bazaar. My work will mainly focus on Computers,Art,My Life :-P and Cows(moo machines :-P).


...So brace yourself !!