Not mine, but I always enjoy seeing these monstrosities.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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What would actually happen if you used an action replay and a game genie at the same time? Would it not even be able to boot up? Would it work and just one supercedes the other? I only ever had game genie so I couldn't test it. Does anyone know?
[EDIT]
Based on further research (read: exactly one DDG query) It appears the Action Replay is actually significantly more complex than I had guessed and functions differently enough from the Game Genie that they quite often simply cannot operate in tandem like this and can cause serious issues.
Read on if you'd like a cool story that has little to do with reality, or would like to imagine how chaining game genies might work if that was feasible :3
[/EDIT]
Based on my (admittedly not incredible) knowledge of how those devices both work, they intercept reads for specific memory addresses from the CPU and insert their own values. As long as they both weren't set up with codes to modify the same address very little would happen, it would behave as you might expect.
If the two both had codes that modified the same address the Game Genie would "win" here since it is physically closer to CPU in the chain. It would see the address matching one of its codes and spit back its value, neither the cartridge nor the Action Replay would see the memory read occur.
Thanks for that. Do you know would the serious issue be like hardware damage or just like corrupted gameplay? I've seen some videos of game corruption and I'm wondering if that's something people could use or would it just fry the game or console.
There's always a chance for hardware damage chaining devices together that were not designed to be used as such. To keep your hardware safe don't use it in ways that violate the manufacturer's guides and recommendations.
In this case? Probably just wouldn't really work, might corrupt save game data.