Enlarge / I can see the code that controls the Tetri-verse! (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game's "kill screen" for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill screen—and some complicated memory manipulation it enables—to code new behaviors into versions of Tetris running on unmodified hardware and cartridges.

We've covered similar "arbitrary code execution" glitches in games like Super Mario World, Paper Mario, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in the past. And the basic method for introducing outside code into NES Tetris has been publicly theorized since at least 2021 when players were investigating the game's decompiled code (HydrantDude, who has gone deep on Tetris crashes in the past, also says the community has long had a privately known method for how to take full control of Tetris' RAM).

But a recent video from Displaced Gamers takes the idea from private theory to public execution, going into painstaking detail on how to get NES Tetris to start reading the game's high score tables as machine code instructions.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

The Federal Communications Commission chair today made a final plea to Congress, asking for money to continue a broadband-affordability program that gave out its last round of $30 discounts to people with low incomes in April.

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) has lowered monthly Internet bills for people who qualify for benefits, but Congress allowed funding to run out. People may receive up to $14 in May if their ISP opted in to offering a partial discount during the program's final month. After that there will be no financial help for the 23 million households enrolled in the program.

"Additional funding from Congress is the only near-term solution for keeping the ACP going," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wrote in a letter to members of Congress today. "If additional funding is not promptly appropriated, the one in six households nationwide that rely on this program will face rising bills and increasing disconnection. In fact, according to our survey of ACP beneficiaries, 77 percent of participating households report that losing this benefit would disrupt their service by making them change their plan or lead to them dropping Internet service entirely."