Hector Martin

It got to the title screen, but instead of loading the title screen cinematic behind the logo, it loaded the first map, with a playable Link. You could move around, but the Y axis of the stick was "folded" so you could only ever move backwards, not forwards.

So yeah, software damage is far from guaranteed to segfault. This is how you get really odd "undebuggable" problems from memory corruption. And how Intel gets away with still crippling desktop CPUs by disabling ECC RAM support.

Your desktop probably flips a few bits in RAM weekly, but you just don't notice. RAM sizes are too huge for memory to be close to 100% reliable. It just isn't possible without error correction support.

Interesting story, but I don't think this is true.

"an average of one single-bit-error every 14 to 40 hours per Gigabit of DRAM. The field study also explains that the error-rate increases by the age of the memory. Brand new DRAMs might not show any errors for weeks and months, but then the error-rate suddenly goes up." 1/

Source,: https://www.intelligentmemory.com/support/faq/ecc-dram/how-often-do-ecc-correctable-single-bit-errors-occur-and-how-about-double-multi-bit-errors.php … 2/

Note that the number is per gigabit, so 8x as much per gigabyte. 3/

In a typical consumer PC, for a huge percentage of memory at any given time a random but flip can go unnoticed. The probability that such a bit flip will lead to a crash or obvious error in a short time is vanishingly small. 4/