Spoiler Tip: Cheat Codes are never to be used unless you have beaten or otherwse given up on a game. Tutorial: Creating Custom Cheat Codes 101 by RenegadeSolja Introduction This tutorial is a step by step guide on creating your own cheat codes. The types of effects your codes will enable in the game will all depend on many factors including: The basic rules of the game, the scoring system used, the effects of in game items etc. Before reading this tutorial you should download a copy of Zsnes (Super Nintendo Emulator for the PC http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/zsnes/zsnesw151.zip) or gens. (Sega Genesis/32x/SMS Emulator)Try using the built in Cheat code functions on your own first. You will get a feel for the GUI. Concepts in the tutorial will make more sense as well as you are reading along looking onscreen. Lesson One: Planning your attack Much like the underground world of software cracking, a good cheat coder will have to exploit a his target by finding a piece of memory and changing its contents to the desired value. In fact cheat coding is a form of cracking to some degree as you are changing the software to bend it to your will. This takes some planning. Not anything too serious for minor codes, but more complex effects require a certain degree of planning. Most cheat codes are developed to bend the rules. Also they can be used to make the game harder, sometimes even much harder. This creates a different gaming experience as you can play on difficulty levels not available in the game. Let's try to make our first code. We will make an Infinite Lives code so that we will never get that dreaded Game Over screen again! 1) Open up Zsnes and load up Super Mario World. (ESC > GAME > LOAD) Of course you can download it right here on Romulation if you don't have it. But for this example almost any run 'n jump platform game will do. 2) Start the game normally and enter the first stage of the game. Make a note of how many lives your character has. Mario has 3 lives to start so I wrote down 3. 3) Press ESC Enter the CHEAT menu by clicking with the mouse. select SEARCH. A dialog will appear. Make sure the 1 byte Size and DEC check boxes are selected. DEC stands for decimal which is the standard numbering system humans use. Computers and Super Nintendo's use HEX or Binary formats. We will use Decimal for our search. Choose Comparative Search then Click Start. 4) A dialog box will popup asking for a value. Enter the value that your wrote down earlier for the amount of lives you have then click search. 5) The dialog will ask you to return to the game and resume play. At the bottom the number of results will be displayed. This is the number of occurrences in the games memory of the value we are looking for. The program tracks each place in memory that matches our query. Press ESC twice to resume play. 6) Play along in the game until you lose one life. Or just jump into a Pipe Plant's razor sharp teeth on a kamikaze death mission. Then press ESC. Click CHEAT Then SEARCH. Now enter the value 2. Your number of results that appear should go down dramatically. The goal is to narrow down the exact place in the memory that keeps the number of lives remaining. 7) Repeat Steps 4 thru 7 until you have Only one result. Click VIEW. In the next dialog a list will appear. Select the code and click ADD. 8) Another dialog appears now asking for a new value. This is where we enter in the desired number of lives 0-255. You may also enter a Description. For this example we will use Infinite Lives. Now click ADD. 9) The main Cheat menu will appear next displaying your code. In the column labeled TGL (toggle) the value should say ON. This means your code is enabled and ready to go. Press ESC twice to resume play once more. 10) Now you are playing with POWER! Infinite lives. Sometimes you will have trouble narrowing down your search. As long as you can get it down to about 5-10 results you can always add each code individually. This brute force method will work if you use different values for each code. This way you will know which code is the correct one by looking which value the desired effect ended up changing to. This method will work on almost any attribute in the game you can think of. (HP, EXP, Level, Number of Items, etc.) Try making the game more interesting by mixing things up a bit on your own. Challenge: Post some Codes up that make the Game more difficult in the comments section. Be sure to tell which game the codes are from and the Effect. Until Next Time. Regards. To be continued... -RenegadeSolja
