A tip in finding pokes for games...

[SyX]

I have been asked a few times to find pokes for games without a cheat mode. Usually the process can be very difficult for people trying to learn or very boring/consuming time for people knowing what to do.

Well, there is a nice trick, reusing the knowledge of our speccy cousins (something good can come of having a lot of speccy ports ). Better explain the method using a real example, APB:

1.- We go to CPC-Power for getting a dump of the original game.

2.- Go down in the game sheet and you will see a link to the game in WOS, where you can download an original dump too (important note: Although i worked a few summers in linking CPC-Power with WOS, i'm sure must be a bad link or games not linked, if somebody find one of them, he can send the info to CPC-Power or me for updating the database).

3.- In the WOS page appears a link to the Tipshop (the orange square with the Tipshop text), a site with tricks and pokes of zx games. We go there and take look, for APB the zx pokes are:

Code Select Expand


Number of Demerits - 35367,xxx
Never Demeritised - 35338,000
Infinite Time - 37312,033
Infinite Gas - 37317,033
Current Day - 35366,xxx
Buy, Buy & Buy! - 31587,000
Speed:from 0 to ? - 30086,xxx
Accel 1st: 64k - 29844,xxx
Accel 2nd: 0 to 3 - 29845,xxx
Brakes 1st: 64k - 29846,xxx
Brakes 2nd: 0 to 3 - 29847,xxx
Armour: 0 to ? - 31825,xxx

4.- Now we use a CPC and a ZX emulator for loading the game in both. And in the zx emulator we go to the memory address of for example, the "Never demeritised" poke (35338 or $8A0A in hexadecimal) and take a look to the byte/assembly instruction we are going to change and the ones before and after:
[attachimg=1]

5.- And we search for similar string of bytes/instructions in our CPC emulator, and we found it in $A276:
[attachimg=2]

6.- We make the poke in the CPC emulator, put a 0 in $A276 and go back to the game for testing... and the poke works!!!

7.- We can go to the step 4 and repeat those steps with the other pokes.

For people can practice and test this method, i only have converted a few of those pokes in APB:

Code Select Expand

$A276 -> $00 Never demeritised
$190F -> $21 Infinite Time
$1914 -> $21 Infinite Gas
$14CD -> $00 Infinite money
$15BA -> x Armour (0 - 255)
Of course, it's not going to work always, but a lot of CPC games share the game code with the zx versions and we can take advantage of it, in the same way the zx people is using the cpc versions for fixing bugs in zx games (Wonderboy in monsterland, Pacland, ...), because sometimes a few bugs were fixed in the CPC port.

[tastefulmrship]

Great stuff, as usual, sir... but we have a QUICKER method of finding cheats for games...

... and...

... it's called...

JOHNNY OLSEN! ^_^

[Bryce]

@SyX: I was just about to call you lazy until MrShip came along and suggested an even lazier method!

Here's some tips on building great hardware: Suggest that someone else does it for you. Or even better just wait for someone else to come up with the idea

Bryce.

[MacDeath]

POKEs are ON : gotta catch'em all.

[SyX]

@SyX: I was just about to call you lazy until MrShip came along and suggested an even lazier method!

Sure is superlazy, but you can not imagine how many emails i have received with the subject of "Please search poke X for game Y" and now i can simple link to this thread

[Nich]

Great stuff, as usual, sir... but we have a QUICKER method of finding cheats for games...

... and...

... it's called...

JOHNNY OLSEN! ^_^

Hey, I'm pretty good at finding pokes as well!

[cpc4eva]

Hey, I'm pretty good at finding pokes as well!

Johhny / Nich - any chance of getting a few pokes like turning off those satelites and making ur cursor visible at all times for Hacker ?

[Nich]

Johhny / Nich - any chance of getting a few pokes like turning off those satelites and making ur cursor visible at all times for Hacker ?

Unfortunately, Hacker isn't a game that I'm familiar with, so I'm not sure I could do that.

[cpc4eva]

damn really need that game hacked

its part of the game the cursor disappears once you get to certain stage and u have no idea where you are placing your moves on the screen to try to visit the different country spies its impossible to complete otherwise.....