Oh, you disabled your debugging options in the test mode menu? We’ll see about that…

Oh man, I am EXCITED! Pocket Fighter was one of the first games I tried picking at when I started hacking old arcade games around the end of last year. I could clearly see from the raw dump alone that there was something hidden away here (it doesn’t get more blatant than a string reading “SECRET TEST”). I tweeted when I found the the entry routine early on, but I could never quite coax the game into loading it properly. Until now…*suspenseful music*

I want to believe…

I’m still alive! It’s the busy season at work, so between that and working on other projects, I haven’t been doing much digital archaeology research. Tonight I spent some time doing just that.

So! Dark Seal 2 (known as Wizard Fire in the west) is a fantasy themed beat-em-up. And apparently it has a variety of debug functions remaining…

Life is finally returning to normalcy (whatever that is) after moving into my new house. And that means back to hacking old games in my spare time! Today we’ll look at Akamaru Q Joushou, a game you probably haven’t bothered with unless your Japanese is pretty good. At its heart, it’s a quiz game, but it also has a variety of simple action and word games as well to make things interesting. It has one hell of a collection of debugging tools… and a very interesting developer easter egg!