Under the microscope: Championship Surfer (Dreamcast)

Polarman: does everything a polar can

Neoseeker reports this cheat code for the Dreamcast version of Championship Surfer:

At the Main Menu press L, R, R, L, L to unlock all the beaches (including the Arctic Beach) and also unlock the Ice Surfer

Alas, it doesn’t work. It seems to be an unverified translation of the PlayStation version’s cheat code, which does work. From IGN:

At the Main Menu press: L2, R1, R2, L1, L2. You will unlock the Arctic Beach and the Iceman surfer.

Ice Man in the PlayStation version of Championship Surfer

What’s the real code? I decided to investigate…

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Reverse engineering

Championship Surfer runs on Windows CE, which makes examining it different from most Dreamcast games. On the one hand, Ghidra is very good with Windows executables — you can import SURF.EXE and just run the auto analyzer. On the other hand, Windows CE games have modern complexities — programs don’t use memory addresses directly, and things tend not to be loaded in the same place each time you play.

I didn’t find any good candidates for cheat code handling on my first pass, so I turned to the PlayStation version, which doesn’t have an operating system complicating things. I quickly found the function at 800496a4 (NTSC-U version), which has a section like this (adapted from Ghidra’s decompilation with labels added):

if counter == 0:
    if input_check(0, 9):  # L2 button
        counter += 1
    else:
        counter = 0
elif counter == 1:
    if input_check(0, 11):  # R1 button
        counter += 1
    else:
        counter = 0
elif counter == 2:
    ...

That is, the game keeps track of a counter. If you press a certain button, it increments. If you don’t, it resets to zero.

With that knowledge, I went back to the Dreamcast version and tried to find its equivalent of the input_check function. I narrowed things down by looking in the neighborhood of strings that referenced menus:

000cacf4 "MAIN MENU"
000cad48 "SETTINGS"
000cae30 "GAME MODE"

That led me to the function at 0004a718. Tracing references to it brought me to a section of code that looks like the snippet above. Success!

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The code

The cheat sequence is:

Up, Right, A, B, A, Down, B, A, B, Y

“You are a bad baby,” huh? That reminds me of a Vectorman cheat.

This unlocks the Gallery > Bonus item, which lets you play as the bonus character. He’s called Polarman instead of Ice Man here:

This also unlocks the Time Attack mode:

And it makes all of the beaches available to play:

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Outro

Back to Neoseeker. For the PlayStation version of Championship Surfer, it also has:

Unlock Everything - At the main menu press X, Circle, Square, X, L1, R1, L2, R2

This seems to be completely hallucinated; the code from above already unlocks everything you need to unlock. Strange!

For more cheat code discovery articles, see the archive. And to get new reverse engineering articles every week, subscribe to Rings of Saturn here on Substack:

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee