Under the microscope: Cosmic Smash
We love Cosmic Smash
Cosmic Smash is an arcade game from Sega Rosso that has you play a game of Breakout combined with Virtua Tennis. You play as a semi-transparent humanoid figure in futuristic looking rooms. Your goal is to break through the wall of glowing blocks in each of 50 stages. The aesthetic is very Y2K.
In this edition I examine Cosmic Smash and come up with:
Two cheat codes that change your character to represent members of the game development staff
An unused level select function that was probably meant to be a cheat code
A set of debug flags that alter various game parameters.
I thought I was the one to discover these things, but after writing them up I noticed that pomegd got to most of them first! This Japanese language blog post covers some of the same ground as I do here. I’ll expand on what’s covered there in this post, and note which things are new.
Cheat codes
There are six well-known cheat codes for this game that let you change the appearance of your character. You can become a “Worker,” a yellow guy, a silver guy, a bear, game developer Toshiaki Miida, or game developer Katsuyasu Ando — see Sega Retro for details.
These codes are in plain text in the game data, but you have to know how to interpret them. The “Bear” code is:
8c0a1b00 "U D U D U U D"U means “Up” and D means “Down,” of course. There’s a space in between each letter, so you press the buttons one at a time.
Now we’ll look at two more codes. pomegd’s post points out their existence, but doesn’t describe how to enter them. They work differently — here’s the first one:
8c0a1b3c "DJSJSJSJSJSJSJSJSJSJSJD "S means “B” or “X” here. You’ll notice that code one doesn’t have spaces in between the letters. You put it in like this (start when the Sega Rosso logo comes up):
Press and hold Down — this enters the first
D.Press and hold B (keep holding Down) — this enters the first J.
Press and release A ten times (while still holding Down and B) — this enters an
Son press and aJon release.Let go of B — this enters the final
J.Let go of Down — this enters the final space.
You’ll hear a sound effect if you got it right (“Have fun”). You character’s uniform will then have クロカワ on it, representing game designer Masahiro Kurokawa.
The second code looks like this in the game data:
8c0a1b94 "URRRDLLLUSULLLDRRRULLLDRRRULLLDRRRUSURRRDLLLURRRDLLLUSU "Intimidating! This one is entered starting at the Sega Rosso logo, too:
Hold the analog stick in the up position (and don’t release it until this whole thing is done).
Rotate the analog stick clockwise once (putting you back at the up position) and press A.
Rotate the analog stick counterclockwise three times and press A again.
Rotate the analog stick clockwise twice and press A one more time.
Release the analog stick.
You can pull this off with the D-pad if you’re precise, but it’s much easier to use the analog stick.
This code puts スギハラ on your character’s uniform. That represents Mamoru Sugihara, one of the game’s programmers.
There’s another thing that looks like a cheat code that the game checks for this during the auto demo / ranking screen:
8c0b7c58 "L R L R DDD U"As far as I can tell you can’t actually activate it — nothing records button presses for it to check.
Stage select
The cheat codes above change the value stored at memory address 8c0cd7b0. The character appearance codes range from 03 to 0a.
If you set the value at that address to 01, you’ll get a stage select screen! You can choose any one of the 51 stages to start on:
It looks to me like this might have had a cheat code associated with it at some point. The table at 8c0a1a00 has pointers to the button sequences for the codes mentioned above (pomegd’s post mentions this, too), but the values for indexes 01 and 02 point to null strings.
The Naomi arcade version has same screen, but there’s no cheat code in that version either.
If you want to sample the different stages without having to play through them all, I made a patch to enable this by default. Get it from SegaXtreme:
8c061d9c 10e4 # Pretend the stage select value is presentDebug flags
There are strings for a configuration menu referenced by the family of functions near 8c05a8bc. I couldn’t get the actual menu to show up (pomegd did), but here are all of the addresses it can affect:
Not all of them actually work, but the various debug info settings do:
DemoBoard is pretty strange!
SkeletonModel is yet another player appearance change:
MultiPlayer doesn’t seem to do anything, alas! I couldn’t find any interesting references to the second controller inputs.
Outro
Follow pomegd on X and on HatenaBlog for some really cool Dreamcast hacking stuff!
For more cheat code discoveries, see my archive. Which other Japanese Dreamcast games should I be examining? Tell me in the comments.
