Under the microscope: Ferrari F355 Challenge (PlayStation 2)

No Passione Rossa here

F355 Challenge is a racing game from Sega AM2. It first appeared in arcades in 1999. A Dreamcast port was released in 2000, and a PlayStation 2 version followed in 2002.

The game has a Gallery that initially doesn’t have anything in it. As you complete challenges, however, it starts to fill up – mostly with pictures, but also with movies and some other things.

If you don’t want to unlock everything the hard way, this article is for you – I found eight cheat codes for this game that enable access to various gallery items. They’re listed below, along with technical details about how they work.

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The cheat codes

Enter these at the Press Start Button screen. The first one unlocks 10 photos in the gallery:

Left (x3), Up (x5), Right (x5)

The second code unlocks the F355 F1 Catalog, which has 25 pages of Ferrari content to peruse:

Up, X, Triangle, Down, Left, Right

The third code gives you nine more photos:

Up (x3), Right (x2), Down (x8)

The fourth code gives you a video ad for the arcade version of F355 Challenge 2: International Course Edition:

Left, X, Up, Triangle, Circle, Right, X, Down

The fifth code unlocks two more photos:

Down (x3), Left (x4), Up (x8)

Code number six shows the F355 Extra Color screen:

Right, Square, Down, Triangle, Circle, Left, X, Up

Code seven unlocks another nine photos:

Square (x3), X (x5), Triangle (x5)

The last code is:

L1+L2 (x3), R1+R2 (x3), Circle, Triangle

This one is pretty difficult to enter, because the timing on the button pairs is pretty tight — you really have to nail hitting them at the same moment.

The result is just one photo, alas:

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Technical details

There’s a suggestive string in the game data:

ura command [%d] success\n

The “ura” here means something like “hidden” in Japanese. 裏技 (urawaza) means “secret trick,” or “cheat code” in this case.

That string is used by the function at 00217970, which implements a fairly standard cheat code tracker. The logic looks like this in pseudo-Python:

for i in range(8):
    sequence = cheat_sequences_002c8b50[i]
    length = cheat_lengths_002c8b80[i]
    counter = cheat_counters_002c8b70[i]
    if player_button == sequence[counter]:
        cheat_counters_002c8b70[i] += 1
        if cheat_lengths_002c8b80[i] <= cheat_counters_002c8b70[i]:
            unlock_gallery_items_001ae430(i)
            play_sfx_00164060(0x10a)
            debug_print_00107570("ura command [%d] success\n", i)
    else:
        cheat_counters_002c8b70[i] = 0

The code checks your input against eight different sequences. It keeps track of how many buttons you’ve correctly entered in each sequence. If you reach the end of one sequence, it applies an effect and prints the “ura” message to the console.

The function I’m calling unlock_gallery_items_001ae430 sets 4-byte values starting at 004315b8 from 0 to 1. These make the photos and videos above available.

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Outro

Thanks for reading. For many more articles like this one, see New codes for old games page – I’ve found hundreds of previously-unpublished cheats for retro titles.

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee