Under the microscope: Fighters Megamix
Featuring Street (almost)
Besides Burning Rangers, the Saturn game I spent the most time with in the 1990s was Fighters Megamix. It’s the perfect fighting game - you can pick it up and have fun with it, and if you’re really into it there are a bunch of characters with lots of moves to master.
Unlocking all of the bonus content takes a while - one of the extra options requires you to have played 500 rounds. So if you want to see everything, better get fighting… or use the newly-discovered cheat codes in this article.
In addition to the cheat codes, I’ve also come up with a couple of goofy hacks (play as “Balls” and not-Vectorman!) and found some tantalizing hints about scrapped game features. (Street Fighter characters?!) See below for details…
The cheat codes
The first one unlocks the Extra Options screen. Plug in two controllers, go to the Options screen, and quickly enter these buttons on the second controller:
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, X, Z
You’ll be able to see a few of the options, but most of them will remain hidden. To activate a secret one, use the second controller and quickly these buttons:
Up, Up, X, X,
Down, Down, Z, Z,
Left, Left, X, X,
Right, Right, Z, ZYou’ll hear a sound effect if you got it right. Exit and return to the Extra Options menu to see the new Backup Debug option. This matches the one from Fighting Vipers that I found recently! More on this below…
To unlock the other items, once again use controller 2 to (quickly!) enter a button sequence:
Up, Up, X, X, X,
Down, Down, Z, Z, Z,
Left, Left, X, X, X,
Right, Right, Z, Z, Z,
Z, Z, ZIncluded is a Backup Utility item, which I think is a new find! It lets you copy and delete your save file, even to a Saturn floppy disk.
These code sequences are loaded to 06084004 and 06083ae8. There are counters at 06083ae0 and 06083ae4 that track how many correct entries you’ve made.
The Backup Debugger / Unlock characters
This game’s secret Backup Debug function is easier to use than the one in Fighting Vipers. To load a save file with almost everything unlocked:
Go to the Backup Debug screen.
Go down to Load and press A.
Go down to SET0 and press A 3 times to change it to SET3.
Go down to FLG0 and press A to change it to FLG1.
Go up to SAVE and press A.
The character select screen will now show everybody:
You’ll have Honey’s extra outfit available, but not the extra Kumachan characters (Mr. Meat and Palm Tree). To unlock them you can use some Action Replay codes:
3609fb85 0001
3609fb86 0001
3609fb87 0001
Playing as “Balls”
As the Training Enemy item in the Extra Options screen reveals, the default training dummy’s name is “Balls.” Can you play as this dummy?
Answer: Yes! The dummy isn’t a separate character, however. You can turn any character into the training dummy. There’s a set of flags that control various aspects of player display - if you OR them with 40h, you get the dummy:
0606557f # Player 1's flags
0606737f # Player 2's flags
The dummy in training mode is actually based on Dural. This seems to be because Dural doesn’t have any animated things on her head - if you change, e.g. Pai into the dummy, you’ll get the dummy with Pai’s braids.
Are there any other interesting flags? Answer: there’s one more (20h). I think this is unused: a single-color dummy. Most of the time it’s green and looks like Vectorman, but in some situations it’s red:
Scrapped characters?
Now we get into the realm of speculation… what was planned for Fighters Megamix that got left on the cutting room floor, as it were?
Well, the standout thing is this… change the value at address 0603738c to 06083b74 and load up the Book Keep screen to see RYU and KEN listed!
The strings RYU and KEN each appear twice in the game data. At first I thought they were just initials for a high score screen, but upon further inspection, they are referenced by the Book Keep function.
Look who else is in the same neighborhood: Aoi from Virtua Fighter 3! Janet uses some of Aoi’s moves, so maybe she replaced Aoi?
I’m reasonably certain that these characters aren’t present on the disc and playable. But it’s interesting that they seem to have been considered!
The game’s valid character indexes are 00 through 1f. The training dummy is referred to by 20, but gets replaced with 1a (Dural) before gameplay starts. There’s code at 06044d5a that replaces character index 21 with 06 (Honey) - was one of the Honey variants from Fighting Vipers supposed to make it over to Megamix?
Outro
For previous coverage of undiscovered button codes, see:
There might be more things hiding in Fighters Megamix - I’ll keep mining it, and post about anything significant.
Congrats for your research!
I remember that in first game footage on some magazines, also Virtua fighter character had an armor like FV characters; it should be nice find some leftovers about It.
Keep up the good work!
So how do you play as the Balls from the Debugger!? I couldn't figure it out!? Plus how do you get the Ken Ryu and Aoi to appear in the All Clear Characters section of Book Keep?