Under the microscope: Fighting Illusion Shou

K-1 Grand Prix

There are a bunch of games in the K-1 Fighting series. One of them was published for Saturn, Fighting Illusion Shou. It’s a 3D fighting game in which you play as various kickboxers from the 90s.

A somewhat similar PlayStation game, K-1 The Arena Fighters, came out the same year. English language sites list several several cheat codes for it. But they don’t seem to have any for the Saturn title. What gives? I decided to investigate.

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Play as the the ring girls

Here’s a cheat code that doesn’t seem to have been published before. Enter this sequence at the title screen:

A, Y, C, X, B, Z, L

Then at the fighter select screen, use Z or X when choosing your fighter. When the bout starts, you’ll see that you’re playing as the ring girls — Z gives you one of them; X gives you two of them:

There’s another cheat code that lets you play as the same ring girls in red outfits. Enter this sequence at the title screen:

A, Y, C, X, B, Z, R

Then use Z or X when choosing your fighter:

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Super combo

This code is on some Japanese cheat sites (e.g.), but I haven’t seen it described in English. Enter this sequence on the title screen:

Up, Down, Left, Left, B, B, Z

Then during gameplay, attack with this pattern:

Back, Forward, Back, Forward, L+R+C

If you got it right, your fighter will start flashing different colors and issue a flurry of punches and kicks:

If the super combo attack connects, you’re pretty much guaranteed a win:

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Technical details

I used the RALibretro emulator’s Memory Inspector tool to see which addresses changed when pressing buttons on the title screen. This revealed that the game stores your history of button presses in the buffer that starts at 060ffb84.

Using the Mednafen emulator’s debugger, I set a read breakpoint for that buffer. This led me to the function at 06034ee0, which compares byte arrays. At the title screen, this is called four times.

Here’s one of the sequences your input history is compared to:

06075898 0400  # A button
0607589a 0020  # Y button
0607589c 0200  # C button
0607589e 0040  # X button
060758a0 0100  # B button
060758a2 0010  # Z button
060758a4 0008  # L button

This is the “yellow Ring girls” code from above. The mapping of the bit patterns to buttons shown is pretty standard for Saturn games.

If detected, that sequence sets the address at 06077430 to 00000001. The “red Ring Girls” code sets it to 02. The “super combo” code sets a different address, 06052b68, to 00000001.

Interestingly, there’s a fourth cheat sequence:

L, A, B, C, R, X, Y, Z

The game sets the address at 0607531c to 00000001 if it’s detected. But as far as I can tell, this doesn’t have any in-game effect. Tell me if I’m wrong about this!

I was disappointed that there’s not a cheat code for unlocking the extra fighters, but here’s an Action Replay code to do it:

3607742e 000d

This sets the fighter limit from its default of 0b to 0d.

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Outro

Comment of the week goes to Jason Dvorak of PlayStationLibrary.com, who found that there’s more to the debug code I found for Madden ‘97.

Stay tuned more retro game reverse engineering and archaeology— I’ll have articles up about undiscovered cheat codes in some PlayStation and 3DO games this week.

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee