Under the microscope: Ford Racing (PlayStation)

Every cheat site has the wrong code for the PlayStation game Ford Racing

The cheat sites, like GameFAQs and IGN, say that you can unlock every car in Ford Racing by entering your name as GIMMEGIMME in career mode.

IGN’s page with the supposed “GIMMEGIMME” cheat

This doesn’t work in the PlayStation version. What’s going on? I decided to find out.

I started by going to GameHacking.org to see what GameShark / Action Replay hackers know about this game. A lot, it seems – there are dozens of modifications listed there. One of them is:

All cars unlocked: RAM Write - Writes 9 to the RAM address 0x80017014.

From users Nachbrenner and UL1.

I loaded a memory snapshot from the Mednafen emulator into Ghidra to see what references I could find to this RAM address. That led me to this interesting bit of disassembled code:

80046c2c lui v1,0x8001    # Load the 1st half of the unlocked cars address
80046c30 li v0,0x0a       # The value to be stored is 10
80046c34 sb v0,0x7014(v1) # Store the value in the unlocked cars address

Here, number of unlocked cars is getting set to 10 – even more than the value shown in the GameShark code.

The disassembled code shown above is part of the function at 80046ad0. I set a breakpoint for it and then clicked around in the game’s menus. I got a hit on the Options > Hidden Items screen.

There’s code that runs while this screen is displaying that checks whether the value at address 800960f4 is 0x6c00. Inspecting that location with the Mednafen debugger shows that it changes when you press controller buttons. The target value is matched when L1, L2, R1, and R2 are all being held.

After the button check, there’s code that reads the buffer at 800971f0 and compares its contents to five groups of values. This buffer fills up when you press Left, Right, Circle, or Square.

One of the five checks is for these values:

08, 04, 20, 80, 04, 08, 80, 20

That corresponds to this code:

(Holding L1+L2+R1+R2) Right, Left, Circle, Square, Left, Right, Square, Circle

If you got it right, you’ll be taken back to the Options screen. When you return to the Hidden Items screen, you’ll see that all cars are available:

All cars unlocked

So much for GIMMEGIMME!

There are two more codes you can put in on the Hidden Items screen. This one unlocks all tracks:

(Holding L1+L2+R1+R2) Left, Right, Right, Square, Square, Circle, Right, Square

Racing on the Willowdale 4 track

And this one shows the credits:

(Holding L1+L2+R1+R2) Circle, Left, Square, Right, Left, Left, Circle, Circle

Before applying the codes above, the game checks to see whether the value at 80096d50 is 0x2f. This address changes when you switch menu screens – 0x2f is the Hidden Items screen.

There are also checks for screen ID 0x06. This turns out to be the Career Menu screen (press Triangle while in Career mode to access it). This code gives you $1,000,000 to spend:

(Holding L1+L2+R1+R2) Left, Right, Circle, Circle, Square, Square, Circle, Square

The last code is also entered on the Career Menu screen:

(Holding L1+L2+R1+R2) Circle, Circle, Square, Square, Left, Left, Right, Right

This one switches your Career mode car to the next one:

The Race Calendar screen, showing a $1M cash balance and the Fiesta car instead of the Ka.

That’s the full set of codes!

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Outro

I traced the GIMMEGIMME code back to 2001, when Ford Racing was released. This bogus information has been copied and repeated elsewhere ever since. This seems to have come from the PC version, where the code does work.

Also present in the PC game data is the string DONTPANIC. Collector’s Almanac from the PlayStationLibrary.com Discord server confirmed that it also unlocks all cars!

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee

Check back next week for more adventures in retro game reverse engineering. You can subscribe here on Substack to get the next edition delivered to your inbox as soon as it’s published: