Under the microscope: Iron Man / X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal

The truth is… I am X-O Manowar.

In this edition:

• New cheat codes for Iron Man / X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal on Saturn.

• There’s a cheat menu that gives you invincibility, unlimited weapons, the ability to skip levels, and more.

• And some other cheat codes with little developer Easter eggs.

Read on for details about the codes and how I located them!

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Intro

This one eluded me for a long time. I could see the strings right in the binary:

A previously undocumented cheat screen! I knew how it worked, but for the life of me, I couldn’t make it show up. I tried reverse engineering the game’s password system, but no luck. I tried replacing the options menu with the function that references those strings, but that didn’t work either.

I had more or less given up, but I decided to take another shot at it. I found another weird string in the binary, and eventually figured out how to make it appear:

RT REV 11000, whatever that is. The flag at 060614bc (NTSC-U Saturn version) turns it off and on. This turned out to be the key to everything…

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Unraveling the mystery

Right above the flag for the RT REV 11000 string is this:

A sequence of powers of two, followed by ffff ffff. I immediately thought “button code,” because most games represent buttons by setting a particular bit in a bitfield. Indeed, this game uses this mapping:

So when you press Up, a value of 0000 0001 gets written to 0605cdda. L is strange, in that it is mapped twice — 0000 2800 gets written for it¹.

So the code is:

B, A, Down, A, Down, Down, C, R, Right, Left

Enter it while the game is paused and you’ll see…

A photo of what is presumably the development staff! Neat.

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Tiny Iron Man

If you scroll up past the staff photo code buttons, you’ll find another sequence:

Left, Right, B, Right, C, R, A, Z, Y

Enter that while the game is paused for…

A very small Iron Man! Cute. If you do these “Staff photo” cheat after entering this, you’ll get Iron Man and X-O Manoward dancing:

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The cheat menu

Scroll up again to find this sequence:

C, R, A, B, B, Y, L, A, Down

Finally, the cheat menu! The main screen has the level skip functionality, and the General Cheats sub menu gives you unlimited armor, boost, and weapon toggles (invincibility and unlimited armor are fairly similar):

You can also change your character and play sounds.

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The other cheats / PlayStation equivalents

There are even more codes! Most of them can be toggled on the General Cheats screen above, so there’s not much reason to enter them individually. For completeness, here’s the full list of codes that you can put in at the pause menu:

You want the PlayStation equivalents, too? Here they are:

I’m not the first one to discover the PlayStation codes; there’s a forum post from 15 years ago that has them. Alas, I didn’t find it until after I figured out the Saturn codes — they would have been much easier to crack if I’d known to enter them on the pause screen.

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Outro

I thought I was the first to come up with these cheat codes for Saturn, but just before I was about to publish, a reader sent me a note that he’d figured out most of them by adapting the PlayStation versions. Thanks to Scott for writing!

For more cheat code discoveries, see my archive.

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee

1. On the PlayStation version, Select is one of the buttons. Since the Saturn gamepad doesn’t have an equivalent button, L does double duty.