If you complete Iron Soldier 3’s mission mode on the highest difficulty level, the programmers give you a special message:
You have completed Iron Soldier 3 at insane difficulty. You are truly a master pilot! As we promised, we have a special surprise in store for you!
To activate the cheat called -incredible speed- you have to press the following keys while in the options menu: -right-up-start-start-up-
If you manage this, we surrender! We can’t offer you anything more challenging than this... Have fun! (Can you find the other cheats?)
Hmm, there are other cheats? Challenge accepted.
Finding the cheats
It’s always a good idea to open up Ghidra’s list of detected strings when analyzing a game’s memory snapshot. For Iron Soldier 3, Ghidra finds these:
800a5b88 "cheat_unlimited_energy"
800a5ba0 "cheat_double_speed"
800a5bb4 "cheat_show_mission_status"
800a5bd0 "cheat_unlimited_ammo"
800a5be8 "cheat_power_weapons"The strings are used by the function at 8006f400 - they seem to be for some sort of debug printing routine. This function records all of your button presses in the buffer starting at 800ae754.
After each press, the buffer’s contents are compared to 16 sequences. These use the same bit-pattern-to-button mapping that most PlayStation games use. For example, the patterns for the cheat_unlimited_energy code are:
| Address | Hex | Button |
|----------|------|--------|
| 800a05dc | 8000 | Square |
| 800a05de | 0400 | L1 |
| 800a05e0 | 0400 | L1 |
| 800a05e2 | 0040 | Down |
| 800a05e4 | 0008 | Start |
| 800a05e6 | 8000 | Square |
| 800a05e8 | 0100 | L2 |
| 800a05ea | ffff | (end) |If a match is detected, an effect is implemented. Most of the cheats set a flag value from 00 to 01. For example, the cheat_unlimited_energy value is at 800332e4.
That’s all the information we need to decode the other cheats…
Unlock all weapons
This cheat marks all levels as clear, making the weapons associated with them available:
From the main menu, press Select to bring up the Options screen.
Enter this sequence: R2, Down, Start, Up, Square, Start, R1, Up.
Press Select again to leave the Options screen.
When you start a new game, you’ll see that all of the missions have a white check box that indicates they’re clear. When equipping weapons for your mech, you’ll have all of the unlockable ones available to mount.
Items and power-ups
These cheats give you extra items and power-ups. During gameplay, press Select to pause the game. Then enter one of these sequences:
Spy drone: L1, Square, Square, Square
Infra vision: Up, Circle, Circle, R2
Speed up: Start, Square, Right, L1
Invisibility: Start, Square, Up, R1
Force field: L2, Down, R2, L2
When you leave the pause screen, you can access the new items and power-ups by pressing Square to cycle through your inventory.
More cheat effects
These cheats are also entered during gameplay on the Pause screen:
Unlimited ammunition: R2, Up, Square, Up, Circle, Start, L1
Unlimited energy: Square, L1, L1, Down, Start, Square, L2
Power weapons: R2, Square, Start, Circle, Start, R1, L1
Double speed: Square, Circle, Start, R2, Start, Up
Self destruct: Start, R1, Start, R2, Left, Up, Left
The names of these cheats come from the game data (see below), and they mostly do what you would expect. One exception is “double speed” – the effect wasn’t obvious to me. Self destruct is pretty strange – the buildings around you start exploding spontaneously.
Mission codes
These cheats affect your mission progress. Enter them during gameplay on the Pause screen:
Complete mission: Start, Left, R2, Right, Square, L1, R2
Fail mission: Start, R1, Up, R1, Circle, R1
Game over: Start, Up, L2, Down, Square, L2
Completing a mission with the cheat code still unlocks the mission’s weapon.
Outro
The special message above also appears in the version of Iron Soldier 3 for Nuon DVD Players, but it gives a different code:
To activate the cheat called -incredible speed- you have to enter the following code in the options menu: C B 5 A 8 7
Alas, I wasn’t able to see whether the other cheats work in that version. If you’ve got a working Nuon setup, get in touch!
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back with more retro game reverse engineering articles soon.
