Under the microscope: Jet Moto 2 & Streak Hoverboard Racing (PlayStation)
Reject the tyranny of gravity
In this edition I’m examining Jet Moto 2 (a.k.a. Jet Rider 2 and Jet Moto '98) and Streak: Hoverboard Racing. Both of these games were made by SingleTrac, the development team behind the first two Twisted Metal games.
I found an unreported cheat code for both of these games:
Jet Moto 2: Enable cheat effects on the Trophy Case screen.
Streak: Hoverboard Racing: Unlock all tracks and enable cheat code entry.
Details on the codes and the reverse engineering involved in locating them are below…
Jet Moto 2
Cheat sites have listed codes for Jet Moto 2 since at least 1998. I found one that slipped past everybody’s notice, however.
Go to Options and set Difficulty to Professional and Laps per race to 5:
Press Start to save your changes. Then enter this sequence at the main menu:
Square, Triangle, Circle, Right,
Down, Left, R2, L2The following items will now be available under Trophy Case:
Upside-down cam
Super brakes
TV cam
Cyberspace cam
Unlimited turbos
Super agility
Unlimited grapple
Remote control
Ice racing
Zero resistance
These mostly do what their name suggests: Upside-down cam turns the viewport upside-down, enabling Super brakes makes it easier to stop, etc.
Remote control allows you to control your opponent in Head to Head mode, according to GameFAQs. I wasn’t able to independently verify this!
TV cam is the camera mode used for auto demos:
Cyberspace cam is a wireframe graphics mode:
Technical details: I found this code by tracing references to this string:
800d3464 "enabling cheat code %d (0x%06x)\n"This debug message is referenced by the function at 800d7fec (NTSC-U version). It gets called by the function at 800d8040, which does all of the cheat code condition checking. For this code:
The difficulty level is stored at
8016af16. It’s compared to the value of2, which corresponds to “Professional.”The lap count is stored at
8016af08. It’s compared to the value 5.
There’s a table of pointers to button sequences at 800ee9a8. The one for the new code looks like this:
800ee928 0f00 0000 # Square
800ee92c 0d00 0000 # Triangle
800ee930 1000 0000 # Circle
800ee934 0a00 0000 # Right
800ee938 0800 0000 # Down
800ee93c 0900 0000 # Left
800ee940 0c00 0000 # R2
800ee944 0600 0000 # L2The mapping of bit patterns to buttons is peculiar to this game; it’s not what’s normally used for PlayStation games. I worked it out by watching the address 800ef984, which happens to store the value for the button you pressed most recently.
Update: I found two more cheats for this game:
The first unlocks a secret message. The access method is now described on The Cutting Room Floor.
The second gives you all of the player endings. Check out the method at X.com.
Streak: Hoverboard Racing
The cheat sites have also had codes for Streak: Hoverboard Racing for many years. But there’s one that they’re missing for it, too.
Set the Difficulty level to Streaker on the Options screen. Press Start to save the setting:
Begin a new Freestyle game. Choose Jade as your character, and then set up the race as follows:
Scoring: Stunt Goal
Duration: 30,000 points
Competitors: Choose Computer for Blades 2 through 4 and set the character to Jade.
Start the race. Then use the Pause menu to quit. This will bring you back to the Race Configuration screen. Press Triangle twice to get back to the main menu. Finally, enter this sequence:
L1, R1, Left, Right,
Square, Circle, L2, R2The game is really finicky about the inputs, and they sometimes don’t register if the background animation is about to loop. Give each button a good authoritative press rather than a light tap.
If you got it right, you’ll see an All Tracks Enabled message pop up:
This will indeed enable access to all twelve of the tracks:
But what’s even better is that this code makes a Code Processing Enabled message show up on the main menu. This means you can now enter more cheat codes:
Spy-cam mode: Select, Triangle, Square, Circle, Square, Triangle, Circle, Select
Super slick mode: Left, Left, Left, Triangle, Right, Triangle, Right, Triangle
Super stunt mode: Square, R2, R1, Circle, L1, Left, Right, Left
First person view: Square, Triangle, Circle, Select, Up, Select, Down, Triangle
Full confidence: Square, L2, R2, Circle, Right, Up, Left, Dow
Unlimited turbo: Triangle, Triangle, L2, Square, Square, Square, R2, Circle
These aren’t new discoveries — the game tells you these codes as you play through the main circuit mode. But you normally can’t enter them straight away.
Technical details: This game’s cheat entry system is quite similar to Jet Moto 2’s, so I had a head start in tracking down how things worked. The names of the various cheats are sitting in plaintext:
80023b68 "SPY-CAM MODE"
80023b78 "SUPER SLICK MODE"
80023b8c "SUPER STUNT MODE"
80023ba0 "FIRST PERSON VIEW"
80023bb4 "FULL CONFIDENCE"
80023bc4 "UNLIMITED TURBO"
80023bd4 "ALL TRACKS"
80023be0 "ALL RIDERS"Tracing references to these strings leads to the function at 800520fc. This function checks your input against the button sequences that start at 800569d0. But it will only actually enable the last two — ALL TRACKS and ALL RIDERS — unless the CODE PROCESSING ENABLED message is being displayed.
The ALL TRACKS code marks everything as complete by storing a 5 at 801bc8aa. That value normally gets set if you’ve completed enough of the game to be given one of the codes, and it’s used to determine whether the CODE PROCESSING ENABLED message is printed.
Outro
For more cheat code reverse engineering articles, see my archive here at Substack. I’ve got more on the way! I’ll have writeups for some Saturn and PlayStation games this week.
I’ve also now got a good hacking setup for Nintendo DS. What should I be examining for that system? Leave your comments below…
Nice finds. I still play Jet Moto 2 today. One of my fav PSX games.