Under the microscope: MX 2002 featuring Ricky Carmichael (PlayStation 2)

Featuring Ricky Carmichael

Earlier this week, I wrote about the two Championship Motocross featuring Ricky Carmichael games for PlayStation. They caught my interest because Internet cheat sites seemed to be confused about which codes work for which game.

There’s another game in the Ricky Carmichael series, MX 2002 featuring Ricky Carmichael for PlayStation 2. What about its cheat codes?

GameFAQs and some other sites have this one listed for MX 2002:

Level Select: Begin in 2 PLAYER mode. Have PLAYER 1 hold R1+ L2 and press Up, Dn, L, R, Triangle. Then, PLAYER 2 holds Triangle, L2, R2, X.

This code doesn’t work. Nothing happens when you put it in. But here’s one that does work. Enter this sequence at the title screen:

L1+Circle, L1+Up, L1+Left, R1+Down
Select, L1+Right, Triangle, Select
L1+Triangle, Left, Left

All of the tracks will be available in both the Supercross and Freestyle modes:

Left: An unlocked Supercross track. Right: An unlocked Freestyle track.

The extra multiplayer modes and challenge clips will also be unlocked:

Left: Unlocked multiplayer modes. Right: Unlocked clips.

So it’s an “unlock everything” code sequence. That’s cool! But what’s even cooler is what’s going on as you press the buttons: letters start appearing in the buffer at 0034fa40:

The RALibetro Memory Inspector

Each button press corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. When you’re putting in the code, you’re actually typing out OPEN IT ALL.

This table shows how to use the controller to enter the letters from A-Z and Space:

Select also works to type a space

How did I know to type in OPEN IT ALL? Well, this game comes with debug symbols. You can see them in the PCSX2 Debugger:

Searching for cheats directly

The function called check_cheat_codes looks for all of these strings:

• OPEN IT ALL

• CLEAR

• TRACKS

• MODES

• BIKES

• CHALLENGES

• NO CHEATS

• FREESTYLE

• QUICKSEASON

All of these but QUICKSEASON unlock some subset of what OPEN IT ALL does. QUICKSEASON sets the target lap count for each race to 1.

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Outro

For more on games that have you spell out cheat codes with a cryptic alphabet, see my articles on Newman/Haas Racing, Jet Moto 3, and Nectaris: Military Madness.

I’ll be back next week with more explorations of retro games with reverse engineering tools. Subscribe here on Substack to get new articles as soon as they’re published.

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee