Under the microscope: Sound Qube (Saturn)
Your time is over, Rubik
Sound Qube is a puzzle game from Media Entertainment and Human Entertainment. There’s a very thorough description of the gameplay at Sega Retro, but in a nutshell: You’re presented with a cube-like figure that’s made up of smaller cubes. You use “sonar” to sonar to eliminate groups of sub-cubes, based on their color.
GameFAQs lists a cheat for the PlayStation version of this game (it activates a sound test mode), but it doesn’t work on the Saturn version. I hoped to find an equivalent code for Saturn, but found three others instead.
Details are below!
Level select
Go to the Option screen.
Hold down Start and then enter this sequence:
(Holding Start) A, C, Up, Right, A, Down, Up, LeftExt the Option screen and then go to Level Select on the menu screen. You’ll be able to start on any of the game’s eight levels:
Wireframe mode
Press Start to pause the game and keep it held down. Then enter this sequence:
(Holding Start) A, C, Up, Right, A, B, Left, CThe cubes will become transparent:
Stage clear
Press Start to pause the game and keep it held down. Then enter this sequence:
(Holding Start) A, C, Up, Right, A, Right, A, BThe Stage Clear message will appear (or Level Clear if you’re on the last stage of a level). You can go all the way to the end of the game this way:
Technical details
While looking for evidence of the Sound Test code from the PlayStation version, I noticed these strings in the game data:
060050c0 "ACURABLC"
060050cc "ACURARAB"
060050d8 "ACURADUL"Those are read by the function at 060050e4, which has logic that looks like this:
The function then saves the letter to the buffer starting at 060424e8 and then compares that buffer to the strings above. On the Pause screen it checks the first two strings; on the Option screen it targets the third one.
Outro
Thanks for reading Rings of Saturn. I’ll be back with more retro game reverse engineering this week – subscribe to get the latest editions as soon as they’re published:
I remember trying the PlayStation version of this game many years ago, some nice finds here for the Saturn.
I already found some codes, purely by accident, for this game: Time Bokan -Yattaman/Time Bokan Series - Bokandesuyo for the PlayStation and published them on GameFaqs, There are English assets on the game disc for the Pal version. I have taken the assets and replaced both the Pal and (with some tinkering) the Japan version of the games with English. I haven't put ot the patches yet. The Pal version has other language assets on the disc also. I wondered if there was a way to access those with a code maybe?
One more...Fighting Force/Metal Fist. There is a known cheat code to bring up a cheat mode which has an option to be invincible. In the Japanese version cheat mode only, you can also turn 2 Player Detection on or off which prevents 2 players from hitting each other. Is it in the Pal and NTSC versions?
Both the Pal and NTSC versions of the game also have files for English, French and German on the disc. You can choose you language on the Pal version when the game boots up. Can it be done on the NTSC version too? Just a couple games I thought to mention. Take care.