Under the microscope: Toy Story 2, 102 Dalmatians (Dreamcast)

Buzz Lightyear to the rescue? Puppies to the rescue? You decide.

What are the chances that there are long-unknown cheat codes in licensed Disney games? Pretty good, it seems! I found:

• An “unlock everything” code for Toy Story 2 on Dreamcast, plus a hidden developer test menu.

• Another “unlock everything” code for 102 Dalmations that works on both Dreamcast and PlayStation.

Details are below!

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Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue

This game from Traveller’s Tales is a port of the PlayStation version. It’s got something that that version doesn’t, however: a level select cheat code.

Enter this sequence at the title screen:

Y, A, Y, A, X, B, X, B, Y, A

You’ll see Cheat activated if you got it right:

After that, all levels will be selectable by default:

The function at 8c081b44 (NTSC-U version) is listening for input at the title screen. It compares controller 1’s button presses to the sequence at 8c0e8890, which encodes the code above. Once everything is entered, the level completion flags starting at 8ca1522d get set.

There are some other cool hidden things in this game. Hold L+R+Y at startup to get the Noah’s Ark debug screen (it looks better on the PAL version):

It gives you this menu:

Primitive Demo shows off some sprites in an odd way:

Shape Demo shows a rainbow colored triangle. You can rotate it around with the controller:

Here’s the Sound Demo page:

Polygon Demo looks rather glitchy. Movie Player works on the PAL version but not the NTSC-U version. Neither the 3D World Demo nor the Playboy Level Editor work. Plugin (Gmain) starts the game normally.

These items seem to be unique to the Dreamcast port, which was done by Noah’s Ark.

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Disney’s 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue

This game was developed by Crystal Dynamics. Reader foxx pointed out to me that there’s a Cheat! string in the binary, so let’s see how to activate it…

8c0b6e68 "Cheat!"

That string has one reference, the function at 8c08c320 (NTSC-U version). The code looks like this:

if DAT_8c0bf580 & 0x800000 == 0:
    DAT_8c3f0758 = DAT_8c19cf14
else:
    FUNC_8c06fb20(0x1600023, "Cheat!", 0)
    DAT_8c3f0758 = 0x14

OK, so it’s checking the bit field at 8c0bf580 for a value of 800000. I searched for word-aligned instances of that value and came to the function at 8c0903c0. It’s got a part that looks like this:

if FUNC_8c090340() != 0:
    DAT_8c0bf580 ^= 0x800000

So the function 8c090340 determines whether the relevant bit gets set. That function looks like this:

if p1_button_pressed == ARRAY_8c0bc3a4[i_8c19cfe8]:
    i_8c19cfe8 += 1
    if i_8c19cfe8 == 6:
        return 1
else:
    i_8c19cfe8 = 0

return 0

So if you press the right button, a counter increments. If it reaches 6, the function returns to set the cheat flag. The array of buttons is:

8c0bc3a4 10000000 # X
8c0bc3a8 20000000 # Y
8c0bc3ac 40000000 # B
8c0bc3b0 40000000 # B
8c0bc3b4 20000000 # Y
8c0bc3b8 10000000 # X

So that’s our code! On the level select screen, enter:

X, Y, B, B, Y, X

All stages will be unlocked:

The minigames will be unlocked also:

Do the analogous buttons work on PlayStation? Yes!

Square, Triangle, Circle, Circle, Triangle, Square

I’ll leave the PC version as an exercise for the reader.

Incidentally, how is it that this game has a better spin dash mechanic than many 3D Sonic games?

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Outro

Thanks to foxx for suggesting the Dalmatians game for analysis. Tell me which other games I should be examining in the comments!

See the archive for other cheat code discovery articles.

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee