Golf games — kind of a snooze, right? I always thought so, and maybe I still do… But the Saturn has a handful of them, and I wondered if any of them would be interesting to examine.
Two of them were! In this edition we’ve got:
- Some previously undocumented cheat codes for Actua Golf (ak.a. VR Golf ‘97)
- A clue that Actua Golf was meant to ship with a whole second disc (!)
- How to make everybody pro in Virtual Golf (a.k.a. Tournament Leader)
Actua Golf / VR Golf ‘97
This game was made by Gremlin Interactive, which develop several sports games for the Saturn. It was released in North America as VR Golf ’97, but I’ll use its original name here. A Saturn sequel was planned, but that game was canceled along with several other Saturn titles (including Re-Loaded).
I started looking at the game’s title screen. The function responsible for handling input is loaded to 06021cdc in the PAL version. That function is looking out for the Start button, as you might expect (the screen says Press Start). But it’s also checking for L and R. If it sees them held at the same time, it flips the byte at 0606bc46 from 00 to 01.
What’s that do? It changes the rankings to have the names of people who worked on the game:
The staff roll credits Duncan Hopkins as the Lead Programmer, and also thanks Catherine Finch and Lai Chow. How do I know? A second undocumented code: holding X+Y+Z at the title screen shows the staff roll:
The game uses X+Y+Z as a code in another place, too. If you press all three buttons at once when highlighting the PRO TOUR option, the tournament you’ll play is the last one: World Matchplay for $305,000:
Three Easter eggs! Not bad. Is there anything else?
According to Sega Saturn Magazine UK, part of the motivation for the would-be sequel was that the original didn’t have very many courses:
So I was surprised to find unused game data that refers to a second “Classic Courses” disc! When I changed the function for the controller options (at 0601e3a0) to point to 0604c8e8, I got this:
As far as I know, every version of this game only came with a single disc. I wonder what became of this idea? I checked the PlayStation version of Actua Golf and didn’t find an equivalent to this screen.
Virtual Golf / Tournament Leader
Core Design, another UK studio, developed this golf game. The first version of it came out for PC in 1995. According to Sega Retro, it was once slated to be ported to the 32X, but it wound up being published for the Saturn instead.
Like Actua Golf, this game requires your players to be “pros” to play in the Pro level tournaments. If you try to play as an amateur, you’ll be asked for a password.
Diffing memory snapshots shows that the password input buffer is stored at 06042968 (I’m using the PAL version). That gets processed by the function at 060288c8, which looks like this when decompiled by Ghidra:
So a scrambled version of each player’s name is a password. That algorithm is easy enough to implement. When applied to the amateur golfer list, I get this table:
JON: LVT
SAM: VBR
JILL: LJPP
EPPO: JPPV
JIM: LJR
SARAH: VBTBH
JAK: LBN
JAS: LBVNow everyone can be a pro!
Outro
For previous coverage of heretofore-unknown cheat codes, see my archive.
This article is syndicated from Rings of Saturn, Bo’s reverse engineering blog.
Be the first to comment