Rastan interactive keypress cheat by R. Bubba Magillicutty Mad Scientist put one of these out the other day. The day the game came out I dived into it looking for all the cheat info and came up with health, lives and level. I was going to put out a cheat that I later found would have had the EXACT same functions as Mad Scientist's. I guess, as they say, great minds think alike (and so do we.) I didn't put one out that day because I wanted to do a nicer one. Last night I finally managed to find pretty much everything I was after. This cheat has a whopping 18 functions, though I still like my Cloud Kingdoms cheat better for some reason. As always, the cheat comes up with an ANSI instruction screen when you first load it. It shows all the different keys available during the game. I considered using Mad Scientist's keys for the functions of the cheat, but I decided against it. I hate mnemonics. They're too damn easy to remember. And even though originality is the hobgoblin of little minds, I went for it (draw your own conclusions from that.) A better explanation of the keys will be somewhere in this file. Hey, how about right here? F5 - Gives all your health back. F6 - Get a life, eh? Doesn't show up until you die or go to a new level. Ctrl+X - End the current game. Much more fun than waiting for the monsters to kill off all your lives. F7 - Unlimited lives toggle. F8 - Permanent items. Usually, your weapons and other items will go away after a while. And they all go away when you die. Using this toggle will prevent them from ever sneaking away. Good for those emotionally attached to their flaming swords. Toggling it off will continue the count-down from where it was when you first hit F8. Keypad minus - Invulnerability. Nothing hurts you except fire and water. As Mad Scientist said, taking that out has weird effects. L - Go to the next level. It functions by killing you off, so you lose all your items unless F8 is functional. The alternative, a clean level change, would have taken much more code and made the loader even bigger. With the old cheat (er, Enhancement Utility) it was annoying, but now you can either hit F8 or just give yourself the items again. Keypad plus - The usual quick cheat. It gives you invulnerability, permanent items, and a flaming sword. It's not a toggle. If you want to turn any of the features off, use F8, -, or 1. 1 - Give yourself a generic sword, the weapon you start with. 2 - Become an axe murderer. 3 - Get out the ol' ball and chain. She'll scare anything away. 4 - Sword flamb‚ - my favorite weapon. 5 - The mystery rod (yipes!) 6 - Get a ring. Doubles weapon speed. 7 - Necklace - doubles points scored. 8 - A mantle. Half damage from touching bad guys. 9 - Shield. Half damage from bad guys touching you. 0 - Armor. Does the duty of both the shield and the mantle. The last three are mutually exclusive. Originally I had it allow all three (thus causing all damage to be quartered) but the game wasn't designed for that. The screen area that shows your protection items would flash through all three (or two.) Since you can have your choice, you might as well use the armor. If you want better protection, hit the numeric keypad minus for invulnerability. I just included all three for completeness. The protection items are good for 10 hits unless F8 is on. There were also counters for two more things in the code. They would go down over time, just like the weapons and other items. I left the code in there since I had no idea what the counters were for. Who knows, they could have been bad (curse counters?) It is possible to do Bad Things with the cheat. Hitting L while changing levels will cause the level counter to be updated between the loading of the background scenery and the foreground sprite info. This is what we professionals call "a mess." Don't do it (aww, go ahead, try it once...) Another problem with the Level command: if you try to go to a new level after you're half-way through your current level, you would have problems. There is generally a half-way point on each level. If you die after that point, you don't start at the beginning of the level, you start there. If you use the Level command after that point Bad Things Happen. I thought I had this one fixed, but it still pops up. Hitting Ctrl-X with the unlimited lives toggle (F7) on will get you out of a mess-up generally. Which is another "bug" in the program. Ctrl-X works by taking all your lives away then telling the game you just died. If you have unlimited lives on, it won't take away the last life. Originally it would only work if the toggle was on, but would give you 255 lives if it was off. This is a bit cleaner. If you want to die so badly, just hit F7 again. Another similar problem. You can't finish the game if you have the unlimited lives toggle on. The game ends by taking away all your guys. If you have unlimited lives on, it will ask you to insert a new disk. Try to remember to turn it off, or you won't get to enter your name (yeah, big deal.) I've also noticed the usual problem my loader has with Taito games. It is possible to kill the keyboard input routines when you are at the "Enter your name" high-score screen. The only key that works is F10, which lets you out of the game. I think this happens if you press one of my cheat hotkeys after you've finished the game and before the high-score screen loads up. I'm still trying to track down this bug. It doesn't come up often in this game, though it always happens with my Bubble Bobble cheat. I hope it's not too large an inconvenience. Try not to press any of the hotkeys after you've lost your last life (ooh, alliteration - or illiteration?) Well, it's about that time again. Greets and expressions of gratitude. The first batch goes to Mad Scientist for writing the original cheat (Enhancement Utility? And I thought Interactive Trainer was bad...) I liked the way it removed itself from memory after the game was done. Neat stuff, though a loader like mine would be much easier to program. Just being original? (Damn hemogoblins...) The next batch are for NASA, for releasing the game. I have to add my voice to Mad Scientist's, clamoring for an end to 84K worth of loaders in a game. If you were to re-write that loader in ASM it would be about 5-10K, and you don't need half that many ANSI screens (or ANSI-displaying COM files.) But then, I'm sure you're hearing all this from everyone. Nice release! Keep it up, but please trim down those intros. That's good enough for now, seeing how enormous this file is. Enjoy the cheat, and watch for many more. -- R. Bubba Magillicutty, Esq.