Posted By
Titler
on 2005-11-13
14:30:27
|  Cheats! I could never get them to work!
Aye, back in the day, I was honest as the day was long... or something! So then, C16 cheats... let's say Finders Keepers. It gives something which is clearly Machine Code. I'd Run/Stop and Reset, and enter the line for the code... but then what? The game would never restart. So how exactly were you supposed to use them? Foolish I know, but if someone could enlighten me after all these years... 
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2005-11-13
18:21:00
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
Finders Keepers is one of those games that cannot be successfully restarted after a reset or even a Run/Stop + reset. I added that cheat a while back, when I was creating for the map for the game.
It's an "emulator cheat", and this is probably the case for any cheat you see listed on the site with no "restart" address below. What that means is either you can enter the cheat while the game is running (e.g. ALT+M in YAPE, type in the line and exit), or you can type it in regular monitor AFTER the game is loaded, and then RUN the game. (Again, you need an emulator for this because normal commercial games autostart. Or you can download a "crack" and save it on a disk or tape.)
However, this game is even more complicated, because it moves the memory around during startup, so if you download the PRG file, you have to look for DEC $037F and get rid of it - it will be at a different place than the one listed on the site. Hope this clears it up
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Posted By
Titler
on 2005-11-16
11:45:24
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
The Dec bit didn't make much sense, but the rest of it did But this raises a question... how did those old magazines expect you to get into Monitor on the original C16? Were they presuming the use of a reset cartridge?
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2005-11-16
13:32:30
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
Either that or they just cracked the games using any other method. Once you have a crack (that doesn't autostart), you can look of a cheat.
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Posted By
Ulysses777
on 2005-11-16
16:49:50
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
The magazines should give a restart address (in the form of either the G monitor command eg: G1010 , or as a SYS command in BASIC). Either that, or just type X (to exit the monitor) and then the RUN command (which worked on some games).
On the other hand, they probably never tested the cheats (which were almost always submitted by readers). In a number of magazine game reviews where there was an enhanced Plus/4 version, they would often say that they didn't know what the enhanced version was like because they didn't have a Plus/4 to try it on :/
Just wondering, did you actually see a cheat for Finders Keepers in a magazine, or were you using it as an example?
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2005-11-16
19:34:00
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
I doubt he'd seen a cheat for Finders Keepers, because like I said it cannot be restarted after reset or run/stop reset. But maybe I'm wrong.
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Posted By
AaronGale
on 2005-11-19
06:51:13
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
I did write a cheat for this back when I was writing cheats for a magazine. I had to use some interrupt based program to get over the reset / run-stop issue.
I have put it online now.
I don't remember exactly what I did but I think I took over a few of the tape based loading addresses and inserted my program in the tape loaded. Then while the game was loading it was constantly updating the addresses that needed to be modified to cheat the game.
I eventually got this working on a few different games that had the same restart restrictions. I had already put another one of these online for Paperboy.
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Posted By
Titler
on 2005-11-19
11:43:22
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
No, the one I always remember being frustrated by was Thrust, not Finders Keepers. I really wanted to cheat in Thrust, just so I could see the later levels... oh well!
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Posted By
Ulysses777
on 2005-11-19
13:30:01
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
The C16 version of Thrust was tough, the fuel consumption was a lot higher than in the C64 or BBC/Electron versions
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2005-11-19
18:39:12
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
Nice cheat Aaron! Couldn't we have simplified things by including the SYSxxxx and NEW statements in the basic program though? Titler, I made a whole bunch of cheats for Thrust a while back, including "start from any level" cheat. Once again you need an emulator or a cracked version (which you can get from the site). No good?
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Posted By
AaronGale
on 2005-11-20
15:35:10
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
Thanks Csabo. The only reason I can think I wouldn't have put the SYS and NEW instructions in the basic program is that if I made some error in the program and then ran it it would NEW itself away and then it would need to be typed in again from the start!
I know it's odd to ask you what my program did but was I right in remembering how it worked? By intercepting the tape loading routines and constantly updating the address of the reduce energy routine?
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2005-11-20
16:09:17
| Re: Cheats! I could never get them to work!
Of course the new and the sys would be in the else part of the IF that checks if the data is correct, so it would only fire if the data was correct. Anywho, it's cool.
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