I guess I shouldn't be surprised that quite a few Dreamcast games are PSX ports where the devs were not particularly concerned about porting all the cheats (what a nightmare to test, all the cheat sites are probably wrong!). Kinda surprised no Star Wars diehards have figured out Demolition though, I guess the fact that its a poor cash grab really doesn't help.
In case anyone cares, I've been doing something similar to this with other Sega consoles - grab an issue of Tips & Tricks, then crop out all the things we have covered https://i.imgur.com/Ld6Gw1a.png Mega CD https://i.imgur.com/sLNnEVs.jpeg Saturn https://i.imgur.com/hxjEIKF.jpeg Dreamcast Most of this is on GameFAQs or IGN but often it's missing context.
Maybe we should blame Activision: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater/Hidden content https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/dreamcast/199057-tony-hawks-pro-skater/cheats This lies too! I particularly like the way the "unlock everything" code is recognised... but doesn't unlock anything. It's definitely a recurring theme. I wonder if the N64 ports were similarly short-changed.
OK, Three Dirty Dwarves on Saturn. The MOSHOLU password that enables "CHEAT MODE" is well-known (e.g. it's on GameFAQs). The game checks for at least two more: I figured out ZEREGAA (the last letter can be anything from A to O), but I have no idea what it does. Notably, that's a street in the Bronx, just like Mosholu. Also, the game has a JOYRECORD mode that can be enabled by setting 06048c68 to 01. I have no idea what it does either. There's one more password that I'll crack sooner or later; it enables SUPERHERO mode - presumably invincibility.
Joyrecord sounds a lot like demo recording, I'd be surprised if it was still functional but you never know!
Vigilante 8: Second Offense/Hidden content A better success rate with these, but there's four codes at the bottom that aren't doing anything obvious. I've come into the game pretty much blind though so maybe they do as advertised.
The Joyrecord mode in Three Dirty Dwarves does let you control the auto demo, good call. I cracked the rest of the password scheme, but I still don't know what most of them do.
Were there any cheats for SoulStar on the Mega CD? The game is a showcase for the system but just too hard
@Bo102010 nice, that was a complete guess, I've never played the game before. Feel free to toss the full set of passwords up and I'm sure someone round here will figure it out eventually!
SoulCalibur, the highest rated Dreamcast game, doesn't seem to have much going for it in terms of cheat codes. It has some "not so obvious" features which require you to play the game and unlock things legitimately, but nothing that can be quickly tested out. For example, during the demo sequence, you get a mixture of the introduction, computer controlled fights, and one of the characters performing a display of their leet skillz. Apparently the location of these performances varies depending on the system clock - if the Dreamcast thinks it's night, it'll pick a night time stage. If the Dreamcast thinks it's Winter, it'll pick a colder looking stage. There's some clues to how it works, but if my adventures with Christmas NiGHTS are anything to go by, chances are there are more variables involved. Which meant, outside of some bugs, I was left with this... feature: ... you can change Sophitia's underwear by pressing and holding buttons before match. They supposedly removed this from international versions of the game, and while yeah, she's canonically 21 in this title, it's... well.
Good thing you can go all out with clothes swapping in Soulcalibur III. Too bad that game has save file issues...
This one didn't work so well: Unreal Tournament/Hidden content While Dreamcast Unreal Tournament has some traditional "press buttons and things happen" cheat codes, it's also has a full debug console like the PC version... you just need a Dreamcast keyboard to use it. Unfortunately Redream's keyboard emulation isn't good enough - I couldn't activate the console, and so I couldn't test any commands. Plenty of websites list "useful" commands for the Dreamcast, but I'd hazard a guess that most, if not all the PC commands are compatible. Quake III Arena's Dreamcast port also retains its console, and if it's anything like the PC version, will likely be just as extensive as Unreal Tournament's, if not moreso. Fun fact: Quake III on the PC, you can change the colour of your on-screen name through the console by using the caret (^) symbol, followed by... something else to act as a value. There were only about eight or so colours available, so normal people would use ^0, ^1, ^2, ^3, etc.. Here's one of many guides: https://openarena.fandom.com/wiki/Manual/Text_colors ... but from what I recall, you could literally put any character after the ^ and the game would set it to one of the eight colours. I don't know how it determined some letters would turn the colour blue and some would turn it green, but it was common to see people fall into this trap when discovering they could use different colours in online matches. Lots of awkward explaining about what the tilde and carat keys looked like because you obviously couldn't type these in the in-game chat "the squiggly line! The arrow that points upwards!". I can't remember if the Dreamcast shared this feature, but I'm sure it had weird stuff like it. Most things in the GUI could be driven by console commands.
Huh, I have a Dreamcast and the keyboard, I might have to hunt down thr game and see what works eventually! I'll definitely need a list of console commands from the PC version to reference, though; I haven't touched an Unreal game since the days of UT2K3 a lifetime ago.
Three Dirty Dwarves: the source code is actually included with one of the prototypes! It doesn't have passwords that work on the final game, but based on it I think the ZEREGAA through ZEREGAO ones are meant to change the starting stage. The final game accepts them but doesn't do anything with them.
Star Wars Episode 1 Jedi Power Battles on the DC also has a debug console like UT and Q3A, with a BASIC-like scripting system. It's described in a GameFAQs guide, and I made a video about it years ago. You can get a list of some supported commands with the HELP command, but there are others not listed that you can find by going through 1ST_READ and looking for their strings. Recently, one of the people who worked on the English version of Seaman mentioned that he added a secret to the game where if you start the game during the first week of the game's release, and answer all of Seaman's questions the way he would have, a piece of joke music plays. I managed to find the ADX file for it (the music clip is only the first 30 seconds, I added a second clip at the end for fun), but I don't know was the correct answers would be to get it to play in game.
I managed to get the quake 3 console by fighting with the keyboard in ReDream. It misses keypresses at random so it's a massive pain to do anything more complicated than a few commands though.
This has turned one of the least interesting Dreamcast games into one of the most interesting: The idea of messing about with in-game objects is one thing, but having the ability to draw lines and circles on the screen like this was a Commodore 64 is insane. It's a bit of a faff to emulate though, since controller C keyboard inputs get in the way of controller A.
Sorry did I mention how insane this is: You can type out BASIC programs and save/load them later... which means it may be possible to write games that run inside this game. I was able to save my "Sega Retro is reet good" program to the VMU. It seems to be saved as plain text, so with a bit of a play, you could probably create a nice editor for modern platforms specifically for writing JPB programs. Because that's a great use of your time. Star Wars: Episode I Jedi Power Battles/Hidden content - I've documented a good chunk of this feature but I no doubt there's a lot more to be done. There were no offically licensed Star Wars text adventures, but there is the unofficial Dog Star Adventure, and its source code has been published. Can you get that "Star Wars" game running in this Stars Wars game??
