Access the "Character Editor" in Shinobi 3

[saxman]

I saw the words "CHARACTER EDITOR" in the ROM after curiously looking through it, so I did a little tweaking and discovered a way to hack the game to access it. This PAR code with enable it from anywhere in the game:

004C0A:4E71

Now to get to it, hold buttons B and C, and press A. You'll see a bunch of crap appear on the screen and the words "CHARACTER EDITOR 3.52" under everything.

The character editor allows you to modify the VRAM. You can redraw individual sprites, and you can change the color palettes too. Press start to restart the game and ignore the changes, or hold B and press start to save the changes and proceed.

http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/5405/chareditgz9.png

Nothing too major, but I thought it was an interesting find.

[The Jackal]

Cool code Saxman! Just one question - Will this also work on real hardware??

[Phantar]

Now, this seems interesting.

What exactly can be done in this editor? (I know it says "character editor", but what specifically?)

[saxman]

It should work on the real hardware. The only thing that code does is change a pointer. It pointed to a return, and I simply moved it up two bytes to read the code for the character editor.

What I found out after I made this post was this is actually available and fully accessible in the Shinobi 3 prototypes (I had never tried them before until someone mentioned this being in those ROMs.) That said, I have tried the beta ROMs, and indeed holding B and C, and pressing A will access this editor during normal gameplay. What's interesting is when you press start, you can access a memory editor. Pressing start once more will access a level editor. It's pretty interesting stuff. The code I have provided allows access to it from the SEGA logo only, and the memory and level editors aren't available (probably something to do with my code, or the fact that it's on the SEGA logo.) If I could figure out how to make it available during regular gameplay, that'd be ideal. Currently though, I am not entirely sure how to go about doing that.

Oh, and on the question of what the character editor does, it modifies sprites loaded into VRAM, and will also allow you to modify the color palettes.



EDIT: New code -- 004C0A:4E71 -- this allows it to be accessed anywhere in the game, including while playing levels. It still doesn't allow access to the memory or level editors. Instead, it resets the game as with the other code. I am not sure why...