@@Nukle0n I actually remember a cheat engine that worked for dos that did it in software. It was called gwiz I believe (I remember the executable having the words gwiz in it)? I remember using it on the game Descent. It basically worked the same without hardware. It took over the screen when you called it with a hotkey and then worked the same as this piece of hardware. This is still impressive as hell though.
Game Genie came out 3 years earlier in 1990. Then 6 years after game genie ( 3 years after THIS weird pc thing in the vid) Game Shark came out in 1996. lol o>O
These deep tap devices remind me (edit; it's the exact same thing) of the interrupt button that my father wired up to our Apple II (actually Pineapple II clone). As I understood it there was a set of jumpers that would do this when shorted so he was just hooking up the button. It would interrupt the CPU and bring up the memory values currently in play. With it we could bypass all sorts of software lockouts, and even read game memory for things like current lives and change the values by seeing what code changed when you did different things in game. To be clear I was 6 at the time, but I watched in awe when that button was pressed and the graphics were replaced with a Matrix-like wonderland.
The Apple ][ ROM has a built-in Monitor (aka debugger, the thing with the * prompt) including a disassembler and just about most features the Action Replay has. I think you could start it with CTRL+RESET or some other combination. Possibly shorting the 6502's reset pin with a button might have done the same thing on later Apple ][s.
Early Macs had two hw accessory buttons you could attach to the side of the case for interrupt (“programmer’s button”’) and reset. Later on, (Mac Plus or Mac Classic) the buttons were built in. All they did was poke through vents in the case to stab momentary switches on the logic board.
Interesting. Thanks for the info I did not know that. I went to a DOS 80C88 and stayed with PCs and Amigas after my time with the Apple ][ and the PET. I still have most of them in semi-working condition.
For my Spectrum 128k+3 (with integrated disk drive) I had a module that plugged into the expansion port at the back called a Multiface 3 by Romantic Robot. In essence it was a box with a red button that would interrupt the game and allow you to enter codes similar to an Action Replay card (called POKES.) More importantly it allowed you to dump the entire content of the memory to a floppy disk. Not only did this allow you to save any game at any time, you could also back up any games you had loaded from an external tape drive. The loading time was incredibly quick and you could fit up to a dozen games on each floppy.
Interesting. Didn't the Spectrum use those weird 3" floppies? Those had that much capacity? Wow. The Atari 8bit computers had an official cartridge that was called: Atari Assembler Editor. And on the C64 there was supermon64 which was quite like the Apple ][ monitor. It even still might have some of Wozniak's code in it. You can find it on github.
Ah man, this takes me back. Years ago I was playing Diablo 2 with a friend and we had apparently both selected a wizard. But I went the ice path and he the necromancy path. But after a while he said "man kinda sucks that you chose ice instead of fire. All enemies you kill leave no corpses for me to revive." So I noted my XP, my HP (and max HP), mana (and max mana), the number of levels, as well as my stats and quickly looked up what my base stats should be. Then I used cheat engine to find all these values in memory, edited them to be lvl 1 again; killed a dude, then edited most of my stuff back to what it was, and killed another dude. Boom, 16 levels up, I picked my new fire based skills and in like 15 minutes we were back in action!
For whatever reason, Ultima 2 (Atari 8 bit) never dropped "blue tassels". Eventually I took a disk editor and added it, allowing me to complete the game.
The unholy combo was a necromancer and a paladin specializing in buffing auras. Once the necromancer managed to raise a few skeletons and the paladin buffed them you soon had a rolling wave of skeletons just moving down everything that got in their way. Big bosses could slow you down but I don't remember they were all that tough even if the paladin had to shift tactics and do some heavy lifting while the skeletons were serving as distractions. The first time we tried this we hadn't really talked about any tactics, but once the wave of skeletons were swarming all over the mobs we were laughing like maniacs. I still think I had more fun playing D2 than D3 or any other similar game. It might just be nostalgia talking but if so then I don't want to know the truth...
This is basically the Amiga version for the PC and either my Amiga disks were all clean or the scanner had no use at all without a modem to find a database, which I'm not sure my manual mentions. Things like the music ripper re also fun and he should definitely do a Part Two. Though unlike other computer versions, this one doesn't appear to let you load freezes as standalone cold boots without the cartridge. Also, the C64 version's worth a look, as while it does less overall, it let me swap sprites in games, mess with the RAM data for cool glitch effects or whatever, pinch game fonts for headlines in word processing (by retyping the game text and printing those out) and lots of other funky stuff. Including software transfers.
@@MrDustpile I suspect it was looking for suspect behaviours, rather than any specific virus. There are a number of common hook points for viruses on AmigaDOS.
I remember seeing ad of this thing as a kid in some magazine. I was reely tempted, especially I believed it won't take any of our presious 640kb memory, since it's hardware. I used standard memory editors, but they always took some memory, and if there was a game for which you had to optimize memory - you were done. Also later, after struggling with some games I discovered their developers were protecting against such intrusion. They stored critical values in multiple memory locations, sometimes obscured, bit reveresed, xored etc and it made cracking them very very hard, at least for a kid :) So I spent many hours in hex editor instead actual playing game... and ended as a programmer today :) Great times!
without modified firmware there was nothing they could do. The code exec protection on the 3ds was and still is damn strong. Cheat carts were a casualty of Nintendo’s war on piracy
also, blame the Game Genie, which essentially did the same thing but tried to package it up in a way that made it simple and "fun". Essentially they removed the memory scanning aspect and simply provided you with codes, which they could then be supply via premium rate numbers for the latest games.
Hi LGR I came to this channel via Techmoan in the UK. What a great place!! I think I'll be binging on your vids for days! Thanks for all this stuff! (okay enough with the exclamation marks)
I remember hearing stories of game magazines having to photograph screens and they'd have strict guidelines on how to do that. Game Boy screenshots before Super Game Boy or special kits from Nintendo themselves were a pain in the ass for example. The editors would have to play the games with the game boy attached to wooden rigs with a camera right over the screen and they couldn't play the games proper as a result. I imagine this must've made it so much easier for them, at least when it comes to DOS games.
Hearing all the press release blurbs on the back of the box I was more and more skeptical. But as soon as you showed how feature-packed the manual was I knew it was going to be impressive... that much detail means you're looking at something powerful. And clearly it *was*... wish I'd had one of these back in the day!
That looks like, effectively, a hardware debugger/ICE type thing on an ISA card. That is so incredibly useful. I wish I'd had one back in the day for just general programming! Hell, I wish I had one _now_: I don't care about cheating in games, I just want to be able to halt the system and inspect memory to try and make my own code work...
Modern CPUs have stunning hardware debugging built in. You can use Visual Studio or windbg as an interface between you and the hardware. Data breakpoints, multiple hardware breakpoints that don’t modify code memory, etc. Awesome.
Man, I love this channel. I can space it out for a month or two, then finally get a new vid alert, check it out and realize that you've done 6 other videos and I end up binge-watching 2 hours before falling asleep with you talking about Unreal or some crazy thrift hunt through every goodwill in the tristate area. Good fun! Seriously though, absolutely love the channel. I'm going to be visiting my uncle when this medical issue passes. He has a type of ALS but was an avid gamer and elite programmer, working for the government; everywhere from Raytheon to N.A.S.A. to retiring and taking a _retirement job_ (? he loved tech so that was retirement for him =^) as a senior project manager at a medical software design company. You know, the typical easy low-stress job. Oddly enough, it was for him. Heck, barely being able to talk or type more than 25 words a minute he still takes free programming classes through M.I.T. for whatever obscure new language he isn't already fluent in. He will be absolutely ecstatic to watch someone going over all the tech things he loved in the '80s, '90s and early 2k's as programming was fun for him, but besides being with family, playing with odd tech was his passion. I can't wait to kick back and watch some of your vids with him. Thanks for that!
I had that and used it quite regularly! The first version I had could't cheat in protected mode games (DOS4GW et all) and I had to buy a second, newer card because you couldn't update to the newer firmware.
Patrik Tschenett well if you are willing to part with something I’m interested in desktop parts from 96-03 for my dream Pentium 3 build. I’ve already got a lot of stuff for it but I always wanted one of those cigarette lighter and cup holder, a front panel equalizer with screen, a bendable spot fan, and a dummy PCI slot cooler from that era. I’ve got a Tualatin with a copper heatsink and 90mm fan adapter, 6600GT AGP, WinTV, Plus Deck 2, Audigy 2 Platinum Drive, WiFi ab for 98se, and USB 2.0. Let me know thanks
Very cool episode! My first ActionReplay device was for the DSi which was also compatible with DS Lite. I spent over 1,000 hours tinkering around with Mario Kart DS and its AR Community. Good times 🙂
As someone who grew up with various action replays and game sharks... I definitely understand the excitement over finding one that actually does what it claims to LOL they weren’t all gold. Looking at you, Gameshark 64
Deeply *deeply* fascinating video. I had no idea it could get so in depth as this. It's such a brute force way of doing it, but it's also kinda elegant at the same time.
The card seems to be a "hardware debugger", but with more specialized software and its own button. I remember cards that added address monitoring, in the days before that was built into the CPU. Debuggers such as Borland's Turbo Debugger and Periscope supported various cards.
Years ago (say, around 2002-2004) I was actively looking to hack console games to translate them into English. One of the games I looked into was Grandia on the Sega Saturn. I had a similar ISA card with a RS-232 port that connected to the Sega Saturn Action Replay (so, for anyone wondering what that RS-232 port was for, now you know). Using that setup I could dump the contents of RAM from the Sega Saturn to my PC. I am pretty sure I still have the ISA card somewhere, but I do not know if I have the software that goes with it. I highly doubt I have the original box now, but seeing that Action Replay box in this video reminded me of it, even though I haven't actually seen that box since probably 2003. The software I used could likely have been used to develop cheats on the Sega Saturn in a very similar way to what is being shown here, but I ended up hacking PC games into English instead as getting tools was much easier at the time (it was also a pain to burn a CD-RW to a moded Sega Saturn and test the games with every little change).
Dude I have been a subscriber of yours for about 5 years now, your content you create now is insane. Well done for the 1 million views. You deserve it. Take care clint.
I was so happy so see this video - especially after the disappointment of the previous Action Replay prodcuts you featured. I had a few Action Replay cartridges for the Amiga 500 and Commodore 64, over the years, and they were Awesome! A friend and I originally saw the C64 Action Reply cartridge advertised in a UK Commodore 64 magazine. We had never heard of it or Datel Electronics. They were the new kids on the block, taking on more the established companies. The product sounded almost too good to be true, and the price was also very competitive. We deciced to take a chance and import one. After a painfuilly long wait, it finally arrived! Wow, was it amazing! It did everything it promised. Freeze games and make "backups" of them. Save states, screenshots, find and create cheats, rip and modify sprtes, rip and save music (SID tunes) from games, disable sprite collision (cheat to stop you getting killed by enemy sprites) and a whole lot more. And the number one feature for me: the Fast Loader. The C64 had a painfully slow disk drive, and some pretty arcane disk commands. It really was the system's greatest downfall. But this cartridge changed all of that. You got a fast loader which allowed you to use the function keys as hotkeys to list disk directories, load and run games and more. And the difference was huge! In later versions of Action Reply It loaded games 10 to 20 times faster than standard - several times faster than the famed Expyx Fast Loader cartridge. Loading a game went from taking minutes, to just seconds. It really was a game changer for the aging C64! If you still have a C64 you really should try it, or its spiritual sucessor the Retro Replay. Or even better, there is an awesome disk drive replacement cartridge called the 1541 Ultimate II+ that allows you to emulate the old 1541 disk drive and run many such classic cartidges as well, so you can quickly and conveniently run disk images at the incredible speed afforded by the Action Replay cartridges, and have all their other features too. What a win. :)
I remember doing that manually with many games. Saving the game after changing just one thing, run a hex editor and manually search for the correct spot :-D
@@cube2fox Nah, back in the 90s when you had no internet connection and played a game from a CD that was included with a games magazine you had no cheat codes unless the magazine handed them to you with the game. so instead of cheating in warcraft 1, i simply modified the savegame to give me more gold and wood. Most common internet use when my father finally allowed me to use his PC to dial up was looking up cheat codes and playing ultima online :)
I owned the Nintendo DS equivalent of this device! It was called the Trainer Toolkit. I got it when I was like 10 because I was obsessed with how Action Replay cheats worked and wanted to make my own. It was wayy above my head but I was actually able to make a few and I learned A LOT about how computers work.
I remember that artwork, the half knight half skull robot thing and thinking it was so cool when I was 8 here in UK. Never did get it though, wish I did now I’d send it to you! Thanks for the nostalgia LGR!
This thing is a truly pleasant surprise, it works like a champ for the most part. There was so much JUNK being peddled to gamers back in the day, it's refreshing to see something that actually works as advertised.
So much fun in PS2 era with my action replay v2 and ARmax. Nowdays it is like: "You suck? Infinite weapons? £5 please." moonjump, freeze timers, slow motion and free camera codes where my favorites. Always look for it in games.
There is an application I've used for over a decade, called ArtMoney. It's a Windows memory editor, and it does what this device does: copies, edits, replaces memory addresses used by the game in real time. The fact that this is done in hardware is very, very cool.
I remember my friend showing me an ad for this device in a gaming magazine back in the 90's. We assumed it was too good to be true and ignored it. Had I seen this device in action at a computer show, I would have definitely picked it up.
I had something like this for Amiga and it did not only let me rip all the sounds and graphics from my games, it also helped me to get rid of the virus problem I had with all the pirated games from friends as it allowed you to just disable virus routines in memory, prevent them from writing to bootsectors and so on.
Ahhh i remember this when buying my ps1 with my mum upon uk release. There was still Big Box pc games in my local HMV . Up untill the late 90s early 2000s. I also remember a purple one when i got my GameCube 🤔 and one in a silver metal tin for ps2 . A green and silver for orginal xbox also . Good times .
There used to be a lot of devices like this kicking around the UK for 8-Bit systems, but I never knew there was one for PC. It's fantastic and I want it.
I remember in the 80's 90's almost every Amiga user I knew had Action Replay Mk. II or III I don't remember about the Mk.II but Mk.III at least had the same features as this DOS one, virus scanner included.
When we were kids, we used ArtMoney to modify values in memory. It used the same method of before and after values. Internet wasn't popular thing back then, so the whole city used the same version. It was the easiest way to get more money in games like NFS Underground.
Wow this thing is so cool. I never saw this back in the day. I would have loved this back then. Love all your videos. It takes me back to this time digging in deep in to the autoexec.bat, config.sys, IRQ, etc. Thanks
I'm both surprised it works and not surprised. Iterating through the memory stack comparing data and then reconfiguring the defaults is not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but the fact that a company actually made a functional piece of software that does this before pumping tens of thousands of dollars in marketing and packaging with little to no QC is basically unheard of back then lol
cheat engine exists my guy. Its free and u can download it on any modern system but i get what u mean by like maybe having a modern PCI card with similar features, and instead of serial its a USB port for the button, or it would just be software controlled
Datel Action Replay cartridges were awesome for the C64 and Amiga. You could do amazing things with them if you knew how. Before the "poke finder" was introduced you had the ability to do this sort of thing by hand the old fashioned way - searching through memory addresses, using the disassembler etc. You could even export or modify sprites etc. It was awesome. I was amazed to see this PC version. Those were the days.
Similar to the old Apple II Wildcard line. They had some of the capabilities (freeze program execution, save to disk, allow poking in memory) back in 1982!
looks like what Cheat Engine would look like in the 90's. Fascinating how closely they resemble each other, with the ability to just chase changing values like that, lol.
These things work by being what is known as a "bus master". The CPU is the OG bus master, and when you trigger the button, there's a line on the ISA bus that tells the CPU that we're taking over all system bus signals, temporarily. It is the exact same mechanism that DMA uses to work. This is why these actually work and I have no idea how the parallel port ones hoped to achieve their goals.
You can also start a game that has a handbook protection, type in the requested word then freeze after you entered the correct word. There should be also a way to start the game in the "freezed" state even if you don't own an Action Replay. This was used to bypass handbook "copy protections" and was common on the Amiga before the cracked games were everywhere on your schoolyard.
Wow, I've never heard of this device, and I played a lot of DOS games as a teen. I would have had a lot of fun with it! Speaking of fun, I have a fun challenge for you... Find a cheat code that makes Vette! actually run in slow motion. I'm pretty sure it's possible, and this is why I think it can be done. It looks like the slow motion feature is adding wait states to the game, which would work great for games that use simple movement calculations. If the speed value is constant, then the distance traveled will always be 'yourSpeed' distance on the next cycle of the gameloop. For example: newPosition = oldPosition + yourSpeed If the above calculation is used to move entities within a game, then adding wait states to the game would effectively slow down the game, since the game objects will only move 'yourSpeed' distance no matter how fast or slow the gameloop is running. But Vette! probably uses time-based speed control, which means that the distance traveled will be the speed value assigned to the object (yourSpeed) multiplied by the time elapsed between the last iteration of the gameloop and the current one. For example: newPosition = oldPosition + (thisFrameTime - lastFrameTime) * yourSpeed If the above calculation is used to move objects within the game, then adding wait states will only make the game look choppy while the entities will still appear to move at the same rate. So to get the Ultimate Game Buster's 'slow motion' feature to work, you'd first need to create a cheat that sets the time-based calculation variable to a constant that works on your computer (because setting this value to a constant will effectively act as a speed control for the game in itself), and then use the 'slow motion' switch to actually slow down the game. Alright, the gauntlet is on the floor and you seem like the kind of guy that would dig this kind of thing. Want to give it a go?
Later there was Cheat Machine (without hardware) which also tried to find out where a value of interest was stored in memory (e.g lives or ammo) by freezing the game, entering the resident part and search for memory locations that have changed their values according to our observations. The memory addresses that were potential matches, could be then overwritten or 'frozen', to see if the cheat is successful (or if the game or PC crashed as a result).
I had the v3 for my Amiga 500 & it was a godsend. Being floppy disc based even something as trivial as formatting a floppy ment having to load Workbench & issue the CLI (DOS-ish) commands. Even with extended ram from 500kb to 1mb of ram you usually still had to swap discs endlessly (and easy for something to go wrong), unless you cleared off some system ram. The v3 had lifesaving a Xcopy like copier/formatter. A amazing music ripper that was very usefull back then as nearly all music was in the 8 track "mod" soundtracker style also used on pc i recall. Easy picture capturing. The cheat engine certainly worked wonders too. Savestates. Virus killing was certainly also not a joke on the amiga with all the "ahem" people borrowing floppies I still have a little box with a small library of infected floppies (like the encrypting "saddam" one) for kicks. Then again you could argue that the AR definitions got old before the box hit the market. But hey, all at a press of a button. Never got the PC one. Did see it & very seriously considered getting it for PC, but on pc you had a harddrive & could usually always poke/scan/rip the files with free software. Really couldnt justity the price. Still having a good hardware based cheat engine hasnt really gone out of date & i recall the PS1 having some similar working carts & the only reason the we dont have em anymore is because consoles has gotten to protected (and probably complex) to tap your way into.
Ahh Action Replay - I had an AR Pro for Nintendo 64. I remember it operating in one of two ways, the first was you press the button on the inline cartridge to crash the game or you pressed the button and it didn't crash but at 12 years old I had no idea how edit hex codes.
Wow, that is super cool. Using one of those back in the day must have felt like being a straight up hacker. Probably useful for reverse-engineering games as well.
I loved the duke nukum games, I didnt really get to play Doom as a kid but had the duke nukem 3d and the old dos versions that I actually beat. Good times
I had NO idea those things existed for PC. I was ONLY aware of the console versions for the Game Boy, Game Gear, Mega Drive, SNES and i think even the Saturn and PS1 had a model. My uncle had one for the Mega Drive and it was a pain in the ass to insert the code numbers first before you could use the cheats in the games but once you managed to do that it was amazing to finally get further in games that were normally too hard otherwise. It was also easy to bypass with that little switch on the side of the cartridge. Good times. Never had one of these thou. I've heard they also made it possible to play regionlocked games on your console. But i'm not sure if that worked with every model.
how neat. cool to learn how computers work. wish i had this back in the day. i wonder how it handles cpu registers when it loads & saves states. stack frame pointer etc
Had something like this for the original PS1, cartridge that plugged in the back. Felt like such a HaX0R finding infinite ammo and lived for quake 2. haha.
This feels oddly crippled compared to the ARIII module for Amiga, which was an insane Swiss army knife for debugging, ripping, save states(into memory as well, if you had some extra) and obviously trainers. You could instantly view entire memory as a bitmap or play sounds in the memory or just enter a command to search any mod files in the memory. And so so much more. Still I would've loved this on my pc as well, no doubt.
