Datel Action Replay - The Secret Weapon of the Piracy Scene | MVG

[@Kuroluxe]

Wow, the action replay is truly a skeleton key! I loved the action replay for ds. It made games play and feel completely different. Infinite master balls in Pokémon, moon jumps in Mario, and godmode in Zelda all come to mind.

[@jameslangridge8849]

infinite master balls would be so useful. it might make the game too easy, but its the kind of thing you play with when you're replaying the game and messing around. like the flying tank cheat on gta3, its a toy to make the game more fun after you've otherwise worn it out 😄

[@EximiusDux]

Reminds me of the Pelican Brainboy for the first Pokemon games. It allowed the player to get every item, every Pokemon, simply everything. Including Mew.

[@ToshiBaguette]

"Catch trainers' pokemons" + "Infinite Master balls", you can't name a more iconic duo.

[@HeyItsJonny]

Man, I remember when cheat codes were free. Now, cheat codes for outfits, weapons, money, and cars are just DLC.

[@MeriaDuck]

I still have one I think, I loved it. This must've been my most ridiculous use-case: My mother was working on the Amiga on a large document for months. I accidently formatted one half of the floppy she used in a C64. I used action replay as follows: redirected output to printer (F2 iirc?), then read out the disk RAW. There were many older copies of the document on the raw disk so we were able to piece the text together for a large part (between the disk errors occurring from the mangled side). And yes, I had to do the touch-typing while my mother dictated the document, from the printout and her notes.

[@roberthazelby4424]

Impressive!

[@seamusoblainn]

Mad stuff!

[@afropovic]

Wow that's cool. Good son (despite it being all your fault to start with 😀)

[@prizedcoffeecup]

That is legit incredible

[@kuzadupa185]

You were a little genius! What a super story

[@adrock0801]

When you replace a command with NOP, you have to make sure to insert the correct number of NOPs. What you did at 08:30 only worked by chance, because the SUB command was 6 bytes long, but a NOP is only 2 bytes long. So the remaining four bytes from the SUB command got still interpreted by the CPU as some random code / instruction. Luckily it worked, but you should have put THREE NOPs.

[@setcheck67]

lol PTSD in XCOM modding where the file size and memory size need to be the same to prevent this effect. It always made me laugh seeing what the CPU saw whenever the size was wrong where some random if statement is just completely split in half or other nonsense. Not gonna lie though it forced me to become one hell of an efficient scripter and still works to this day doing modding in other games.

[@Nightshft42]

Also you should replace the conditional BPL branch by an unconditional BRA branch instruction because the SUB instruction which sets the flags for the BPL is missing now.

[@desertdude540]

@@Nightshft42 Or he could have just changed the SUB instruction's immediate operand from 1 to 0, so that the number of lives would remain unchanged but condition codes would still be set as usual.

[@RallzGuitar]

Whenever I see content like this, it makes me wish I was already alive and developing since then. As a modern day programmer, the old stuff from back in the day look so much more interesting and witty!

[@RyTrapp0]

Ars Technica's 'War Stories' series are some of my favorite vids on YT, episodes like the 'Crash Bandicoot' one(not to mention MVG's vids on these topics as well of course) about game programmers hacking and backdooring their way through consoles/systems to achieve an end result that normally wouldn't be possible, they're just endlessly fascinating. Or, the whole backstory behind 'NBA Jam' taking over the world at that time. And the 'extended cut' with Lorn Lanning is absolutely incredible too, must listen, I even had my mother(who is of course not exactly a 'tech enthusiast' lol) listen to it it's so good(dude is an amazing story teller, and has a different level of drive than most people). Honestly, the only thing I don't like is that there hasn't been many 'War Stories' since the 'rona, and it's hard to find other similar content straight from the horse's mouth - the programmers/designers themselves behind these often pretty historically significant/famous titles, not just a' story passed around the message boards or from a friend of a buddy or what have you. When you hear their exact context for these situations and the thought process behind their solutions, there's just another level of understanding, great stuff!

[@ScottDuensing]

No reason you can't write code for these machines now. I do a ton of retro coding to keep me sane from DayJob(tm)!

[@postaldudeirl]

@@RyTrapp0 If you don't know about it yet, noclip is a great channel about that. They usually do hour long docs on games with lots of interviews.

[@Tech-geeky]

Truly, a master was behind this

[@nanoano88]

Yeah, coders were more celebrated back the, but it was more difficult to code then, because you had to code in Assembler, not a higher-level language like C++, and using an old architecture (with the Blitter chip etc on Amiga) was more difficult too.

[@KentSurvival]

Back in the day i used to love screen capturing with this and using delux paint to play with the sprites :)

[@leemajors3834]

Ah delux paint. Now that brings back memories

[@Trevorodunne]

and ripping the music from games it was great. I mostly used it for freezing games and saving to disk which could be faster then original loader

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

And I used to love thwarting the Action Replay graphics ripper by exploiting a bug in his firmware.

[@Games-bw5ee]

@@leemajors3834 Photoshop before Adobe.

[@Games-bw5ee]

@@Trevorodunne and also for ripping (non-music module) in game audio samples too.

[@mph8er]

Man, Action Replay is a blast from the past. One of the things it allowed you to do on the OG Xbox was inject save files for games like Mechassault and Splinter Cell in order to softmod your console. I remember cutting open the end of a USB device and soldering it to the controller port of an Xbox controller in order to get my PC to recognize my controller (and by extension, the memory card) so that I could upload save files to it. I also used a Gameshark on my PSOne to play import games since it would bypass the check required. This allowed me to play Dragon Ball Final Bout, Ultimate Battle 22 and Legends. Only later did I realize this also worked to play 'backups' with some versions of Gameshark. I always found the ingenuity of the community super interesting and that community is something I miss today. The xbins and xbox scene efnet IRC channels along with a few other connected irc channels was the last time I really felt part of that scene. MVG was part of that scene as I remember some of his emulator releases showing up during that time. I'd be interested in seeing him revisit some of that history.

[@dreamyrhodes]

Not only crack games. This thing helped me to finally get rid of viruses that were spread all over the disks. Together with having all disks generally set to write protected, I was able to stop the virus pandemic that was infesting every Amiga I owned.

[@DaussPlays]

Didn't even know Amiga viruses were a thing. Should be an MVG video on the topic.

[@Optim121]

Is that why its asking to check for viruses in memory at 2:27?

[@thea.0413]

what would viruses do on older hardware like this?

[@fonkbadonk5370]

@@thea.0413 At worst delete or corrupt files. Often just "funny" effects like displaying some spooky messages or do other things with what's on screen, sometimes rendering the system effectively unusable though. Just crashing the computer was also a rather unimaginative thing. Viruses back then were about the annoyance, not retrieving personal information (which ofc. isn't possible without some form of online connection). On some few systems some very few viruses even managed to make some of the hardware destroy itself, but those were far and between, and almost like camp fire ghost stories among enthusiasts.

[@michac3796]

@@thea.0413 prevent the correct loading after the the disc was left unprotected during a boot in an infested Amiga. RIP FA-18 Interceptor.

[@djmattc1978]

I used to work for Datel here in the UK and used to give cheat codes out to gamers on the phone. Fascinating video.

[@Mitchy_Witchy]

Great Video MVG! This video brings back so many memories! I'm an Aussie that grew up on Sega Master System and SNES. I remember seeing adverts for Action Replay in magazines as a kid and I knew it was some cool cheat device for consoles. My uncle gave me an Amiga with SO MANY games, it was either Amiga 500 or 600, so long ago, can't remember if it had a numpad or not, but it had the extra external 3.5" drive. Every game was a pirate copy with the cracker's splash screen upon boot. My parent's loved a golf game we had on it but they haven't enjoyed any other golf game since! Monkey island was amazing too! Unfortunately my uncle is no longer with us and I wish I knew him better, he may have been a bad-ass pirate or just a resourceful bloke like myself, still an absolute champ in my eyes!

[@nonskeetuser760]

Little note about the no-operand (NOP) instruction : it actually is executed by the computer/console and still uses 2 cpu clock cycles, so it's not the same as nothing. Great video btw !

[@Projectioncloud]

Had no idea Skid Row did stuff for Amiga! Such a talent and I'll never forget the stuff he allowed me to achieve on PC back in the day.

[@Aremisalive]

Never realized how similar cheat engine is to stuff like this.

[@MichaelPohoreski]

It is basically a software version of earlier hardware.

[@jju00]

Was thinking the exact same thing

[@iskamag]

you can probably do the same with gdb (GNU debugger)

[@BillyEilish]

yup!! CE is an amazing tool and extremely powerful. These Action Replays were very well thought out.

[@dieSpinnt]

@@iskamag Yes and no:P Action Replay, Final Cartridge, etc. are hardware based solutions that could take full command over the architecture. A pure software gdb has to rely on (software) breakpoints and system interrupts. Sophisticated copy protection mechanisms can mitigate this or make it very hard to break. A ring0 debugger would be a good starting point, like bochs with gdb. So the short answer: It depends on the system and the architecture ... :) For example JTAG hardware debugging on x86 may be limited for security reasons, which would be similar to our old cartridges method, where you could use an external gdb over JTAG. If it is Linux ... just use kgdb

[@lainamitclaire]

I love your videos on the Commodore and Amiga to death. They're way, way before my time, yet they're so fascinating, and have such rich histories with both the hardware and the tricks developers used, as well as things in various scene communities as well.

[@afkafkafk]

Older hardware and the computing world of that era really makes me wish I was born a few decades earlier to experience it for myself

[@jameslangridge8849]

I've just been bingeing amiga content, as a games platform I've never had. perfect timing for this, thanks MVG 😄

[@jfitnesshealth]

Same here. Never owned one but I remember a kid playing all those shareware games in the 90s for windows 3.1/win95. Had no idea those were ports of amiga games!! Which lead me back to vids on all the amigas. Beautiful computer. Imagine they made a streamline console version. Something like cd32. I'm getting the amiga500 mini coming out in may. Check the early reviews man!

[@jameslangridge8849]

@@jfitnesshealth I've seen the early reviews and im tempted too. Just depends on the price, availability, and final reviews. I hear it runs WHDload files straight from a usb stick though! 😄

[@5Perf65mm]

Excellent video. Loved the explanation about the use of the disassembler and assembler.

[@specker4118]

Yes, awesome Video. So the disassambler works like a reverse engeneering tool and the assembler as a debugger?

[@HAGSLAB]

@@specker4118 In very simple terms, the disassembler turns opcodes into readable instructions (LDA, NOP, etc.) and their "parameters". Assembling turns readable instructions into opcodes and data.

[@specker4118]

@@HAGSLAB Thanks for the explanation! ;)

[@meady200]

Yes great! Back in the day, and without the internet, how did people learn this stuff? Anyone?

[@5Perf65mm]

@@meady200 Dialup BBS and face-to-face chats at school and local computer stores :-)

[@FabledGentleman]

Speaking of Amiga. Matt Gray's last reformation campaign is now on kickstarter, he remixes both c64 and Amiga tunes. This will be his last one. For those who doesn't know, Matt Gray was the composer of the Last Ninja 2 soundtrack. And his remixes are amazing.

[@PihkalTheTihkal]

Anyone remembers SoftIce in the good old MS DOS days? Memory resident debugger that allowed you to break out any program at any time, pretty much like the Freeze button of the Action Replay. It was such a great tool, helped me crack a ton of shareware applications/games back in the day.

[@MichaelPohoreski]

I actually wrote my own poor man’s SoftIce clone in the early 90’s! I wrote a small TSR that would generate an INT 3 when I pressed a mouse button. Next, I would start the game up under debug. When I got to the copy protection I would press the mouse button, process a few instructions where I cleaned up the stack? and boom, back in the game! It is how I cracked Test Drive 3, SimCity, found a typo in the Ultima V manual for the reagent list for one of the spells, and got Lord British to join my party in Ultima 6 (free heals in the middle of combat!) I never did figure out that stupid wheel protection for Monkey Island 1 since I didn’t realize they were using a Virtual Machine. Ralph Brown’s Interrupt List FTW!

[@PihkalTheTihkal]

@@MichaelPohoreski Cool stuff! I "borrowed" a copy of SoftIce from a friend, saved me the hassle of writing my own. 🙂 I fondly remember trying to crack a TSR DOS audio CD player, it had a hotkey to pop up (overlay) its UI and allow you to control which track was being played etc. The problem with it was that because it was shareware once you tried to close the UI it kept flickering on the screen for 5 seconds encouraging people to purchase the software, obviously this was really annoying! I was able to circumvent this pretty quickly BUT for some reason my patch wouldn't stick, it returned to the original code and disabled my patch. I never actually figured out why that was happening as I decided to brute force my patch, my "solution" was to hook INT 1Ch and patch the CD player code every 16.2 mS. Not the most elegant solution but it did work well enough to make 14 year old me happy with the result. 😀 Good times! And now 25 years later I can barely read assembly code let alone write a program with it.... 😞

[@MichaelPohoreski]

@@PihkalTheTihkal That’s a clever hack of using the timer IRQ to patch code! I’m curious what that DOS CD audio player program was? Wondering if it was using self modifying code and that’s why your hack didn’t work? Or if there was two copies code and you only patched the second, temporary copy? I still program in 6502 assembly every month to stay sane from C(rap)++ bloat. Reverse engineering Apple 2 games is SO worth it.

[@PihkalTheTihkal]

@@MichaelPohoreski my previous statement wasn't entirely correct, it patched every 18.2 mS not 16.2 mS. 🙂 As for which program it was, don't really remember but I've done some Googling, it turns out it's not easy to find an obscure 25 year old piece of software but one of the TSR CD players I stumbled upon was called ACDC and for some reason that rings a bell but I'm unable to find the actual program so there's no way for me to verify if that's correct. Don't know what mechanism was in the code to make it behave like it did hence my brute force approach. So your still writing Apple ][ games? Talk about devotion to a system. 🙂

[@MichaelPohoreski]

@@PihkalTheTihkal I worked on Nox Archaist, an RPG game for the Apple 2 which shipped in Dec 2020. I work on AppleWin's debugger adding new features to make it easier for me to reverse old games. Writing a mini-map viewer is just one of the things I write in 6502 assembly.

[@rcmaniac25]

Thanks for showing this. Now that you mention it, I do remember hearing of the Action Replay when I was a kid, but just in name only. But the bigger one for me was "trainer". I played Roller Coaster Tycoon religiously and I remember reading on forums that if you wanted to do amazing things, you need a trainer. I downloaded a few and went about crazy parks and whatnot. Eventually I ended up just reverting back to vanilla, but in the back of my mind I went "why is it called a trainer?" Now I know. I hadn't thought about trainers since those days, but happy to have learned today.

[@overlordalfredo]

9:12 oh the memories when I thought that all games were coming on these colorful hand written floppies xD Wasn't until mid nineties that I saw an original video game with its box...

[@ForeverGeordie]

I still own an original MkIII and my very first amiga that I used to crack all my games back in the day. Brought back a lot of memories. Thank you!!

[@overlordalfredo]

3:00 the entire setup looks so much like a picture from my childhood and my first gaming experience. The Amiga, the mouse, the joystick... Only the flat-screen looks a bit out of place here xD

[@Tech-geeky]

only had a CRT myself... but i love that setup.. Reminds me of my Action Replay III cartridge adding it to the side expansion....

[@tuanbe]

I got a mkIII for my A500 as a Christmas present in '92. I had so much fun with it. Best present ever!

[@blacksunshine7485]

This is why I love this channel. Man, I miss my Amiga. Those big ass boxes with a little floppy inside

[@DigitalFacts]

I had tons of fun using the C64 and Amiga versions of the one and only Action Replay. Writing your own trainer, ripping gfx and sprites or even sound modules was a breeze. There also was a version for the Amiga 2000 - a zorro card with a little external box that had the buttons for freezing and slowing down the cpu. Still have those lying around. Great memories.

[@andrewford7129]

Man your videos are always high quality but I found this one to be super engaging and informative. I love the individual code steps you went through on the old Amiga. Kudos to you for such a good job!

[@Tech-geeky]

throughout mu childhood my skills were limited... Never done dissembler with my ARIII.. Only tools i uses was monitor (m) and as well as trainer (ts), (TFD) and scanning areas of memory "scan" looking for good music from Lotus games to save out :) Probably only 10% of the manual.. 30 years on. i learn allot more but NOT from the manual, ... from KZbin... That's crazy.

[@marioavossa]

30 years later I finally find out how to use one of these things properly!!

[@KopperNeoman]

Even in the PS2, GCN, Xbox era the Action Replay hardware was redundant - those machines were capable enough to run cheats in software as a makeshift hypervisor. Modern cheat solutions centre around homebrew for this reason.

[@Manic_Panic]

The OG Xbox never got cheat support in Action Replay, it was only for save import/export and save modding. Similar to SaveWizard on the PS4 except without all the encryption stuff.

[@banditkeithkingofduelmonsters]

@@Manic_Panic Great for putting a modded dashboard on. I still use it to mod xboxs to put halo 2 mods on.

[@userPrehistoricman]

@@Manic_Panic How were cheats developed and executed on the OG Xbox?

[@Manic_Panic]

@@userPrehistoricman For both the OG Xbox and 360, you first had to mod/hack them. Then the community would develop custom trainers for each game individually, installing them on the console's hard drive (correct directories) and assure they're recognized by your custom dashboard. In the end, you just enable them while you're still on the dashboard and then finally launch the game.

[@PSVitaFan]

I remember people were using the action replay on the original PlayStation 1 The version with the AV inputs on the back of the system, the action replay would plug into the back of the PlayStation 1 and allow you to play import games and games burnt onto CD -R CDs without having to mod the system with a mod chip later on another version was released where you would use a boot disk problem is sometimes you could scratch a game by doing the hotswap

[@IdiotRace]

The earliest version of the PS1 didn't even need action replay to play pirate or import games. You could literally just go to the music player, put an original disk in and wait for the ps1 to read it. Then keeping the disc tray button held down with something (I used blu-tack) swap whatever pirate/import game back in and it will just boot. This was amazing, until stupid teen me managed to kill the disc drive on that ps1. I did get a replacement PS1 but it was the one without the AV inputs so you had to do a more complicated swap disc trick. Eventually I got a knockoff action replay that let you play everything and also did VCD playback.

[@matt5740]

Don't even need them anymore. Can just use a memory card with a modified save to play anything 😅

[@JamsterJules]

I loved my days of AR III and the Amiga. Thanks for the memories.

[@BlackFantasy470]

I've only ever used Action Replay on PS2 when everything was conveniently easy for the user. It's really interesting to see how it works in the background, or how it was used before there was an UI. I wasn't aware that AR could defeat protection as well.

[@Chilliconcarnage]

I had the Action replay for the C64 first and remember that amazing packaging. The MK III for the Amiga was also amazing. I'm proud that Datel was located in Fenton in Stoke-on-Trent just a stones throw from where I grew up. An awesome time to be alive :) Thanks for this great video.

[@Vili69420]

its just like Cheat Engine but more primitive , hella interesting

[@phuzz00]

Cheat Engine is just like an Action Replay, but more advanced ;)

[@MeriaDuck]

It was quite advanced; this is in 1990! You could for instance scroll through memory graphically, in all thinkable bit-map modes. And auto-search for module-files to get the music from a game. And playback the memory as a sample to find the game or music samples.

[@Vili69420]

@@MeriaDuck very interesting

[@Games-bw5ee]

@@MeriaDuck Yes. It was fun ripping the bitmap 'sprites' and fonts from games.

[@Tech-geeky]

we like the primitive stuff :) I'm 42 years old for christ sake

[@cacheman]

Had one of these (the mk3 specifically on the amiga, but also an earlier variant on the C64, after switching from a Final Cartridge II). Pretty useful for cheating with the poke-finder, but also for ripping mods and stuff.

[@hilly900]

OMG the thumbnail brought back some memories! I loved ripping mods from games with my MKIII!

[@ffmdotcom]

Had this for my Amiga as a 12y old. I used the memory scan to bump up all sorts of values. We also managed to 'pirate' some games by passing the copy protection and then create a memory dump disk effectively allowing to start the game from after the copy protection check. It worked but not always. Got to say it was a great devices even for us kids with limited understanding of how things actually worked in detail back in the day.

[@JohnnyReb1976]

MVG, at 8:36 you entered just one NOP, which is a single word operand. However, the operand you're replacing (SUBI.B) is a 3-word operand. You need three NOPs.

[@ModernVintageGamer]

you are correct, im actually puzzled as to how that infinite lives cheat worked heh

[@JohnnyReb1976]

@@ModernVintageGamer Most likely the remaining two words created a harmless operand which did not effect the flow. So, luck.

[@JohnnyReb1976]

I looked it up, the remaining two words make ORI.B #0,D1 so yes, completely harmless.

[@NeonEUC]

Anything to do with Amiga has my vote. Will download and watch this tonight with no adverts but loads of beers with other vids from Dan wood, LGR, nostalgia need, RMC, etc... all the best KZbin channels

[@jfitnesshealth]

Yoooo same here! Dan, and lgr. Never heard of rmc. Will check it out. Never had an amiga or saw it in person but played many of its games via windows 3.1 /95 ports. As a kid I had no idea these were amiga

[@NeonEUC]

@@jfitnesshealth RMC is brilliant, Dan and LGR have a great relationship with him and he's just set up a retro arcade. Give RMC a chance (it's short for retro man cave) as you will love it 😊

[@Games-bw5ee]

Thanks for the recommendations.

[@joerhorton]

Weapon of choice on a C64 back in the late 80's and early 90's. Great for transferring all your tape games to disk or using it as a fast loader. I never purchase done for my Amiga, but now wish I had.

[@keithbeesting]

Yes fantastic I loved the C64 version. On later versions you could even copy multiload tape games to disk.

[@C64_and_Amiga_Memories]

Love how you spent good time in really cleaning the A500. It looks "new"

[@rexhavoc9]

I think the videos from Modern Vintage Gamer are the only ones where I press the like button first and then watch

[@Frostie3672]

Owned the action repay Mk 6 for the C64, used the backup feature to transfer all the games I had on tape to disk, that along with the fast loader function totally transformed using my C64. I also had numerous microprose games that used the nova loader & had a friend who owned an older version of the cartridge that could transfer nova load games to disk, that again totally transformed playing gunship & other such simulations from microprose. Even dabbled in assembly code using the built in monitor, anyone remember the basic program in the C64 manual to move a balloon with the C64 logo around the screen, I recreated that in machine code, was quite chuffed at the time, I did it referencing a machine language for the absolute beginner book I brought.

[@rudy5360]

I used to love the Action Replay on Amiga! The ability to freeze the machine and poke around at all memory was so powerful. I used to love finding cheats, ripping graphics, samples and tracker files from games and demo's. One demo, the name I can't recall, would crash after you un-freeze. A type of defence against the Action Replay. I think it compared demo running time against system running time. No games I remember did this.

[@lurkerrekrul]

8:56 - I'm not familiar with 68000 assembly. I only know 6502 assembly, and not all that well. However I'm confused about something. The original instruction at 79CE appears to have taken up six bytes, from 79CE to 79D3. You enter a NOP instruction at 79CE and the assembler starts the next line with 79D0. In the absence of you entering anything there, I'm assuming that 79D0 to 79D3 will still contain whatever values they had before. Once the program executes the NOP (and does nothing), how does it know that the next valid instruction is at 79D4? Wouldn't it try to execute whatever it finds at 79D0 as an instruction? And wouldn't that throw off the program counter (which tells it where the next instruction starts), unless those bytes just happen to form valid, but benign instructions that don't affect the functioning of the program? That was my experience on the C64. If the original instruction at C000 took up two bytes, the next instruction would start at C002. If I replaced just the first byte with NOP, the program would think that the next instruction was at C001, which would usually result in a crash. I always had to replace ALL the bytes that made up an instruction so that it would properly find the next one.

[@skylo706]

You're correct, the unchanged bytes got interpreted as code but it did nothing (that was by luck, it could have, but didn't this time). He should have put 3 nops there but it just happens to be irrelevant this time around

[@lurkerrekrul]

@@skylo706 This may be a dumb question, but as I said, I'm not familiar with 68000 assembly: Do all parameters following instructions always take up at least two bytes? In other words, are there any instructions that only have a single byte parameter after them? I'm just wondering, since the NOP seems to take two bytes, and you wouldn't be able to use it to replace an instruction and parameter that took up just three bytes. A two-byte NOP only works if every part of the program always takes up two bytes at a time. On the C64, NOP only used one byte, so you could replace any amount of bytes with it.

[@JoseRojasA]

What you did not mention was the hours of teenage life invested to learn assembly, uncover these and find a way around them. I often enjoyed attempting to crack a game more than I did playing it!

[@csgowoes6319]

My friends and I used the Trilogic Expert cartridge for the Commodore 64 over the Action Replay. I don't really see the Expert Cartridge mentioned much but it was a GREAT bit of kit, I spent SO much time poking around in the code of games and demos. In fact I was too lazy to use an assembler so I used to do a lot of coding with it too. And yeah, devising cheats exactly like you describe, the Expert had something similar. Good times.

[@jgameruk.]

The Amiga was my go to computer growing up 🔥

[@jameslangridge8849]

Im actually jealous. I grew up with DOS, and the amiga always seemed like it was "put in disk, boot amiga" to play. To run DOS games we ended up tinkering with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get enough memory, then deal with sound card IRQ conflicts, and then it still might not run at the right speed! 😅

[@JohnnyReb1976]

Still holds a certain charm to this day.

[@lolocaust4967]

@@jameslangridge8849 I started on the Amiga but wanted to make the move to PC because that's what we used at school. I couldn't wait to get my first PC. My first was an olivetti with a 486DX266. It was a compact PC. So compact when I added a CD Rom to it, the drive sat on top with the cables hanging out of the case 🤣

[@TomMannCenturia]

Appreciate the way you make these quite technical videos as accessible as possible, for the complete novice/casual observer. Very interesting, thanks.

[@BeingKyleBusch18]

I remember using a gameshark module that connected to the back of a PSX with the interface door on the back. I was able to find addresses that contained the number of lives by using the same technique displayed by MVG. The term, "Nuked" also brought back memories of scene groups and their releases that i used to download via news groups, irc xdcc bots, irc servers via serv-u and FTP servers for example. Every once in awhile, i check dalnet,darknet,Efnet servers to see what's left of it. Discord is the new underground chat of today, whereas back in the 2000's it was Mirc.

[@KopperNeoman]

The modern underground has got a bit lazy there. Using a centralized service known for ideological purges? Sloppy.

[@ScottWozniak]

My older brother had this cart. I remember him using it to cheat through Shadow Of The Beast. Then I ended up getting one for my Genesis, SNES, then Saturn. The console versions were much easier to find cheats! 🕹

[@DemonStink]

Xploder was my baby growing up. I met a coder back in the day on the forums and he had developed a special program that could convert action replay to hex and then from hex to xploder, and vice versa. We also discovered a way to get gameshark cheatcodes for NTSC to work on PAL copies of the games. Was super fun growing up in that scene.

[@nicholas_scott]

This is fascinating. Back in the 80s, all we had to use was a hex-editor, and sometimes you could find the section of code to modify, but without trainer tools like this, it was extremely difficult, Usually, we would end up just modifying the high-score list, since that was usually stored as text, and easy to find and modifiy.

[@mishkatown8625]

I used to know what to look for in a hex editor, especially with demo's you'd find music, images individually compressed within the whole file. Curiosity was a beautiful thing back in the 80's/90's.

[@memitim171]

My Grandad showed me how to use pokes on the Spectrum when I was 7 or so, I was like "Woah! Grandad's a wizard!" lol

[@davidd3065]

I used hex editor to modify save games to get better stats in some games back in the 80s on my TRS-80 Color Computer, when I moved on to PC there was better tools somit got easier and more accurate, but the game developers got smart too one particlur game apparently had a checksum in the save file and if it didn't add up it would just wouldn't load. I don't why they even did it wasn't an online game or anything, just some no name DnD type of adventure.

[@DerykRobosson]

Youngins! Back in the old days, we used sector editors to edit the high scores.

[@mishkatown8625]

@@DerykRobosson you must be a young one yourself! before the internet we used bulletin boards to get the latest demo's & cracked games on the Amiga! Intel outside forever LOL.

[@darktetsuya]

wow that's neat! I did learn (maybe it was even from your video) how these trainers work by looking for changes in specific memory addresses and then looking to see if a certain value has changed. didn't have a PC til the late 90s so I definitely missed out on this era of early PC gaming!

[@JamesWilson01]

Oh, the Interpol Flashback that wasn't fully cracked 😱

[@DannyNilsson]

Thanks MVG, it was so informative to learn about the possibilities of the Action Replay. Remember having one myself as a kid, but was only able to figure out the way with using t and ts to add more to a counter. This time it was before the internet so to learn anything about assembler was impossible. I would have loved to try more out with the write to disk and the way you locked the lives. didn't even know it was possible to write a change in the memory

[@Ziggurat1]

When you pressed the freeze button, I was reminded how much I wanted a PCI-Screamer

[@johnnychang4233]

At least, the long awaited video I was hoping is here ;)

[@notFleqx]

I remember having this for the PS2. Calls back so many memories

[@liswifi]

I actually moved super close to Datel's office recently! I would love to pay them a visit to talk about the history of the Action Replay. Surely people still work there that worked there during the company's prime.

[@scikoolaid]

Do it, doesnt hurt to ask

[@whitebakecase]

I worked there in 1998/99 on action replay solder rework. Staff turnover was high back then so I doubt there are.

[@lolocaust4967]

@@scikoolaid yeah second this. You'd be surprised. Might even get a tour of the place.

[@SirCarcass]

My first foray into memory editing was on PC with a DOS program called Game Wizard. It worked similarly but in software. It was a TSR program with a hotkey that would interrupt the game and allow you to search and edit memory and even create tables of memory addresses to reload later. It didn't do the disassembly, though I wouldn't have known how to use it even if it did. I did learn a lot about computer memory and hexadecimal from using it. It was a staple in my mid-90's gaming.

[@Hobes128]

Thanks for another great video MVG! I had a similar piece of hardware for the ZX spectrum +3 called a "Multiface 3". IFRC i paid ~£35 for it, and I still consider it the best piece of computer hardware I have ever purchased! I learned so much about machine code / z80 assembler by playing with it, and had loads of fun finding infinite live pokes for my games too (not to mention it's ability to transfer tape games to disk). It was just amazing to me that so much could be achieved with an NMI (non-maskable interrupt) and a simple monitor program). Keep the videos coming!

[@DJKutski]

Great video, thanks! Fascinating to know how all this worked having played them as a kid. Excited for the Amiga mini this Friday :)

[@blankblank4949]

hardware based cheat engine, I love that. I used to use an AR on my nintendo ds lite, but i dont think it ever had awesome features like that. Its so cool that this concept has been around for so long

[@zunaidparker]

The Amiga 500 was the first PC I had. Although I never had an Action Replay, this was a good trip down memory lane. Thanks!

[@gosunkugi]

I used to love messing with my AR. My biggest find was somehow turning the blood on permanently for Wrestlemania 2000 on the N64. The UK release was censored to our annoyance, so unlocking that was a revelation.

[@15xv]

awesome video MVG. i learned this stuff on ZSNES's action replay implementation way back in the day. so cool to see the same exact methods here

[@tomahzo]

LOL, yeah I used to have one of those. Sometimes it would be more fun to tinker in the memory monitor than to play games ;). I used it for patching sprites in memory, rip music and samples out of memory so that I could use it for my own tracker modules. Oh, and don't forget the great bitmap ripper feature that let you grab what was currently on screen and save it to disk. So much fun! :) I'm glad that the Action Replays on C64 and Amiga worked the way they did. It was so much fun to just explore the machine and to tinker rather than to just use it to type in cheat codes. Had it worked like the console versions I would probably have stopped using it. Also, to comment on the rest of the video: It's like you visited my childhood. Like... I had those same games that you had there in that floppy disk box, I had the same cracked version of Flashback, I used the same version of X-copy ;). (among others - Action Replay actually had a built-in disk copy tool as well - Burst Nibbler I think it was called - but I never felt like it surpassed the versions of X-copy that I usually relied on) What a flash from the past! Also, regarding how to debug memory to find code snippets like that: I guess it helps that 1) the memory space was reasonably small, 2) no address space randomization like in today's machines, 3) no multi-process environment, no OS that allocates memory on-demand and on the Amiga 500 there wasn't even any MMU and certainly no virtual memory - the programmer had direct control of the physical memory layout and decided where in memory to put stuff and there it goes - if you find the location for a subroutine in memory it will be there the next time you boot up the software.

[@dreamcastfan]

Very cool! I never saw the Amiga Action Replay, but I did have it on the GameBoy and I had loads of fun with the value search features. It even had a “woolly” search for things like health bars where you wouldn’t necessarily know the value of it, but you could tell the AR to look for a value that had decreased or increased until you eventually homed in on where the game stored the health bar. I remember using it on T2 The Arcade Game on the GameBoy to make a code for infinite health.

[@kjrehberg]

Finally cracking and training Amiga games makes sense. I had an Amiga 2500 and Amiga 3000 which don't have cartridge ports like the Amiga 500 has.

[@dbnpoldermans4120]

Wow, trully amazing at how well you are teaching us about this. I always wondered how it was done and this clarifies it. Can't wait to see what you will explain next! This is perhaps similar to how people create patches to turn 4:3 games into 16:9 (or any aspect ratio really) games

[@Siktah]

As always, a great episode. And as always, left me wanting more haha! Highlight of my late monday nights!

[@Cassp0nk]

I enjoyed this and takes me back to using mine to bypass the protection of f15 flight eagle (ea). I actually owned it, but it was a simple manual check so within my ability level at the time. I also tried SSI games but failed. If only tutorials like this had been available I’d have got further! There used to be a disk based scene mag with hacking tutorials with a guy who went on about ‘works’. Computers were in many ways more fun back then. Everything is so complicated and abstracted now.

[@lolocaust4967]

It's not just that. Most people don't really explore what thier computer can do anymore. OS actively discourage you from tinkering with warnings and errors all over the place. Or you download a tool to fix it. Gone are the days when we'd poke through every file and every bit of hardware to figure it out ourselves.

[@Layby2k]

I had a Mk II Action Replay on the Amiga 500. Cost me AUD $250 back in the day. Loved it and I learnt a lot.

[@RetroHenni]

Thanks MVG! Still using my MKIII in my A500. Back in the days I had many fun trying to cheat various aspects of a game. E.g. I filled the spellbook in Bloodwych and so on.

[@hundgirridchannel]

I was a lucky action replay 2 owner back in the Amiga days, you could do nearly everything. I used it to have infinite lives or power ups; with the save memory on disk function you could bypass copy protections based on writing words written in the manual or codewheels; you could rip music mod files, save images, edit sprites or interface. And with the slow motion feature you could pause every game to study what to do or to have more time to think. Not to mention the antivirus tool and many other little things.

[@COMATRON.]

GREAT content - absolutely LOVING this! thank you

[@DonYagamoth]

In my random opinion: Every game would be improved with a cheat-menu, that gives you god-mode, infinite resources and such, that you can toggle on or off I would have never gotten as good or played as much Civilization 2 as a kid, if it didn't have that neat little menu ^^ Thank you for the overview, this is quite fascinating

[@kluzz]

I learnt so much about assembly programming on the Amiga by freezing demos and inspecting the code. This really was an amazing tool.

[@Nobe_Oddy]

This was AMAZING!!!!! I have ALWAYS wondered how this was done and you have open that window for me!!! PLEASE OH PLEASE CONTINUE TO MAKE VIDEOS ABOUT THIS STUFF!!! I LOVE IT!!! I spent sooo much time as a kid playing BACKUPS and this was always a big mystery to me!! Could you PLEASE tell us more about the cracking/warez scene from it's hayday? Thank you no matter if you do or not, you are the BEST MVG!!! :D

[@skylo706]

Same here =)

[@willierants5880]

So cool. All the things I just never knew of back in the day simply because methods of communication were so different.

[@GoTeamScotch]

Very cool! This is just like what using CheatEngine is like for modern PC games. CE is way more fancy, but similar in how you use it. The only Action Replay device I used was the memory card reader for PC for the original Xbox. That was quite a simple device. Much simpler than what was on show in this video. It's cool to see Action Replay's roots.

[@grumpyoldgeezr]

The Amiga was so fun and easy to access and use. Not perfect by any means but it had a little of everything. Exciting times back then. Not a coincidence a lot of great future game coders were made using the Amiga. I loved this episode, I had an Action Replay 3 as a kid, but mostly used it as a mod and graphics ripper.

[@Mahti77]

Really brings back memories! I had one of these for my Amiga. I remember ripping music from couple of games and adding number of lives like you could see in this video, but could not figure out assembler back then.

[@Cassp0nk]

Enjoyed this. The Amiga days were so cool.

[@IroquoisPliskin86]

I used a Game Shark on my PS1, which was basically the same thing as a pro action replay. I mostly used it to zoom through Resident Evil 3 and I messed around a lot with the Smackdown games. I did so many cool things in the Smackdown games. Those were the days.

[@telmotrooper]

I gotta say: I freaking love your channel, man!

[@mradamdavies]

This brings back some serious memories of cracking my own games when I was a kid... Damn, I had more fun messing with the code than playing the games. SoftIce was always my favourite tool!

[@asgerf5240]

Great introduction, and nice that you're using an actual Amiga instead of an emulator. The chiptune at the end isn't for Amiga though, but for Adlib RAD player on DOS :) It's called Alloyrun by the australian group Reality. Great song though (one of only 9 on my chiptune playlist)

[@maxderp6588]

Changing an instruction in this manner also has the potential to change the timing. If you're not building a trainer menu, I'd suggest changing the "subi #1(etc)" to "subi #0(etc)"

[@JimboJammy]

Had a game genie for nes and game gear but had an action replay for the PlayStation, I probably used that the most. Used to do lots of silly things like give shelley in resi 2 a rocket launcher. Used to crash games regularly but it was always good fun. Great for leveling up characters in rpgs too without having to grind for hours and hours.

[@trelard]

Never owned an Amiga version of the cart, so it's great seeing this. I did own a version for the C64 after blowing a ton of fuses inside the machine via the paperclip method of freezing to add pokes. Even those times I got zapped just before the fuse blew is kinda nostalgiac.

[@Guardian1224]

9:24, the protection of Flashback.... that brings back some fine memories🙂

[@ichigen511]

I've always wondered how these devices work. The mystery is finally solved. Thank you! Liked and subscribed, cheers!

[@breaque]

For extra fun there's also the "sysop mode" which allows you to disassemble more memory areas, including the ROM of the cartridge itself.

[@MeriaDuck]

cool, how do you enter that?

[@breaque]

@@MeriaDuck By typing "may the force be with you new" and pressing enter after each word. There's more info on this on the English Amiga Board.

[@elmeromero303]

Thank you for this backflash to my childhood 🤩

[@spacecat8748]

Super interesting content. I remember some PSP cheat plugins that allow you to find memory addresses and modify them (useful for cheats not present already in the included database file). Good times! I knew that physical action replay disks existed on consoles like PS1 and PS2, but never imagined they were already a thing on even older systems.

[@christophed348]

Hi ! Thanks for this video. This reminds me the multifaces devices for 8bits computers such as the zx spectrum or the amstrad cpc, but the action Replay assembly/disassembly and file system save possibilities makes it so powerful !

[@GeezerGamesRetro]

The AR3 cart is also an awesome programming tool for developers. I still use it now extensively to make my games, it's simply an awesome bit of kit.

[@linkssz1699]

I had an action replay for the Gameboy that did something like this, you would go into a game and lose a life and hit the button on the top to go back into the action replay menu where it would give you a list of codes, normally repeating losing a life and hitting the button gave a higher chance you would find the code for infinite lives, I found loads of codes for different games when I was a kid.

[@qettyz]

I had action replay mk3 back in 94 when i was 12y old. Added more lives, saved pictures and music with it. As i got older and had already sold my amiga, learned asm i realised how powerful that action replay actually would been if just would known asm back then. Amazing hardware. Picked one from ebay ~6y ago, not selling that action replay or my amiga.