Under the microscope: Beavis and Butt-head

In this edition, we’re examining Beavis and Butt-head, the 1994 adaptation of the MTV series for Genesis by Radical Entertainment.

Data miners have looked through this game and found various unused elements – text, animations, music. They’ve compared the visuals in prerelease screenshots to the final game. They’ve noted the title’s unusual use of the Genesis sound hardware. But I think they missed something – a hidden cheat code.

Details are below…

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Passing the password test

When you’re on the Password Test screen, you can enter 12 characters from the set shown here:

The indexes of the characters you choose are stored in the buffer that starts at 00ffd232. A is 00, a is 01, B is 02, b is 03, etc.

If your password doesn’t decode into one of the ones the game generates with progress data encoded, it gets checked by the function at 00026204. When this function is called, its first argument is a pointer to a string. Follow the pointer, and you’ll see this value: -Raptor-

Hmm, what happens if you enter that string as your password?

Three things happen: first, the value at 00ffbe30 gets set to 0xff. This makes Beavis and Butt-head invincible! Their eyes glow red when this effect is active:

Enemies and objects can’t injure Beavis or Butt-head when invincibility is enabled, of course. They can still die, however, by losing the race in the hospital.

The cheat also sets the value at 00ffbe09 to 0xff. This makes all enemies fall with one hit.

The last cheat effect involves the value at 00ffaeee. This value determines how much money Beavis and Butt-head have. It gets set to its max value, which corresponds to $6.40 in game:

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Outro

I wonder what the significance of the word Raptor is in this cheat? I’ve got no clues. If you have an idea, leave a comment.

Thanks for reading – I’ll be back with another examination of a Genesis game soon. In the meantime, check out my blog for more retro game reverse engineering.