4 MB Cartridge Hack for King of Fighters ’97 Posted to SegaXtreme

This week, a new YZB hack was posted to SegaXtreme for King of Fighters ’97.

YZB is a Chinese hacker who edits Saturn games to use the 4 MB RAM cartridge for improvements.

While the original version of KoF ’97 already requires the 1 MB RAM cartridge and is compatible with the 4 MB cart, this hack makes better use of the 4 MB one specifically for better load times. It also unlocks every character’s ending — accessible from the “demo mode” in the options screen — in addition to unlocking six hidden characters right from the start, including the final boss, Orochi.

Other changes include several screens and a piece of music that are seen and heard before the main game loads. One screen gives credit to YZB for the hack with a URL to the Chinese forum it was originally posted in, and the others show a variety of King of Fighters artwork.

The full game with the hack already applied to it can be downloaded from the SegaXtreme thread’s original post.

Fellow Shiro contributor Emily captured some footage of the KoF ’97 hack in action:

“Orochi is pretty glitchy as the video shows,” Emily said, “most notably his background sprite when he’s not fighting and his super.”

SegaXtreme poster Ardiloso made the thread dedicated to YZB’s hacks back in July 2020.

The thread was necessary because the place YZB typically posts the hacks is a forum named Chinaemu that won’t let users download anything until a lot of hoops are jumped through.

“Since the downloads at Chinaemu are behind some kind of forum currency you earn engaging in there, I’m not able to download the things anymore,” Ardiloso said, “but once more I bothered YZB and he once again shared the game with me.”

Ardiloso added: “YZB said he shares at Chinaemu because he is Chinese and don’t know any western places he can share the Saturn hacks. So I did the logical thing and invited him to SegaXtreme. Let’s see if he shows up.”

This is the first YZB hack that Ardiloso has posted in two years. Others hacks posted back in 2020 include Dracula X (aka Castlevania: Symphony of the Night), Ultraman, King of Fighters ’95, King of Fighters ’96 and Samurai Spirits RPG.

Check the thread’s original post for details on what the hacker did to each of those games.

The post says all of them require an Action Replay cartridge and do not work with official Sega 4 MB carts, although Emily’s tests confirmed that the KoF ’97 hack as well as the Dracula X one do indeed work with an official cart while the others do not.

Edit to the above story:

Emily and Derek (aka Ateam) did some testing with the King of Fighters ’97 hack today, comparing its performance to the unhacked retail release. They found that the hack is less useful than it initially seemed.

While the initial loading time to bring up the title screen almost halved in the hacked version — 8 seconds vs. 15 seconds — the loading times before a stage and between rounds during a match are an identical 5 seconds.

Not only that, but the initial load time’s advantage is mitigated by the extra screens that YZB added in the hack. The screens cannot be skipped and result in making it much slower to start up the game when compared with the retail release.

Additionally, the characters other than Orochi that are unlocked in the hack can be unlocked with a cheat code in the retail release. Doing so does not result in the graphical glitches that are seen in the YZB hack.

The hack does enable playing with Orochi — something not possible outside of practice mode in the retail version — and that might be the cause of the graphical glitches. So that’s one bit of functionality that this hack adds, at least, plus unlocking endings without needing to modify a save file or complete the game.