Under the Microscope: Chill

Eidos planned to publish Chill, a snowboarding / cryptid hunting game, for both PlayStation and Saturn in 1998. But the Saturn version never materialized, leaving Swagman as Eidos’s final Saturn title.

A late prototype build of Chill for Saturn came to light in 2011 — it’s available from Hidden Palace. I decided to check if there was anything hiding in it, and was pleased to find that it does. The PlayStation version also turned out to have a long-unnoticed secret.

See below for:

• An “unlock everything” cheat code for the Saturn version.
• Details on the reverse engineering involved in locating the secrets.
• Some additional hidden debug features in the Saturn version.

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The cheat menu

To unlock the extra tracks and bonus character, enter this sequence at the title screen:

A, B, A, C, A, B, A

If you got it right, you’ll get this cheat screen:

You can use the menu to set the two Tracks to On. They will then be available for selection when you start playing:

You can also set Characters to On to enable the bonus Yeti character:

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Technical details

This one was straightforward! As usual, I compared memory snapshots from before and during button presses to determine where the game stores input. That led me to the function at 060097c4, which runs when you’re at the title screen.

That function has logic like this:

if pressed_button == cheat_sequence[counter]:
    counter += 1
    if counter == 7:
        next_screen_id = 0x1b

The sequence that it refers to is:

060540c4 0000 0004  # A button
060540c8 0000 0001  # B button
060540cc 0000 0004  # A button
060540d0 0000 0002  # C button
060540d4 0000 0004  # A button
060540d8 0000 0001  # B button
060540dc 0000 0004  # A button

The 0x1b return value is screen ID. If you change it to 0x1C, you get a different hidden screen:

I don’t think this one is accessible without hacking. Turning off collision allows you to go out of bounds. The debug display items show some sort of resource meter:

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Outro

For info on how to cheat in the PlayStation version of Chill, see my Rings of Saturn blog on Substack.

And for many more articles about Saturn game reverse engineering, see my archive here at SHIRO!.