Under the Microscope: Battle Arena Toshinden URA

In last week’s edition, I came up with a few new cheat codes for Battle Arena Toshinden Remix. The question naturally arises: what about Battle Arena Toshinden URA, the other Saturn Toshinden game? Is there anything left to be discovered in it?

Yes! I found four:

• One lets you control the movement of the title screen’s background.
• Another lets you stretch and warp the game’s FMVs.
• A third is broken, but a memory patch lets us see that it would make the “Press Start” text spin.
• A fourth nullifies the effect of one of the already-known codes.

Details are below…

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Cheat code hunting

Several codes have already been reported for URA — Sega Retro has a nice list. Let’s start by examining how those work. The first one is:

Play as boss characters: On the title screen, when the “Press Start Button” text is displayed, press A, B, Z, X, Y, C.

When you put in that code, the buffer at 0607015c (NTSC-U version) gets updated with numeric representations of your button presses. A is 0x0400, B is 0x0100, Z is 0x0010, Y is 0x0020, and C is 0x0200.

The function at 06017504 reads this input buffer and compares it to the array at 06057eea. If it matches, the function updates the value at 06057ee4. This value is a 32-bit field of bit flags. The flags indicate whether a certain cheat effect is activated.

The array for the “Play as boss characters” code is stored next to the arrays for all of the other button codes. Here are the ones that match up with the well-known cheats for this game:

• Enable easy secret moves: A, Z, C, X, B, Y.
• Play as hidden characters: A, Y, C, X, B, Z.
• URA Options 2: A, X, Y, Z, C, B.
• URA mode: A, B, C, C, C, X, Y, Z, Z, Z.

But there are more! Here’s one that doesn’t appear on English-sites: A, X, B, Y, C, Z, L, R. This one allows you to control the title screen’s background with the D-pad and the face buttons:

You can find this on some Japanese sites. But this one appears to be new in any language: A, B, X, Y, Z, C, L, R, Left, Right. This allows you to manipulate videos that play with the D-pad and face buttons:

There’s another special effect, but it’s broken. Its code is A, A. But the function that tracks button history resets the input buffer each time A is pressed (notice how all the codes above start with A), so this one can never actually be activated.

  button_1 = get_input_01(0);
  button_2 = button_1 & 0xfff8;
  if (button_2 != 0) {
    all_codes_2_ = &all_code_buttons_01a;
    /* Reset on A or Up */
    if ((button_2 == 0x400) || (button_2 == 0x1000)) {
      input_counter_01 = 0;
      memset(&button_history_01,0xff,0x20);
    }

A memory edit to change the second button to R makes it work, however:

06057efe 0080 # R's hex pattern

It makes the Press Start button text spin!

One more oddball code that doesn’t seem to have published before: A, B, C, X, Y, Z undoes the “Enable easy secret moves” code’s effect.

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Outro

I know what you’re thinking: what about the PlayStation Toshinden games? Well, I checked them for effects like this, and didn’t find anything analogous that hasn’t already been documented.

But don’t worry — there are many more secrets still waiting to be discovered. Check back here next week for another one from my Saturn files, or see my Substack blog for the things I’m finding in games for other systems.