What does Gebockers mean? I asked a robot and got this back:
ゲボッカーズ (Gebockers) is a Japanese word that is derived from “ゲボッ” (gebo), which is used to represent the sound of vomiting.
…is that right? I asked some humans and the consensus was “What? No, it can’t mean that.” So I have no idea.
Gebockers is not particularly well-known, though it’s notable for being one of the handful of games to support the Taisen cable. If you had a friend who could lug their Saturn, television, and copy of the game to your house, you could play it together.
I found some cheat codes for this game that haven’t been reported before. I also developed a patch for a prerelease auto demo that makes it playable. Details are below!
Codes for the main game
This Japanese cheat archive has lots of stuff that’s unknown to the Anglophone Internet. For example, I thought I discovered the level select for the Japanese version of Bug!, but it was on that site all along.
For Gebockers, that site says:
Open the mode select screen and enter Left, Right, Left, Right, X, Y, Z. When “BOSS SELECT” is displayed, you can play as the Big Eye boss.
And it’s right:
It also says:
Open the mode select screen and press X, Y, and Z simultaneously 10 times. When “COMMAND DISP” is displayed on the screen, start the game in “STORY MODE”.
This one’s not right — the real code, from the button list at 0603d53e, is:
X, X, Y, Y, Z, Z
What other button sequences does the game recognize? I found this one:
L, L, R, R, Z, Y, X, Z, Y, XIt displays the version number, which is not terribly exciting.
And I found another:
Up, Up, Down, Up, Down,
Left, Right, Left, Right,
L, R, L, R,
X, Y, Z, X, Y, ZThis one is actually cool: it adds a DEBUG OPTION item to the options screen.
Debug Disp adds position information to the screen during gameplay:
CD-DA Test and EFT Test Bank are for testing background music and sound effects. Frame / Sec adjusts the frame rate.
Mind Ball controls the special move gauge – setting it to ALWAYS MAX is handy.
Setting Computer to OFF disables CPU control of your opponent in single player mode.
I’m not sure what COM Boss Select does, but if you figure it out, leave a comment!
The prototype demo
What caught my eye about Gebockers was the fact that it had a trial disc billed as an “auto demo.” Auto demos run in the game engine, which means they have to include game code. And that often means that they can be controlled.
The Gebockers auto demo has files for all of the characters and levels. They’re dated 1995-12-01, more than a month before the final version’s build date (1996-01-11). So the demo is based on a late prototype build.
Normally you see the opening movie, some in-engine gameplay, and character profiles in a loop.
The first function executed by the game’s initialization code lives at 060245f4 in memory. Simplifying greatly, its logic looks like this:
DEMO_NEEDED = True
while True:
play_opening_movie()
while DEMO_NEEDED:
play_auto_demo()
play_character_profiles()
do_normal_game_stuff()If we break out of the inner while loop, the mode select screen pops right up. Neat!
What’s different? A few things seem unfinished — for example, the mode select screen is missing its banner. The cheat codes aren’t implemented, but debug options can be enabled with memory hacking.
These patches skip the infinite demo loop and enable the cheat modes:
06024632 0009 # Skip the opening movie
06024636 e001 # Break out of the demo loop
06014af2 0565 # Enable debug mode
06014af8 0565 # Enable boss select
06014afe 0565 # Enable command displayAfter patching, you do still get the “coming soon” screen from the demo when you finish the campaign.
Outro
To play the auto demo, get the patch from SegaXtreme.
For more Under the Microscope, see the archive here at SHIRO!. And for even more retro game reverse engineering, see my blog.
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