Pilotwings

Pilotwings
Developer: Nintendo EAD Publisher: Nintendo Platform: SNES Released in JP: December 21, 1990 Released in US: August 13, 1991 Released in EU: January 21, 1993 This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden level select. This game has a development article This game has a prerelease article

To do: Stuff from the July 2020 Nintendo leaks.

Pilotwings lets you fly a biplane, ride a rocket belt, sky dive, and then fail miserably at hang gliding, all in glorious Mode 7.

Sub-Pages

Development Info

Prerelease Info

Debugging Functions

A number of debugging functions can be enabled by replacing the eight bytes at 0xFFF8-0xFFFF in the ROM with FF, or by enabling the below Game Genie codes:

EEEE-34D5
EEEE-3405
EEEE-3465
EEEE-34A5
EEEE-37D5
EEEE-3705
EEEE-3765
EEEE-37A5

Level Select

At the craft selection screen, press X to make a number 0 appear at the bottom of the screen. Press L or R to toggle the level and Start to choose your craft and begin the level. Note that this will also allow you to select craft(s) that are normally unavailable on each level, though doing so doesn't appear to have any adverse effects on the game.

Instant Failure

Hold Select and press X during gameplay.

Debug Display

Hold Select and press Y during gameplay to add a debug display below the timer. There are seven displays total, and to toggle between them hold Select and press Y.

To do: Figure out what each display, well, displays.

"Bribe" the Instructor

When the instructor comments on your performance, press Select to get an extra 100 points. The L and R buttons let you select a point amount.

Jet Heli

With the Debugging function or Pro Action Replay (PAR) codes 7E00B008 7E0CAB04, the jet heli can be used in the lesson. The instructor states that the player must fly through the two rings. The controls are identical, but the game crashes upon attempting to load the score total screen.

The map crashes the player in the water, and the game over screen will always show 0 points.

However, with the Pro Action Replay (PAR) code 7E00D007 (which changes the tileset), the helicopter can be used instead. Though the map is glitchy, the player can win this mission with 0 points.

As a side note, the helicopter can be seen in an old magazine scan of Dragonfly, an early version of Pilotwings.

Revisional Differences

While the ROM code itself was never revised, the microcode in the DSP1 addon chip received a revision which altered behavior of its math processing to fix bugs and be more accurate. Most of the game is unaffected by this change, but the demo playback glitches. In particular, the plane demo ends first in the plane crashing, then the demo crashing afterwards glitching back to the title screen.