The King of Fighters: Battle de Paradise

The King of Fighters: Battle de Paradise
Developer: SNK Publisher: SNK Platform: Neo Geo Pocket Color Released in JP: 2000 This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden sound test.

Debug Menu

An unreferenced menu is present, but is missing setup subroutines, such as loading the font. This also leads to some graphical glitches, such as the current selected entry's cursor not rendering.

At 0x200800 there's a table of pointers to subroutines. We can replace an entry that is executed after starting a new game and entering your character's name, which already loads the required font for the debug menu. Apply the following patch:

0x810 = 51 7c 20

Event

Loads various in-game events. Also includes a barebones but functional sound test:

Game Start

N/A (Loads invalid data)

Send Striker

These entries expect lowercase letters to immediately follow uppercase letters in memory. However, the font likely changed during development, and uppercase letters are instead followed by Hiragana and Katakana characters. If we copy 0x300 bytes from file offset 0xb1018 to 0xb0618, we have the lowercase letters at their expected memory offsets:

Receive AP

This is likely a simplified test for the Neo Geo Pocket/Dreamcast Setsuzoku Cable accessory. A more featureful test is present but unreferenced by the debug menu. We can replace the subroutine for entry EVENT with the following patch (in addition to the one for the debug menu):

0x85ae = e1 7e

If this accessory isn't emulated, then when receiving data, status is WAITING, while attempting to send data leads to status TIMEOUT:

Debug DIP

Another unreferenced subroutine exists that includes a second line to configure, but only the first line is actually updated. We can replace the subroutine for entry EVENT with the following patch (in addition to the one for the debug menu):

0x85ae = 00 7c

Yamauchi

Input test. Holding any of the ABCD buttons fills the pattern of zeros with the button's mask value. The longer you hold, more zeros get filled. After some time passes, the values get cleared. The bottom values count Up/Down button presses.

Ito

N/A

Shibata

N/A

Watanabe

N/A