Here’s an excerpt from the August 1997 issue of Ultra Game Players :

Finally, THQ, who was originally going to publish several PlayStation conversions of Psygnosis’ games, has cancelled those efforts in the last few weeks. Among the titles that were slated to be brought to the Satun were: Wipeout XL , Destruction Derby XL, Krazy Ivan , Assault Rigs , Discworld , Sentient , and Tenka .

Some of those games were published for the Saturn, but not in the U.S. Missing out on Wipeout XL (a.k.a. Wipeout 2097 ) was a bummer, since the Saturn version is pretty good. But I think U.S. Saturn owners dodged a bullet with Krazy Ivan — the port is really rough.

Krazy Ivan ’s draw distance and frame rate aren’t great on the PlayStation, but it at least looks OK in motion. The Saturn version generally doesn’t — it’s really visually unappealing, and the draw distance is so bad that you often can’t tell which enemies are shooting at you.

Both versions have some hidden secrets, however! Below are details on how to access cheat menus that make playing a bit easier.

The cheat menu

This version of Krazy Ivan has a cheat menu that you can enable from the mode select screen. Enter this button sequence quickly:

Y, A, Z, Z, L+R

Left: The mode select screen, where you enter the code. Right: The cheat menu.

The cheat menu will pop right up. Its items do more or less what you would expect:

• LEVEL : changes your starting level.
• AMMO : set it to unlimited to never run out.
• WEAPONS : full gives you all of the available ones.
• HEALTH : lets you be comes invincible.

Some technical details

When I’m cheat code hunting, I usually start by identifying where in memory a game stores input in memory. Then I set a read breakpoint in the emulator for the memory addresses that change when you press a button.

For Krazy Ivan , this process led me to some code that checks your button presses against a fixed sequence. There’s a counter (at 06079410 ) that keeps track of how many correct button presses you’ve made. It also serves as an index to an array of jump targets. The code at each target checks for the next button. The last one enables the cheat menu.

Here’s how Ghidra’s decompiler renders the logic (my labels are added):

Outro

For previous coverage of long lost Saturn cheat codes, see my archive here at SHIRO!. And for more retro game reverse engineering (including a cheat menu code for the PlayStation version of Krazy Ivan ), see my Rings of Saturn blog on Substack.

	Bo Bayles
		Rings of Saturn: 32bits.substack.com