In this edition:

• I break the password encoding scheme for The Crow: City of Angels while looking for cheat codes.
• I don’t find any, but I do find an exploitable bug that gives you (practically) unlimited lives.

Details are below!

Intro

Edge Magazine wrote this about the Saturn version of The Crow: City of Angels :

The indistinct nature of The Crow ‘s animations means that very often, aligning your character with opponents is down to luck. Awful collision detection, repetitive gameplay and the absence of a two player mode make Acclaim’s licence one of the worst Saturn releases to date.

Ouch. The PlayStation version didn’t review any better — IGN said “Leave this one for the crows.” Is there anything interesting about this game?

Yes! These two things intrigued me:

Are there cheat effects in the Saturn version? What’s going on with the PlayStation version’s invincibility cheat? I decided to investigate.

Infinite energy

I used my usual memory snapshot comparison trick (you can do it with a tool like Cheat Engine ) to locate the code responsible for the password screen.

The function at 06031718 (NTSC-U version) is handling input when you’re entering a password. When you choose a letter, that function converts it into a number: A is 2; B is 3; X is 0; Y is 1; everything else is -1.

The bits from each number are shifted and packed into a 20 bit value, with the last letter at the highest bits. Here’s a password for “Level 9” from GameFAQs being converted into its binary representation:

The function at 06031eec validates passwords in their packed form. For valid ones, it extracts four pieces of information: stage, difficulty level, lives, and health.

These values are encoded into the password in a complex way. I gave Claude Opus 4 some decompiled code from Ghidra and asked it to give me a Python equivalent. Then I repeated the process for the PlayStation version.

Using Claude’s Python code as a starting point, I wrote some scripts to generate every possible password and print out the unique ones for each difficulty level that give you maximum health — they are at the bottom of this article as appendices.

None of the Saturn version’s passwords enable special effects the way some of the PlayStation version’s do, alas.

But there’s something interesting about the password checking function: it doesn’t validate things very thoroughly. For example, it will accept passwords for stages beyond 11. The password YAYXAYYAYA is for stage 12, which doesn’t exist. The game doesn’t reject it, but it freezes up on the loading screen when you use it.

The game also accepts passwords that have the number of lives set to 0. When you’re playing the game normally, losing your last life triggers a “game over” sequence. Here’s the relevant logic (in the function at 0603cecc ):

You can see the problem: if the lives variable is at 0, then subtracting 1 from it gives -1. But the game is only checking for the specific value 0, not “any integer below 1.”

So if you enter one of these degenerate passwords, you can play through your 0th life, then your -1st life, then your -2nd life. Lives are stored as a 16 bit value, so you will eventually wrap around to positive numbers, at which point you’ll only have 32,767 lives remaining.

This is actually what’s going on with the “infinite energy” password that’s listed on the cheat sites for PlayStation. Its encoded values are:

• Difficulty level : 1
• Stage number : 3
• Number of lives : 0
• Health : 71

The trick stops working in the last stage because the game helpfully gives you three lives before that stage starts. The relevant logic in the Saturn version is at 06048d60 :

Here are passwords to start the game with effectively unlimited lives:

• Saturn : Y, A, B, X, B, Y, Y, B, A, A
• PlayStation : Triangle, Circle, X, Square, X, Triangle, Triangle, X, Circle, Circle

So there kind of is a cheat effect for the Saturn version!

God mode

The debug mode code for PlayStation enables this information display:

It’s not terribly clear, but the last bit of information is telling you whether God mode is enabled.

There are some scraps of this screen’s code in the Saturn version, but the remnants aren’t hooked up to anything. Here are some of the strings:

I couldn’t get them to display, but from what I can see, God Mode would have been enabled by pressing X on controller 2.

The flag for it does work, even though the menu that was supposed to trigger it doesn’t. You can make yourself invincible with this Action Replay code:

Outro

For more on the PlayStation version of The Crow: City of Angels , see my Rings of Saturn blog . And for many more articles on Saturn game hacking, see my archive here at SHIRO! .

I’ve got more articles in the works! Up next week: Formula Karts Special Edition .

Appendix: Passwords

These passwords start you at the given level with the default number of lives and full health.

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