Bio Menace Debug Mode

[Frenkel]

Two weeks and twelve years ago Bio Menace v1.0 was released.

Anyway I looked inside Bmenace1.exe and I found the strings "Debug keys active!" and "God mode on", "God mode off", "Jump cheat on", "Jump cheat off", "Free items", "Warp to which level".
Is there a way to active these cheats? I did some hex editing and I could get the game to display "Debug keys active!", but I can't make it display "God mode on" etc. I tried every combination of G and another key.

[Tedades]

Cheats are just ON/OFF

BTW. I don't think editing original .exe files is legal, just mentioning it. (found this stuff on google)

go sector 113 offset 61 - 64
change 2B 46 08 to 90 90 90

go sector 118 offset 254 - 257
change FF 0E 08 44 to 90 90 90 90

go sector 113 offset 117 - 120
change FE 0E 0D 44 to 90 90 90 90

go sector 139 offset 468 - 471
change FE 0E ED 43 to 90 90 90 90

[Joe Siegler]

Bio Menace was put out during our "We hate cheat codes" period if I remember right. There were a few others like that, too.

[Rider]

Joe3DR said:
Bio Menace was put out during our "We hate cheat codes" period if I remember right. There were a few others like that, too.

but still you had a super-blaster that ate 1 health, and a temporary invincability trick

[Joe Siegler]

Yeah, but they weren't cheat codes. That was in game stuff.

[TerminX]

Joe3DR said:
our "We hate cheat codes" period

Did that have anything to do with saying Aardwolf?

[jbailey]

If I remember properly, that was a contest related to
wolfenstein3D, but due to hackers creating editors for the game, the contest was called off...

[Joe Siegler]

TerminX said:

Did that have anything to do with saying Aardwolf?

No. Why would it?

[Frenkel]

With the sprite test (Tab+T) in Wolf3D you could see the Aardwolf sign.

[Joe Siegler]

True, but it required a cheat to get at it, and at the time, the prevelance of cheat codes, hacks and the like didn't exist. We genuinely thought it was well hidden. We were wrong.

[Malvineous]

Well, sorry about digging up such an old thread, but:

[Shadow Master]

How did you get that? I've been researching in activating those cheat codes for ages! (without success)

[doomjedi]

I think that if you edit the exe for your own private use only (after buying the original game) - it's quite legal. Who cares which exe you play?

[Shadow Master]

Or by using a patch tool, such as a modified version of CKPatch.

[Malvineous]

Actually no, there's no hex editing involved Of course there was quite a lot of disassembling to figure out the process for activating the cheats, but the procedure will work "out of the box" without any hex editing at all.

Here's a hint to get you thinking: has anyone tried pressing C + O + D before?

[Shadow Master]

Originally Posted by Malvineous

Actually no, there's no hex editing involved Of course there was quite a lot of disassembling to figure out the process for activating the cheats, but the procedure will work "out of the box" without any hex editing at all.

Here's a hint to get you thinking: has anyone tried pressing C + O + D before?

... But why 3DR didn't include this in the readme, etc., now that the game is no longer being sold and they are no longer getting money from it?

[Malvineous]

I'm guessing from Joe's comment earlier that they didn't know these cheats were left in the game - after all, if it was created almost entirely by Jim Norwood, and he didn't tell anyone what the debug keys were, they wouldn't know to include them in any readme files.

[006 3/4]

Originally Posted by Malvineous

Here's a hint to get you thinking: has anyone tried pressing C + O + D before?

COD does nothing.

[Frenkel]

I too found the Debug Mode in Bio Menace. It seems that it only works in the version that is released as freeware. I've tried it on shareware version 1.0 and shareware version 1.1 that I got from Classic DOS Games, but it doesn't work. I don't have version 1.0 of the registered version, so I don't know if it works in that version.

Malvineous, when are you going to publish the code and the key combination to enable the debug mode?

[Malvineous]

Okay, okay, I've had my fun. I checked out the shareware version and indeed the C + O + D key combination has been removed. This means you can't activate the key combination required to enable the debug keys. It's possible to hex-edit the exe to remove this limitation which does allow you to activate the debug keys, but the whole F10 routine has been replaced with a "do nothing" function, so all the "cheat code code" really has been removed from the shareware version.

So, in the registered/now freeware version, this is how you enable the cheats:

• Press C + O + D and you'll be asked to enter in a code.
• The code is 91827.
• You can then press J + I + M + Space to enable debugging keys.
• The standard F10 cheats will now work (F10 + G for God Mode, etc.)

I've put a complete list of all the keys and some more details on the ModdingWiki Bio Menace page.

Have fun!

[Frenkel]

Now let's see if we can get the Tec mode in Duke Nukem 2 or the warp cheat in Monster Bash working .

[DOSGuy]

91-8-27. The date Jim Norwood's first child was born, perhaps?

I'm guessing that this multi-level system was made deliberately difficult because the public wasn't supposed to know about it. Otherwise, 91827 was supposed to be changed before the game was released, but it wasn't because Apogee had decided not to do cheat codes any more.

[Teron]

Originally Posted by Joe Siegler

Bio Menace was put out during our "We hate cheat codes" period if I remember right. There were a few others like that, too..

heh, I remember games like heretic which killed you, when entering cheats from doom...

[Malvineous]

Monster Bash has a warp cheat?! Hmm...

[Frenkel]

Originally Posted by DOSGuy

91-8-27. The date Jim Norwood's first child was born, perhaps?

I thought it was just 987 and 12 interleaved.

Originally Posted by Teron

heh, I remember games like heretic which killed you, when entering cheats from doom...

You can enter the B+A+T cheat from Keen 4 in Wolfenstein 3-D and the G+O+D cheat from Keen 1 in Duke Nukem II, but what it does is not as destructive as entering IDDQD in Heretic.

Originally Posted by Malvineous

Monster Bash has a warp cheat?! Hmm...

Well, the string "{7}Warp. (1-10) ?" appears in the executable.

[Litude]

I wonder why these cheats only work in the freeware and not in the registered version? Did they release a version with the cheat codes enabled later, or did Joe in mistake release a beta of 1.1 that still had these cheats enabled?

[Malvineous]

I don't think anyone has tried it in the registered version, only the shareware version is known not to work. If anyone has a registered version and these cheats don't work, I'd like to get a copy!

[Litude]

I guess it's legal to distribute as the game is freeware, so here's a download link: http://real_hotdog.sitesled.com/Pictures/bmace11.zip (the C+O+D combination does NOT work)

[Malvineous]

Well that's interesting - I only had a quick look, but you're right - the COD cheat has been removed, which means you can't activate the "enable debug" keys. As with the shareware version though, it wouldn't matter anyway, as the F10 processing routine has been removed again. Odd that the text strings still remain in the EXE file though.

I wonder where Joe got the version from that he released as freeware?

[Shadow Master]

From Jim himself, probably. I think that was stated somewhere in the freeware version special readme file.

[Litude]

I couldn't find that part in the readme, and I doubt he would have recieved the files from Jim. You'd expect 3D Realms to atleast archive the latest versions of their games even if their archiving is kinda bad.
Too bad that the files don't have their original modify dates so you cannot see if these exes are newer or older (I guess they're older).

[Joe Siegler]

When I do a freeware release, I generally take the last released registered version and put that out. When I released Alien Carnage a few weeks ago, we had a version that was newer than the last released, because the DOSBox guys helped out and sent along a fix.

The DOSBox guys also did some work in DOSBox itself for Bio Menace, I can't remember if they sent over anything for the game itself or not now.

But as a rule, the freeware releases are the same thing we distributed when we stopped selling the games.

[Qbix]

We didn't send something over for Bio Menace, that would change the game executable(s).

[Joe Siegler]

I know it would change it - I honestly could not remember whether that happened or not. You guys helped out with the Crystal Caves/Secret Agent patches, too.

I've found as my age started with a 4 that certain things move into the permanent haze of the past.

[Qbix]

It's one of the features of life, I recall that time seems to go faster because of things like that.

For BM we created a patch that had to be run inside dosbox (modifying our internal memory) to get it running in 0.63. We had this modified memory in 0.65 , but then another "bug" in the game happened. Hence I made a new patch that modified a different part of the internal memory. In 0.70 both patches are inside dosbox and the game runs without them. (The game executable was never touched)

(BM is (probably) suffering from a broken linked list implementation)

I recall that the CC and SA patches did indeed modify the executables.

[DOSGuy]

They had to. CC and SA were messing up people's system clocks.

[Shadow Master]

Yeah, January 1901?? No way.
But IIRC, that only happened if you ran those from Windows XP directly (VDM), not from DOSBox. Or did you integrate a patch in DOSBox 0.63?

[DOSGuy]

It was fine in DOSBox, which uses a virtual environment to protect the actual system clock.

[Joe Siegler]

Originally Posted by DOSGuy

They had to. CC and SA were messing up people's system clocks.

If I remember right, it was only on XP, though.

Funny thing is, when we posted the patch for CC & SA in October 2005, the y2k date issue would have been active for 5+ years at that point. NOBODY told us (nor did we notice ourselves) until that point. Kind of surprising nobody noticed it until then.

http://www.3drealms.com/news/2005/10...er_titles.html

[Shadow Master]

Although I bet it was MS' fault somewhere in the VDM code...