Under the microscope: Team Buddies (PlayStation)

According to its back cover, Team Buddies, is an “aggressive battle-action game with some of the foulest language ever heard anywhere.” It was published by Psygnosis for PlayStation in 2000.

This game has a bunch of cheat codes. They activate the usual sort of effects, like invincibility and infinite ammo. Most have been known since the game’s release - the earliest Wayback Machine snapshot of GameWinners.com already had several listed:

How does the game check for these codes? In the NTSC-U version, the function at 800abc44 executes when the game is paused. If you press a controller button while holding L1+L2+R1+R2, that function puts a letter into the buffer at 800bc2ac.

The button-to-letter mapping is:

| Button | Letter |   | Button   | Letter |
|--------|--------|   |----------|--------|
| Up     | E      |   | Triangle | M      |
| Right  | F      |   | Circle   | N      |
| Down   | G      |   | X        | O      |
| Left   | H      |   | Square   | P      |

There’s no apparent technical reason for this mapping. It seems that the developers just used it to obscure the cheat list from players who opened the game’s main binary in a text editor.

After each button press, the contents of the buffer are compared against 22 different strings, each of which corresponds to a cheat code. All of them have been documented before, save for the last one:

NFHFHGGEE

The buffer stores things in reverse chronological order, so we have to reverse this string to map it to a button code. When we do that, we get:

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, Circle

Yes, it’s the Konami code! Enter that sequence while holding L1+L2+R1+R2 at the pause menu, and a new Cheats item will appear on the pause menu.

Fans of this game already knew about this menu - it’s described in the Team Buddies article at The Cutting Room Floor. But till now, the only way to access it was to hack the PlayStation’s memory.

As TCRF’s article notes, this screen is somewhat broken: the final two menu items are invisible, and some of the items don’t actually do anything. Health Cheat and Ammo Cheat do what you would expect, however.

Presumably this is why the code for this menu never got disclosed to gaming magazines - it wasn’t actually finished!

Outro

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back with more retro game reverse engineering articles next week. In the meantime, check out the archive for many more notes on cheat code excavation.