so i've decided to start hacking at RoboWarrior again. i've cataloged MUCH more data in the rom (this time around i'm actually learning 6502 asm )

during cataloging i noticed an odd string that i'd never actually seen in-game, despite having played it through several times: "theme song" at 0x1a993.... so i fired up the debugger, and stepped around manually until i found a routine that accessed this address in ram (the routine starts at 0x1a973). this routine immediately BEQs  to an RTS because A=0. i wondered what would happen if it didn't branch so i wrote 1 to 2F8 in ram and froze it, then reset. to my suprise, the normal title screen menu now had a new entry... "theme song". i'll be honest, i almost shit my pants when i saw it and found that i could actually arrow down to it and select it.

selecting it jumps into a credits-esque slideshow of jibberish with the level 1 theme song playing; it's only jibberish in RoboWarrior, if you do the same with a Bomberking rom it actually shows as japanese  (at least i think it's japanese  \ ). it scrolls through 9 screens of text (repeats over and over) with the 8th screen including an english tidbit: "Go for break out, Go for breakout". if anyone can interpret the rest and fill me in, that'd be great

anyhow, i just thought i would share my findings with the community. i'm pretty amazed that i was able to find it, but i'm not sure what it's good for or how to trigger it without cheating

if anyone knows anything about this, feel free to elaborate...

You should submit your find to The Cutting Room Floor.

Reminds me of the "Zanki Attack" in Recca; What tipped me off to its existence was that the text string was there for it immediatly following the standard game modes, but it looked like the code to increment the memory address related to what game mode to load was removed; There was a small section of free space immediately following it (Where this code was at originally?), which is where I wrote the new routines to enable it.

(Hacking the PPU routine to make the game actually draw "Zanki Attack" was another matter altogether; there was no free space in the immediate vicinity of the routines that drew "Normal Game", etc, so I JMPed to the aforementioned free space and wrote a new routine there)