rave.N11 Feb 2016
Who "mispells" the name of their own game on the title screen, Ian Copeland does, and I don't mean the J that looks like an I in "NINIA", I mean it says "NINJA COMMAMDO" in the scroll bar. This thing is neato and fun but crazy hard, we should get 11 lives like in "Cavernia" (also by Zeppelin Games) but here we get 3 over-quick lives instead.
This is a Platformer meets "Joust" (Williams' Arcade), you kill enemies by jumping on top of them and they kill you if you're too low. You die if you fall to the lowest level, analogous to the lava pit/monster hand in Joust. There's a bug in which instead of being reset to safe ground after dying, your next man can start in midair and all remaining men die uncontrollably. No better argument for unlimited lives cheat. There's 8 levels you'd never see otherwise. And if you win? You get the word "CONGRATULATIONS", a prize worth nothing. The kind of prize one might expect the game to begin by telling you "GOOD LUCK"...
CHEAT MODE unlimited lives, cassette image - change two bytes at cassette image offsets $8AEF, $8AF0 from initially $"C6 6B" to become $"A5 8C" .
I dropped out of the Atari scene from 1989 to 2015, so everything made then is new to me now (how about "Pondering About Max's" ?). I developed this cheat myself, so first I made a DOS file version of the cassette which is straightforward. The first $180 bytes are a cassette loader to be discarded, then the remaining $B580 bytes are the game program which needs addresses supplied, it uses addresses $0600 thru $BB7F and runs at address $8190, can be reset there too, so the 12 bytes added to the end of file are $"0C 00 0D 00 90 81 E0 02 E1 02 90 81", this file loads and resets correctly in emulation but would have trouble starting up from most DOS menus, doesn't bother me. BTW a file version is easier to correct the spelling of COMMAMDO.
1 / 3