[jazzy jazz music]
[floppy drive sounds]
Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware!
Where we're taking a look at hardware and software
that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete.
And this time around we've got this right here
the PC Action Replay from Datel
for MS-DOS-based PCs from the early 90s.
And yeah, this is a little different
than the one I covered before
that was just like a little parallel board thingy
and some software for Windows 95
this is not that.
This is an actual straight up ISA Card
that plugs into your computer
and manipulates things on a little deeper level
and allows you to cheat at your games
and get some save states and slow motion
and all sorts of other little things
can be manipulated using a combination of the card
and this weird little mouse-looking thing
with buttons and switches and stuff.
Yeah, what in the world.
Let's take a look at it!
So, this is The Ultimate Game Buster
the Datel PC Action Replay from late 1993
one of the original models that sold for 70 pounds
in the UK or $90 in the US.
It's an 8-bit ISA Card paired with a little breakout box
they called the Freezer Controller.
Huge thanks to Brandon for loaning me this one
for Oddware because these things have become
exceptionally hard to find
relative to its later console counterparts
or even compared to the latest PC Action Replay devices
like the one I previously covered on LGR Oddware.
But that was a glorified trainer program
with a copy protection dongle
you plugged into a parallel port
whereas this earlier model
is a fully fledged PC expansion card
for systems running at minimum
a 286 processor in MS-DOS version 3.2.
More Energy, More Levels, More Power, More Lives!
Action Replay gives you the power
to bust your games wide open!
Just imagine the power to freeze
any program and take total control!
Yeah, that certainly would be a nice change of pace
compared to the other PC models I've tried
those didn't exactly grant me
phenomenal game busting powers
so much as they flat-out didn't work.
But anyway, dude!
If this does what it says it does
like generate infinite cheats,
take screenshots, freeze gameplay,
enable slow motion, monitor memory contents
and scan for viruses in real time,
that'd be pretty fantastic.
If anything, the fact that Datel Electronics themselves
advertised it so heavily back in the day,
seems to imply a certain high level of confidence
in the product, more so
than the crappy parallel port models.
This Action Replay received several board revisions,
software updates, box art changes
and price drops over the years
but the core functionality remained the same:
provide infinite cheat codes through software
and freeze games in place using the paddle.
That latter feature is one
that I find highly intriguing
since the way it's described makes it sound
like a kind of save state function
that you normally see on emulators.
Yet this is an ISA card for MS-DOS PCs
so having that kind of functionality
through a hardware add-on is wildly amusing
assuming it actually works.
Inside the box you get the Action Replay software
on a 3 1/2 inch double-density diskette
I don't know the exact version of the software
but the files are dated to December of 1993.
Then there's the freezer controller,
which looks kinda like a tiny serial mouse
minus the ball underneath.
The orange button is for activating
the Action Replay software itself,
allowing you to do things like enter cheats
and freeze whatever's in memory
and this little switch is for activating slow motion.
It connects to the Action Replay card
using what appears to be
a nine pin serial interface
or at least it's the same kind of
D-sub connector on the end.
However Datel repeatedly warned users
not to plug serial devices into the card
or plug the freezer into serial, so, yeah.
As for the card itself,
it's a neat little 8-bit ISA card
with a handful of Programmable Array Logic chips,
some static RAM, PLCC socketed ROM chip,
along with a pin header and set of DIP switches
for the Action Replay's ROM address I/O port
and IRQ settings.
Finally there's an impressive
50-page spiral-bound instruction manual
something that reviewers at the time criticized
for being perhaps a bit too technical
to the point of being confusing
and yeah, I mean, this gets intense.
Even the "quick installation and setup" section
consists of seven pages packed with text
and it only gets more convoluted from there
with detailed appendices and things like
hexadecimal notation and the basics
of 20-bit memory addressing.
Even the Q&A troubleshooting section
is direct and to the point with answers like
You are making a mistake, if you give the trainer
one wrong piece of information you could do
a thousand passes and you would
still not find the right code.
Welp, that's promising.
On that note, let's get the Ultimate Game Buster installed
and for that we'll be using
the venerable LGR Woodgrain 486.
Just gonna drop it into a free ISA slot
and that's about it
as I've already set the I/O port
and IRQ address on the card
so they won't conflict with other devices
then it is just a matter of plugging in the freezer paddle
again keeping in mind to plug it into the 9-pin port
and not the serial port by accident.
And, yeah, that's about it.
Time to freeze and cheat our way
to MS-DOS gaming victory.
All right, now that we've got the thing installed
in the Woodgrain 486 it's just a matter of
getting the software put on the thing
through the floppy disk
and that is incredibly simple,
just a setup program that guides you through things
mostly just making sure that it can see
where the card is, where your mouse is,
and, you know, addresses and things like that.
Yeah, as long as nothing is conflicting,
and it knows where to put stuff
on AUTOEXEC.BAT, you're ready to start cheatin'.
And once the setup was configured
and everything's installed, we restart it
and it loads the action replay COM file here
the control program, it loads it in the memory
as a terminate-and-stay-resident piece of software
so it's always running in the background
you can see there all the settings
that it got from the setup program
and now we can go into the Action Replay folder
and we can look at what's in here.
So it comes with a bunch of different things,
a bunch of pre-configured files
and the COM file itself
and all we have to do now is just load a game
and start messing around with
our little thingy here. [chuckle of silliness]
So it comes with this program here PCMAN
And uh [laughs] this is not the PCMAN I was expecting
it is a Pacman clone, but it's not the older one
it is some other shareware game I'd never heard of
but yeah, anyway, it mentions in the manual
how to figure out this freezing stuff
using PCMAN here as an example.
So yeah, it's this, by Simon Constable.
Intriguing.
Doesn't appear to have any sound,
but yeah, it is just a Pacman game
and so as an example of what we can do
with this little freezer button,
let's just press it in a spot here
press the button, doink!
And it takes us over into the Action Replay menu here.
Really it's just a command line
and you can type in all sorts of things
it's just way more advanced
than the other PC Action Replays already
I mean look at all this stuff.
But yeah, we can go ahead and enter the trainer
and this is pretty awesome actually.
So we can select the trainer type
we can enter some parameters if we already know them
or we can load a parameter table.
It does actually come with some already,
we're not gonna do that though.
I'm just gonna show you how
we can run a trainer, like create our own parameters.
So the trainer type, there's really only one that it can do
through this particular part of the program,
lives or countable value.
So entering a start value.
This is the part of the memory
that we're gonna be looking for
so right now in the game we have three lives
so we're just gonna type in three
and it's gonna scan the current memory
and see if it finds anything in the program
that we froze using the little thingy here.
It found 4,882 possibilities and using this function
we can just look at the first 10
but this is useless, I mean
there's way too many possibilities.
4,882, man.
So we need to narrow that down.
So we can exit back to the frozen program
and since we're looking to mess with lives
let's just lose one really quick
so that takes us down to just two lives
so there's one and then one you don't see
'cause you get yeah like an extra.
So we got two lives left.
Let's go and park our little man over here,
press the button again,
freeze it, and we're back to the trainer
[chuckling of endearment] I love this process.
So the original value is three, now we have two
and it found one location.
That went from three to two since we originally froze it
and there you go, we've got just the one.
This is the Action Replay parameter, very similar
to like where you'd see in a GameShark code.
So this is the code and the address
and now it knows that
so let's go to enter parameters
and then press "insert"
and that inserts the code that we just found
created by looking at the memory
and having the program compare what it knows
that's it.
So we can go back to the frozen program.
And now, we should never be able to lose our lives
so yeah, look, it just goes right back
to the full lives.
Lose another one, goes right back.
[laughs]
So we just created the infinite lives cheat
for this PCMAN game
and I can see why they included it
because it is, as you can see,
very simple to narrow things down.
[laughs]
and that's all, man, I mean this is,
that's what this does.
In theory this is what the other Action Replays
were supposed to be doing,
but it just couldn't find the memory addresses
for whatever reason.
But yeah, I mean look at that,
we can lose all the lives we want, we never will.
It's just gonna keep on looping
so you can play this game forever.
But let's not do that,
let's go into some of my other games
that I have on here,
and we can play some Duke Nukum 1
and see if maybe we can, I dunno,
do the same thing.
Here's Duke Nukum, the first one.
Spelt with a U, as it was for a time
due to potential copyright issues.
So yeah, just go into the game here,
still have time to watch Oprah.
And there we go.
So at the moment, we've got eight bars of health
because we go full-health, baby,
so let's just, I dunno, go into the trainer,
doink
and we can do this, select the trainer type
we'll do the same thing we we're doing with PCMAN
but we're gonna be looking for eight,
'cause we get eight bars of health.
And it will scan the memory
and let's see what we find.
8,357 possibilities, ergh.
Yeah. So let's exit to the program again
and let us lose a life, or a health.
Oh, that kinda hurt.
So that's that, we're down to seven,
doink
now we're gonna look for seven.
And it found one.
Wow, that was easier than I thought.
Huh, okay.
So we've got literally just the one location
address, parameter, whatever,
so there's that and that,
awesome,
go in here and insert,
dink, dink,
and this should be it, I guess.
Now, probably have infinite health?
[game bleeps]
[laugh of satisfaction] We do!
Dude, that's so cool!
Ah dude, that works way better than I thought it would.
Holy crap.
[PC speaker beeping]
That's interesting, so it's gonna keep it as seven
no matter what.
I'm assuming there's a way to modify that parameter
so you can keep it at eight no matter what,
but whatever, the effect is the same.
So if I get more health and then,
yeah, then it just goes right back to seven.
I dunno, lucky number seven,
always got seven health no matter what.
[game beeps]
That's pretty darn cool man.
So I can just stand on these spikes forever.
So, okay, so we can only enter two digits at once
that kind of limits things,
we can't necessarily alter like the score
if we just go out of here
we can maybe just look at some other things
let's see, what can we do here?
We can also... "MM", that's just monitor.
Well, that doesn't do anything.
[keys clack]
Memory monitor on, okay.
So you have to know the specific memory address
[laughs] I see, what, okay.
I can do this, on the other hand.
Dump standard EGA/VGA screens to disk.
Let's just do...
There you go.
I'm assuming it's gonna save this screen.
All right, well let's get outta here and let's try it.
[startup chime]
Hey.
PCX, there it is,
and there it is, that is really cool.
All right, next order of business,
how 'bout we try out one of the cheat settings
that it came with because I mean it's got a lot.
In fact the Read Me in here
set a program here we can look at what it does come with
Legend, Gods, Magic Pockets?
Prince of Persia, Whizz Kid, Pinball Dreams,
Unlimited Balls.
Crazy Cars Three, Star Control Two,
Frontier Elite 2, Ooh.
And PCMAN which we've already tried
oh let's see, it does say it does work with Windows
by running it in standard mode, huh.
Okay, so we got Pinball Dreams going here,
let's try out one of these configuration
cheat files that it actually came with.
So that is the parameter that it has for Unlimited Balls.
Let's try that.
[keys clack]
All right, we've got one ball still of course,
and let's just get a bit of points
and see what happens.
[arcade music]
Okay [laughs]
I didn't mean to do that badly, but that works.
All right we should still have one ball left
if the cheat was working, ah we do!
Nice!
Hey dude, this action replay just straight out
does the job.
That's awesome.
At least with the games I'm trying it with so far
but I mean again, we went like 100% better
than we did with those other Action Replays
GameSharks and stuff in the past for PC.
let's try Gods.
[boppy beepy music]
I just like this music [laughs].
So let's get into the game, man,
I haven't played this for years
in fact I haven't played the DOS version much at all.
Mostly played this on Amiga.
And yeah we have to do this every time
in terms of telling it where the table is
Because it's just gonna be looking in the directory
that the game is playing from
but yeah, should just be "Gods".
Yeah there we go.
So I don't know which one's which,
let's have 'em all turned on, whatever.
So, cool.
It should be there.
And now in theory, we should be an invincible god.
Which is great.
[gentle explosion]
Guess I shouldn't...
Okay well I am still getting hurt,
and I lost a life [laugh].
Let's try again.
Okay, yep, I am dying.
I was thinking maybe it'll just let me live,
no, it will not.
Even after hitting no lives left, huh.
Well what the crap is that? [laughs]
it is definitely affecting something wrong there
that high score table was borked.
All right, so something else I wanted to try on here
is the SlowMo, or slow motion option
which is this little switch on here
it's also configurable by going in to the command thing
but I've just got the game Vet running here,
and this runs way too fast on a 66 Megahertz 46
really anything faster than like a 16 Megahertz 386.
So just shift into first.
Oh my goodness, yeah it's ridiculous.
So if we engage the slow motion,
[engine drones in slow motion]
Ah, turn off the sound.
Yeah, ah, I don't think this is doing anything.
Hmm, maybe the system's just too fast
for it to do anything on that kinda...
One percent, wait, one percent slowdown
or one percent of the speed?
[keys clack]
that's oddly stated.
99%, so that should be extremely slow
if that is how it works.
Okay, that's definitely doing something
so it's backwards from like how it is
using the program SlowMo or MoSlow in DOS
and it's not working very well
in fact it's just very choppy
may as well just use the turbo buttons
on the computer, yeah see here is turbo engaged
on the 46, like the actual hardware itself
[laughs] this is what it should be doing
it is without turbo,
and now full speed again, running over nuns,
and then back on turbo, without turbo,
yeah, the actual turbo switch,
using something else makes more sense
than the little switch on here, so.
Okay well, that doesn't work very great
but it does work [laughs].
How 'bout this virus scan, what the hell is that...
Okay, it's an actual virus scanner.
Why not?
Value for your money I s'pose,
don't know what it's using
for it's database of viruses, but cool.
Here's one I was wanting to try,
freezing the memory, that's freeze
the entire contents of memory to disk.
Kinda sounds like a save state type of thing
so looks like we can use this to just save it to a file.
Intriguing.
So I've got Crystal Caves running in the background here
let's see if it'll do that.
So this is what I have running in Crystal Caves right here
just the very beginning of the first level,
the first episode.
Well, first level, depending on which level you choose
but first one I normally choose.
And we'll just shoot the air and die.
[laughs]
Pouf, I am dead.
So yeah, lost a life, totally dead.
So let's see if we can un-freeze that
and just go right back to where we were.
I believe that's how this works.
So yeah, "unfrz cc"
Actually it'll be C-A replay
CC something, then this,
unfreezing from this
will overwrite the current contents of RAM, yes.
Go ahead, whoa.
[laughs] How scary.
Oh, dude!
Totally works!
Ah, that is rad, you got save states
[laughs] on a real DOS computer.
Dude, that is cool, ah that is cool.
This device is so cool!
Dude, I love the fact that this actually works
exactly what you want from Oddware,
it is odd, and it's obscure,
and obsolete and all these things,
but man, it works and it is actually functional
for something that is 30 years old,
25 years old, whatever, you know, old hardware for PCs.
[keys clack]
Ah, look at all these things, yeah, dude,
there's just so much you can do with this card,
wow, yeah, this is great.
I am so glad we got to experience this
especially with how badly the other Action Replays
ended up working out, oh man.
Well, that's about it for the Ultimate Game Buster here
at least for this video, yeah this is mighty impressive,
this PC Action Replay works so much better than
the other PC Action Replay that I looked at before,
I mean, that didn't have this kind of a hardware solution
it had a parallel port dongle, but that was really just
for copy protection as far as I could tell
and the software wasn't nearly as straightforward
as the trainer this comes with
and this just gives you way more options
in terms of generating your own cheats
and sniffing through memory
and messing around with dumping what's in the memory
and opening it back up again,
like there's so many things
that you could potentially do with this
and that is just really cool.
So thank you very much again to Brandon
for sending this my way
so I could look at it here with you on LGR Oddware,
maybe I can get another one of these, like for myself
in the future, that'd be really cool
but I'm just happy I got the opportunity
to mess around with this one.
So yeah, thanks for watching.
And if you like this, then why not check out that other one
that I covered in the past, or the GameShark variant
neither one of 'em worked, spoiler alert,
but eh, I tried.
And if you like to see me trying with odd hardware
and software than this is the show for you
and there are new videos of all kinds going up
each week here on LGR and once again,
thank you for watching.