Wow, the action replay is truly a skeleton key! I loved the action replay for ds. It made games play and feel completely different. Infinite master balls in Pokémon, moon jumps in Mario, and godmode in Zelda all come to mind.

I still have one I think, I loved it. This must've been my most ridiculous use-case: My mother was working on the Amiga on a large document for months. I accidently formatted one half of the floppy she used in a C64. I used action replay as follows: redirected output to printer (F2 iirc?), then read out the disk RAW. There were many older copies of the document on the raw disk so we were able to piece the text together for a large part (between the disk errors occurring from the mangled side). And yes, I had to do the touch-typing while my mother dictated the document, from the printout and her notes.

Back in the day i used to love screen capturing with this and using delux paint to play with the sprites :)

When you replace a command with NOP, you have to make sure to insert the correct number of NOPs. What you did at 08:30 only worked by chance, because the SUB command was 6 bytes long, but a NOP is only 2 bytes long. So the remaining four bytes from the SUB command got still interpreted by the CPU as some random code / instruction. Luckily it worked, but you should have put THREE NOPs.

Whenever I see content like this, it makes me wish I was already alive and developing since then. As a modern day programmer, the old stuff from back in the day look so much more interesting and witty!

Not only crack games. This thing helped me to finally get rid of viruses that were spread all over the disks. Together with having all disks generally set to write protected, I was able to stop the virus pandemic that was infesting every Amiga I owned.

Never realized how similar cheat engine is to stuff like this.

My older brother had this cart. I remember him using it to cheat through Shadow Of The Beast. Then I ended up getting one for my Genesis, SNES, then Saturn. The console versions were much easier to find cheats! 🕹

9:12 oh the memories when I thought that all games were coming on these colorful hand written floppies xD Wasn't until mid nineties that I saw an original video game with its box...

3:00 the entire setup looks so much like a picture from my childhood and my first gaming experience. The Amiga, the mouse, the joystick... Only the flat-screen looks a bit out of place here xD

Anyone remembers SoftIce in the good old MS DOS days? Memory resident debugger that allowed you to break out any program at any time, pretty much like the Freeze button of the Action Replay. It was such a great tool, helped me crack a ton of shareware applications/games back in the day.

I remember people were using the action replay on the original PlayStation 1 The version with the AV inputs on the back of the system, the action replay would plug into the back of the PlayStation 1 and allow you to play import games and games burnt onto CD -R CDs without having to mod the system with a mod chip later on another version was released where you would use a boot disk problem is sometimes you could scratch a game by doing the hotswap

I used to work for Datel here in the UK and used to give cheat codes out to gamers on the phone. Fascinating video.

Even in the PS2, GCN, Xbox era the Action Replay hardware was redundant - those machines were capable enough to run cheats in software as a makeshift hypervisor. Modern cheat solutions centre around homebrew for this reason.

Older hardware and the computing world of that era really makes me wish I was born a few decades earlier to experience it for myself

Had no idea Skid Row did stuff for Amiga! Such a talent and I'll never forget the stuff he allowed me to achieve on PC back in the day.

Oh, the Interpol Flashback that wasn't fully cracked 😱

30 years later I finally find out how to use one of these things properly!!

Excellent video. Loved the explanation about the use of the disassembler and assembler.

Speaking of Amiga. Matt Gray's last reformation campaign is now on kickstarter, he remixes both c64 and Amiga tunes. This will be his last one. For those who doesn't know, Matt Gray was the composer of the Last Ninja 2 soundtrack. And his remixes are amazing.

Great Video MVG! This video brings back so many memories! I'm an Aussie that grew up on Sega Master System and SNES. I remember seeing adverts for Action Replay in magazines as a kid and I knew it was some cool cheat device for consoles. My uncle gave me an Amiga with SO MANY games, it was either Amiga 500 or 600, so long ago, can't remember if it had a numpad or not, but it had the extra external 3.5" drive. Every game was a pirate copy with the cracker's splash screen upon boot. My parent's loved a golf game we had on it but they haven't enjoyed any other golf game since! Monkey island was amazing too! Unfortunately my uncle is no longer with us and I wish I knew him better, he may have been a bad-ass pirate or just a resourceful bloke like myself, still an absolute champ in my eyes!

Had one of these (the mk3 specifically on the amiga, but also an earlier variant on the C64, after switching from a Final Cartridge II). Pretty useful for cheating with the poke-finder, but also for ripping mods and stuff.

I've only ever used Action Replay on PS2 when everything was conveniently easy for the user. It's really interesting to see how it works in the background, or how it was used before there was an UI. I wasn't aware that AR could defeat protection as well.

its just like Cheat Engine but more primitive , hella interesting

I've just been bingeing amiga content, as a games platform I've never had. perfect timing for this, thanks MVG 😄

I love your videos on the Commodore and Amiga to death. They're way, way before my time, yet they're so fascinating, and have such rich histories with both the hardware and the tricks developers used, as well as things in various scene communities as well.

Little note about the no-operand (NOP) instruction : it actually is executed by the computer/console and still uses 2 cpu clock cycles, so it's not the same as nothing. Great video btw !

Owned the action repay Mk 6 for the C64, used the backup feature to transfer all the games I had on tape to disk, that along with the fast loader function totally transformed using my C64. I also had numerous microprose games that used the nova loader & had a friend who owned an older version of the cartridge that could transfer nova load games to disk, that again totally transformed playing gunship & other such simulations from microprose. Even dabbled in assembly code using the built in monitor, anyone remember the basic program in the C64 manual to move a balloon with the C64 logo around the screen, I recreated that in machine code, was quite chuffed at the time, I did it referencing a machine language for the absolute beginner book I brought.

The Amiga was my go to computer growing up 🔥

I got a mkIII for my A500 as a Christmas present in '92. I had so much fun with it. Best present ever!

I had tons of fun using the C64 and Amiga versions of the one and only Action Replay. Writing your own trainer, ripping gfx and sprites or even sound modules was a breeze. There also was a version for the Amiga 2000 - a zorro card with a little external box that had the buttons for freezing and slowing down the cpu. Still have those lying around. Great memories.

This is fascinating. Back in the 80s, all we had to use was a hex-editor, and sometimes you could find the section of code to modify, but without trainer tools like this, it was extremely difficult, Usually, we would end up just modifying the high-score list, since that was usually stored as text, and easy to find and modifiy.

I remember using a gameshark module that connected to the back of a PSX with the interface door on the back. I was able to find addresses that contained the number of lives by using the same technique displayed by MVG. The term, "Nuked" also brought back memories of scene groups and their releases that i used to download via news groups, irc xdcc bots, irc servers via serv-u and FTP servers for example. Every once in awhile, i check dalnet,darknet,Efnet servers to see what's left of it. Discord is the new underground chat of today, whereas back in the 2000's it was Mirc.

MVG, at 8:36 you entered just one NOP, which is a single word operand. However, the operand you're replacing (SUBI.B) is a 3-word operand. You need three NOPs.

Thanks for showing this. Now that you mention it, I do remember hearing of the Action Replay when I was a kid, but just in name only. But the bigger one for me was "trainer". I played Roller Coaster Tycoon religiously and I remember reading on forums that if you wanted to do amazing things, you need a trainer. I downloaded a few and went about crazy parks and whatnot. Eventually I ended up just reverting back to vanilla, but in the back of my mind I went "why is it called a trainer?" Now I know. I hadn't thought about trainers since those days, but happy to have learned today.

I actually moved super close to Datel's office recently! I would love to pay them a visit to talk about the history of the Action Replay. Surely people still work there that worked there during the company's prime.

My friends and I used the Trilogic Expert cartridge for the Commodore 64 over the Action Replay. I don't really see the Expert Cartridge mentioned much but it was a GREAT bit of kit, I spent SO much time poking around in the code of games and demos. In fact I was too lazy to use an assembler so I used to do a lot of coding with it too. And yeah, devising cheats exactly like you describe, the Expert had something similar. Good times.

Love how you spent good time in really cleaning the A500. It looks "new"

I still own an original MkIII and my very first amiga that I used to crack all my games back in the day. Brought back a lot of memories. Thank you!!

This is why I love this channel. Man, I miss my Amiga. Those big ass boxes with a little floppy inside

Man, Action Replay is a blast from the past. One of the things it allowed you to do on the OG Xbox was inject save files for games like Mechassault and Splinter Cell in order to softmod your console. I remember cutting open the end of a USB device and soldering it to the controller port of an Xbox controller in order to get my PC to recognize my controller (and by extension, the memory card) so that I could upload save files to it. I also used a Gameshark on my PSOne to play import games since it would bypass the check required. This allowed me to play Dragon Ball Final Bout, Ultimate Battle 22 and Legends. Only later did I realize this also worked to play 'backups' with some versions of Gameshark. I always found the ingenuity of the community super interesting and that community is something I miss today. The xbins and xbox scene efnet IRC channels along with a few other connected irc channels was the last time I really felt part of that scene. MVG was part of that scene as I remember some of his emulator releases showing up during that time. I'd be interested in seeing him revisit some of that history.

As always, a great episode. And as always, left me wanting more haha! Highlight of my late monday nights!

Had this for my Amiga as a 12y old. I used the memory scan to bump up all sorts of values. We also managed to 'pirate' some games by passing the copy protection and then create a memory dump disk effectively allowing to start the game from after the copy protection check. It worked but not always. Got to say it was a great devices even for us kids with limited understanding of how things actually worked in detail back in the day.

I used to love messing with my AR. My biggest find was somehow turning the blood on permanently for Wrestlemania 2000 on the N64. The UK release was censored to our annoyance, so unlocking that was a revelation.

Man your videos are always high quality but I found this one to be super engaging and informative. I love the individual code steps you went through on the old Amiga. Kudos to you for such a good job!

I used to love the Action Replay on Amiga! The ability to freeze the machine and poke around at all memory was so powerful. I used to love finding cheats, ripping graphics, samples and tracker files from games and demo's. One demo, the name I can't recall, would crash after you un-freeze. A type of defence against the Action Replay. I think it compared demo running time against system running time. No games I remember did this.

I loved my days of AR III and the Amiga. Thanks for the memories.

Appreciate the way you make these quite technical videos as accessible as possible, for the complete novice/casual observer. Very interesting, thanks.

Anything to do with Amiga has my vote. Will download and watch this tonight with no adverts but loads of beers with other vids from Dan wood, LGR, nostalgia need, RMC, etc... all the best KZfaq channels

I remember having this for the PS2. Calls back so many memories

I had the Action replay for the C64 first and remember that amazing packaging. The MK III for the Amiga was also amazing. I'm proud that Datel was located in Fenton in Stoke-on-Trent just a stones throw from where I grew up. An awesome time to be alive :) Thanks for this great video.

Man, I remember another kid showing me how to use the Sega Genesis version of the Action Replay to 'find cheats' like this, with infinite lives in Sonic as a demonstration. 😁 (He was also the only other computer nerd I knew at the time, and he had an Amiga...because of course he did, lol)

OMG the thumbnail brought back some memories! I loved ripping mods from games with my MKIII!

Really brings back memories! I had one of these for my Amiga. I remember ripping music from couple of games and adding number of lives like you could see in this video, but could not figure out assembler back then.

awesome video MVG. i learned this stuff on ZSNES's action replay implementation way back in the day. so cool to see the same exact methods here

Wow, trully amazing at how well you are teaching us about this. I always wondered how it was done and this clarifies it. Can't wait to see what you will explain next! This is perhaps similar to how people create patches to turn 4:3 games into 16:9 (or any aspect ratio really) games

I have a fond memory of going to my Amiga dealer in Manhattan in the early 90s and looking over his shoulder while he used XCOPY.

Great video, thanks! Fascinating to know how all this worked having played them as a kid. Excited for the Amiga mini this Friday :)

Xploder was my baby growing up. I met a coder back in the day on the forums and he had developed a special program that could convert action replay to hex and then from hex to xploder, and vice versa. We also discovered a way to get gameshark cheatcodes for NTSC to work on PAL copies of the games. Was super fun growing up in that scene.

My first foray into memory editing was on PC with a DOS program called Game Wizard. It worked similarly but in software. It was a TSR program with a hotkey that would interrupt the game and allow you to search and edit memory and even create tables of memory addresses to reload later. It didn't do the disassembly, though I wouldn't have known how to use it even if it did. I did learn a lot about computer memory and hexadecimal from using it. It was a staple in my mid-90's gaming.

I enjoyed this and takes me back to using mine to bypass the protection of f15 flight eagle (ea). I actually owned it, but it was a simple manual check so within my ability level at the time. I also tried SSI games but failed. If only tutorials like this had been available I’d have got further! There used to be a disk based scene mag with hacking tutorials with a guy who went on about ‘works’. Computers were in many ways more fun back then. Everything is so complicated and abstracted now.

For extra fun there's also the "sysop mode" which allows you to disassemble more memory areas, including the ROM of the cartridge itself.

What you did not mention was the hours of teenage life invested to learn assembly, uncover these and find a way around them. I often enjoyed attempting to crack a game more than I did playing it!

wow that's neat! I did learn (maybe it was even from your video) how these trainers work by looking for changes in specific memory addresses and then looking to see if a certain value has changed. didn't have a PC til the late 90s so I definitely missed out on this era of early PC gaming!

The AR3 cart is also an awesome programming tool for developers. I still use it now extensively to make my games, it's simply an awesome bit of kit.

The Amiga 500 was the first PC I had. Although I never had an Action Replay, this was a good trip down memory lane. Thanks!

I used a Game Shark on my PS1, which was basically the same thing as a pro action replay. I mostly used it to zoom through Resident Evil 3 and I messed around a lot with the Smackdown games. I did so many cool things in the Smackdown games. Those were the days.

This would've been a fun toy back in the day. I bought a load of Amiga hardware and over 1400 disks from a guy on Craigslist and he said he and a friend removed cracktros from games using a special cartridge. I was so excited by the deal I forgot to ask what that cartridge was but it probably was this.

Thanks MVG, it was so informative to learn about the possibilities of the Action Replay. Remember having one myself as a kid, but was only able to figure out the way with using t and ts to add more to a counter. This time it was before the internet so to learn anything about assembler was impossible. I would have loved to try more out with the write to disk and the way you locked the lives. didn't even know it was possible to write a change in the memory

I had action replay mk3 back in 94 when i was 12y old. Added more lives, saved pictures and music with it. As i got older and had already sold my amiga, learned asm i realised how powerful that action replay actually would been if just would known asm back then. Amazing hardware. Picked one from ebay ~6y ago, not selling that action replay or my amiga.

GREAT content - absolutely LOVING this! thank you

This was the video I have been waiting for since I know your channel!

I think the videos from Modern Vintage Gamer are the only ones where I press the like button first and then watch

The Amiga and C64 Action Replay also let you save whatever was in memory at the time to disc, like a save state. Monkey Island 1 didn’t have any protection on the disk and relied purely on the dial a pirate wheel that came with the game, so backed up my friend’s original version, entered the correct answer from his original dial a pirate wheel and immediately saved it to disc. I had to load that disc first and immediately swap it for disc 1 every time I wanted to play it, but it worked :)

At least, the long awaited video I was hoping is here ;)

I gotta say: I freaking love your channel, man!

Wonderful video. Love hearing you talk about these fascinating copy protections on Amiga, etc. Different world from today.

Thanks MVG! Still using my MKIII in my A500. Back in the days I had many fun trying to cheat various aspects of a game. E.g. I filled the spellbook in Bloodwych and so on.

Pretty awesome to see how easy it would have been to make these cheats. I had a GameShark for my N64 back in the day and absolutely loved and was bewildered how some of the effects were achieved. It really got me into programming and learning about hardware.

Very cool! I never saw the Amiga Action Replay, but I did have it on the GameBoy and I had loads of fun with the value search features. It even had a “woolly” search for things like health bars where you wouldn’t necessarily know the value of it, but you could tell the AR to look for a value that had decreased or increased until you eventually homed in on where the game stored the health bar. I remember using it on T2 The Arcade Game on the GameBoy to make a code for infinite health.

Thanks for another great video MVG! I had a similar piece of hardware for the ZX spectrum +3 called a "Multiface 3". IFRC i paid ~£35 for it, and I still consider it the best piece of computer hardware I have ever purchased! I learned so much about machine code / z80 assembler by playing with it, and had loads of fun finding infinite live pokes for my games too (not to mention it's ability to transfer tape games to disk). It was just amazing to me that so much could be achieved with an NMI (non-maskable interrupt) and a simple monitor program). Keep the videos coming!

LOL, yeah I used to have one of those. Sometimes it would be more fun to tinker in the memory monitor than to play games ;). I used it for patching sprites in memory, rip music and samples out of memory so that I could use it for my own tracker modules. Oh, and don't forget the great bitmap ripper feature that let you grab what was currently on screen and save it to disk. So much fun! :) I'm glad that the Action Replays on C64 and Amiga worked the way they did. It was so much fun to just explore the machine and to tinker rather than to just use it to type in cheat codes. Had it worked like the console versions I would probably have stopped using it. Also, to comment on the rest of the video: It's like you visited my childhood. Like... I had those same games that you had there in that floppy disk box, I had the same cracked version of Flashback, I used the same version of X-copy ;). (among others - Action Replay actually had a built-in disk copy tool as well - Burst Nibbler I think it was called - but I never felt like it surpassed the versions of X-copy that I usually relied on) What a flash from the past! Also, regarding how to debug memory to find code snippets like that: I guess it helps that 1) the memory space was reasonably small, 2) no address space randomization like in today's machines, 3) no multi-process environment, no OS that allocates memory on-demand and on the Amiga 500 there wasn't even any MMU and certainly no virtual memory - the programmer had direct control of the physical memory layout and decided where in memory to put stuff and there it goes - if you find the location for a subroutine in memory it will be there the next time you boot up the software.

AR for the PS1 & PS2 days was amazing

So cool. Love this stuff. Thank you so much for documenting this history

That blue screen brings back good memories 😃

Hi ! Thanks for this video. This reminds me the multifaces devices for 8bits computers such as the zx spectrum or the amstrad cpc, but the action Replay assembly/disassembly and file system save possibilities makes it so powerful !

This brings back some memories my dad putting cheats for me :)

There was a software version of the Action Replay floating around back in the day on the Amiga, It could be used often to pull game images, sprites, fonts out of memory and save them.

This brings back some serious memories of cracking my own games when I was a kid... Damn, I had more fun messing with the code than playing the games. SoftIce was always my favourite tool!

Amiga 500 was the first gaming device I played with. So cool to see how that stuff worked back then... my father used the action replay on ps1 to get some cheats so he has not too much stress when playing after a long work day. Awesome device

Why does mvgs voice along with the music give heavy how it's made vibes. Like his voice is what I'd imagine an Australian how it's made would sound

This was AMAZING!!!!! I have ALWAYS wondered how this was done and you have open that window for me!!! PLEASE OH PLEASE CONTINUE TO MAKE VIDEOS ABOUT THIS STUFF!!! I LOVE IT!!! I spent sooo much time as a kid playing BACKUPS and this was always a big mystery to me!! Could you PLEASE tell us more about the cracking/warez scene from it's hayday? Thank you no matter if you do or not, you are the BEST MVG!!! :D

In my random opinion: Every game would be improved with a cheat-menu, that gives you god-mode, infinite resources and such, that you can toggle on or off I would have never gotten as good or played as much Civilization 2 as a kid, if it didn't have that neat little menu ^^ Thank you for the overview, this is quite fascinating

I did one week work experience in the original datel factory in Fenton,stoke on trent,uk when I was 14 as part of a school thing. Pretty much all action reply boards were soldered and assembled by hand. Must have been 1991 mostly helped tested them and shadowing people for the week.

hardware based cheat engine, I love that. I used to use an AR on my nintendo ds lite, but i dont think it ever had awesome features like that. Its so cool that this concept has been around for so long

I've always wondered how these devices work. The mystery is finally solved. Thank you! Liked and subscribed, cheers!

This brought back memories of cracking Mechwarrior on the PC using debug! Also, the Pro Action Replay on the SNES was utterly fantastic.

The Action Replays of C64, Amiga and PC/DOS weren't just cheat modules, they brought the functionality of a hardware debugger. Fun fact: The retro project MEGA65 (rebuilding the C64 successor C65 cancelled because of the Amiga) has a built-in hypervisor. It looks like the Action Replay on C64...

Thank you for this backflash to my childhood 🤩

One of the best bits of kit ever. Taught me a lot and got me into coding in the end.