Have you been using SNES9x to play lots of the old SNES games and been having a good time? Found a lot of games that are just too hard, or maybe not that much fun so you want to try out the cheats? Confused because you've been searching all over the internet for "SNES9x codes" and can't turn up anything? Well are you in luck, in this article we're going to discuss
where to get cheat codes and
how to use them in SNES9x.
For those of you that don't know, the Game Genie and Pro Action Replay codes that you've probably seen a lot of aren't magical things. What they do is patch the game program, or in some cases lock RAM addresses to a constant value. How do they do this? The code specifies an address, either RAM or ROM, and a data value. These are generally known as address/data pairs.
What a ROM patch does in many cases is insert a NOP or no-op which causes the program to do nothing when it executes that instruction. This can be handy to stop the game from altering a counter such as how many lives you have, how many shots you can fire, how much life force you have, things like that. A RAM patch does something very similar, but instead of being executed as part of the program, a special interrupt handler is installed and periodically rewrites the RAM location with the data value you requested.
Why ROM vs RAM codes? Well RAM codes on the "real thing" require special hardware which can install interrupt handlers. This means that simpler devices like the Game Genie can't work with them because the Game Genie just sits between the cartridge and the console and whenever the CPU tries to access a certain ROM address the Game Genie checks its internal list of codes you entered, and if the address is listed it returns the data value that was part of the code. The advantage of RAM codes is that they are *much* easier to find on your own. Using an emulator or a device like a Pro Action Replay, you can stop & start the game and search RAM for specific values that you expect to find, or search for RAM locations that changed since the last time you ran a scan. ROM codes on the other hand pretty much require you to disassemble the game and go through the program code line-by-line and figure out how it works and what you can change to get the effect you're looking for.
Now that you understand what the codes do and how they differ, lets get into the nitty-gritty of how to make use of them on SNES9x. First thing to do is
search this site for the cheats you want. Once you've found the cheat you want, you'll need to display it in a form that you can enter into SNES9x. Both Raw and Pro Action Replay are essentially the same thing, the only difference is the colon that comes right before the data value in the Raw format. Since Raw is easier to read, we'll work with the Raw format from here on. If the cheats are not already being displayed in Raw format, change the pop-up to Raw and click Redisplay.
Fire up SNES9x and load a game. Pause the emulation and go to the Cheat menu and choose Cheat Entry...
In this example we will enter the Infinite Energy code for Mega Man 7, 7E0C2E:1C. In the window click New and a new cheat will appear. Singe click the 000000 in the Address column and enter the part of the cheat before the colon, 7E0C2E. Single click in the Data column and enter the part after the colon, 1C. You can also single click the Description column and enter what the code is about, in this case Infinite Energy.
Click the checkbox next to the cheat to mark the cheat as one that you want to use. Close the window and go back to the Cheat menu and choose Apply Cheats. Now you can resume your game and have a good time cheating!
If you have a lot of cheats but don't want to use them all at the same time you can check and uncheck them in the Cheat Entry window, and then choose Apply Cheats. SNES9x doesn't change the active cheats until you Apply Cheats.
