But the screen actually uses five, since Hiruko joins the player's party for the final stage. Since each portrait consists of 16 8x8 tiles, there are a total of four portraits that can be displayed on-screen (one for each playable character). The character selection screen uses sprites to display the portraits. Presumably meant to be used during the end credits. Profile shot of the Lee brothers standing back-to-back stored among the ending graphics. Note that it's actually possible to get a blue knife or hand spear (as well as the shurikens thrown by enemy ninjas) dropped to the ground if you intercept the thrown blade with a standing kick, but they cannot be picked up no matter what you do and they will eventually disappear from the ground after a while. Curiously there's a 14-character blank between "SHURIKEN" and "KNIFE", which suggests that there was another weapon listed between those two at some point that ended up being removed. The text strings for each weapon are 11 characters long (including the spaces from one name to the next). The "KNIFE" refers to the blue knives thrown by the female enemies in the first two stages (as opposed to the "ARMY KNIFE", which can be obtained from some of the bald enemies that appear throughout the game), while the "HAND SPEAR" refers to the knives thrown by the Italian enemies in the later stages. All of these can used by the player except for the "KNIFE" and HAND SPEAR", which are weapons that are used exclusively by enemy characters. The text strings for weapons are located at offset 0x11DE5 of the English ROM and offset 0x11DC7 of the Japanese ROM.
These names are all used, except Hiruko's, which suggests she might had been planned to be playable at one point. Each name is 8 characters long, including the spaces from one name to the next. The text strings for the character names used on the HUD are all located at offset 0x11BA8 of the English ROM and offset 0x11B8A of the Japanese ROM.
However, it doesn't update the selection screen properly, so it leaves the other character portraits invisible.
You can restore full functionality with the additional Game Genie code XVNXAPAV. In the Japanese version, all of these features except the first one were disabled with the code patch. Various bits of this variable enable or disable various debug features.īit 7 of the debug variable (to set it, use the Game Genie code EKNYVYAA) switches between normal and "SAMPLE VERSION", which enables some debug features.
Usually all debug code is controlled by a memory flag, hardwritten at the end of the ROM at address $FFF6 in M6502 CPU address space. There is a common debug feature in a couple of Technos games.