After Burner: Black Falcon

After Burner: Black Falcon is an arcade-style combat flight simulation game. Unlike the previous games in the series, this one was made exclusively for the PSP and was not adapted from an arcade game.

Cheat Codes#

A number of previously-undocumented cheat codes were found in the game's code, and are listed below. Each code should be entered on the mission select screen. Upon successful entry, a message will be displayed.

Funny Subtitles#

"CHTFUN", when enabled, adds silly subtitles to the game's movies (minus "Conclusion", notably), featuring quite a bit of toilet humor.

Development Unit Dip Switch Cheats#

There are a number of General Purpose Input (GPI) dip switches within the hardware development kits used by developers to test, debug, and develop PSP games¹. In code, the status of each dip switch is checked by calling a kernel function, sceKernelGetGPI(). While these dip switches do not exist within retail PSP units, by modifying the return value of sceKernelGetGPI() to non-zero values, one can pretend that certain dip switches are enabled. The retail version of After Burner: Black Falcon retains calls to this function within its code, and enables certain cheats (presumably used for faster debugging) when specific dip switches are enabled.

This includes a cheat to give the player $100,000,000, a cheat that unlocks all customizations, and a cheat that enables all missions. Internally, these cheats are referred to as hellacash, allcustomizations, and allmissions respectively.

Here are some CwCheat codes for ULES00753 to enable the flags that these dip switches activate:

_C0 hellacash Cheat
_L 0x0049445C 0x00000001

_C0 allcustomizations Cheat
_L 0x0048935C 0x00000001

_C0 allmissions Cheat
_L 0x004965D4 0x00000001

CVM Machine Info#

This game uses an embeddable scripting engine called Cohort. One of the functions provided by this engine is CVM::Machine::ListInfo, which prints information about the virtual machine. The following text is printed when the function is called within ULES00753:

Machine Info:
    CSL Version      : V0.5.0
    Compiler         : Built with GNUC EDG gcc 3.4 mode on Dec 21 2006
    Endian           : little
    Data             : 32 bit
    Pointers         : 32 bit
    Integers         : 32 bit
    Numbers          : 32 bit
    Ref Count        : 16 bit
    Idents           : CRC's and text
    User Handles     : Disabled
    User HBHandles   : Disabled
    HB Heaps         : Disabled
    Mem Debug        : Disabled
    Mem Stats        : Disabled
    Mem Tracking     : Disabled
    Access Exceptions: Enabled
    Value Exceptions : Enabled
    Ref Exceptions   : Enabled
    Profiling        : Disabled
    Ref Counting     : Enabled
    Debugger Support : Disabled
    XPL Asserts      : Disabled
    CSL Debug        : Disabled

References#