Cadash (Arcade)

Prototype Info Notes

Debug Mode#

After booting the game, hold the service switch and reset the game. Afterward, a service SW error screen should appear. At this point, press Start x 3, Service, then Start, and the game should proceed as normal. After inserting credits and selecting your character(s), you will then be greeted with a level select. You can see a level number and scroll layer position info.

After selecting a level, you can then choose the amount of gold, the amount of experience, and which key items to start off with for each player.

Special & Forbidden Names#

Text DifferencesThank you for the important thing!

• cadashjo is the earliest known release.
• cadash is based off of cadashjo and is the first to feature several different difficulty adjustments.
• Both cadashf and cadashi are nearly identical to cadash, with the only changes being the different script and adjustments to the game's text handler to accommodate the extra characters each language needs.
• cadashj1 has a few code updates from cadash, but nothing that effects gameplay.
• cadashu1 is the earliest known US set and is based off of cadashj1.
• Both cadashg and cadashs are directly based off of cadashu1. Like the French and Italian sets, the only updates are to the script and the text handler.
• cadashj is the last known update for the Japanese set.
• cadashu contains the same code updates as cadashj.

Bug Fixes#

Screen Flip Bug

Early	Final

In older sets, when the screen is flipped, all elements on the mask layer (HUD graphics and text, message windows, etc.) are improperly offset 5 pixels to the right. Notably, the ornate border around the player's health bar is placed partly off-screen. Both cadashu and cadashj fix this.

Projectile Bug
In earlier versions, there's a bug with the way the game clears projectiles that effects when the player can start shooting again. This is easiest to see as the Ninja: Go down the vine to the start of the first dungeon, then rapidly fire shuriken upwards. There should be moments where pressing the fire button does nothing, even though all of the shuriken have gone off-screen and despawned.

This effects the following weapons and spells:

• Fireball
• Flame Wall
• Fire Blade / Staff of Fire (Fireball only)
• Shuriken
• Butterfly Knife
• Dagger of Swallow
• Spirit Ball
• 3-Way Cutter

The updated sets add code to fix all of these except for the Dagger of Swallow.

Difficulty Tweaks#

Herbs & Antidotes
Sets with the difficulty decreased change the number of medical herbs and antidotes that each player can carry from 4 to 8 each.

Shop Prices
The first change is simple: Medical Herbs have their prices decimated from 200 to 20 gold.

Inn prices are slightly more complicated. In all sets, inn prices increase before hitting a cap. However, in the easier sets, the inn prices both cap earlier and at a much lower price.

Priest Spells
Three of the Priest's spells were changed between sets:

• Her Heal spell originally restored 16 HP of damage; this is also the amount it heals in the prototype. However, after the prototype, messages were added to both of the Priest's heal spells to tell the player how much HP each spell recovers. Heal 2 has its own special message, but the first Heal spell shares its message with the Medical Herb.

The problem with this is that the Medical Herb heals 10 HP, not 16, making the message inaccurate. To fix this, the cadashj and cadashu sets nerf the Heal spell to restore just 10 HP.

• The Protect spell originally absorbed 30 HP of damage. In some sets, this was increased to 50 HP.
• The Recover spell originally added 30 seconds to the timer. In certain sets, the amount restored was doubled to 60 seconds.

Amulet Worth
Originally worth 10,000 gold, some sets instead max out the player's savings at 60,000 gold.

Boss Difficulty
{| class="wikitable" style="border: none; background: none; text-align: right; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" !style="border: none; background: none;"| !colspan=2|HP !colspan=2|Attacks |- !style="text-align:left;"|Fire Elemental |500 |300 |Fireball |080 / 050 ATK |- !style="text-align:left;"|Baarogue (True Form) |2,000 |1,000 |rowspan=3 valign=top|Contact (Body)
Contact (Tail) |rowspan=3 valign=top|100 / 090 ATK
120 / 100 ATK |- !style="text-align:left;"|Baarogue (1st Fight Threshold) |1,200 |600 |- !style="text-align:left;"|Baarogue (2nd Fight Threshold) |800 |300 |}

• The HP of the Fire Elemental was reduced, and Baarogue's HP in both fights was halved.

In both versions, Baarogue flies away in the first fight when he gets below 60% HP.

In the second fight, the amount of damage Baarogue has to take before his second head spawns changed from 60% to 70% of its HP, further reducing the difficulty of the fight.

• Some of Fire Elemental and Baarogue's attacks had their damage reduced. Note that the base damage of the Fire Elemental's fireballs was reduced just enough to let the Fighter's Silver Shield block them; the shield is ineffective in the harder sets.

Round 3 Secret#

There's a hidden alcove with six NPCs that's located just above the gnome's hideaway in the bottom-left corner of Round 3.

To get to that spot, the player has to lure a spider over to where the stairs are and have it shoot a web to the right. The player must then jump to the right, quickly turn to the left, and then collide with the shot web. This should give them enough vertical momentum to grab onto an invisible vine. They would then simply take the vine up to access the hidden area.

Talking to the gnomes reveals that they're actually avatars for six of the game's developers. The translated text can be read in this Legends of Localization article, which also includes information about some of the cultural references in the text.

While it's still possible to access this area in non-Japanese sets, there's a check in the NPC code for these six specific characters that will despawn them if the region flag at 0x7FFFE in the main CPU is set to anything other than Japan (0x0001). Even if they did spawn, speaking to them would just produce blank text boxes; their dialogue was taken out of the script.

References#