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Hello all, long time Ecco fan and found my way here from Sonic Retro where I generally spent my time picking apart old Sega games trying to document cheat codes and hidden stuff.

This one always bothered me, because the the mother dolphin talks about confusing the sharks when you save her, and indeed if you use sonar on the sharks in the same level, they briefly shake their head. If you use charge sonar on them, they shake their head for a long time (at least if you keep them visible on the screen). But the password generator and a bunch of faqs talks about perma kills instead.

Has there been an attempt to disassemble this part of the game and figure it out definitively? I figured if anyone has done, it's probably here!

Hello there and welcome to our message board. Love your reverse engineering projects!

There are three powerups that the game gives you in general. The way the third one is NOT explained anywhere in the manual does lead me to believe it was one of those last minute additions as Tides of Time already mention it in the handbook! Which is fair, given they only had one year to make the first game and a lot of stuff had to be thrown out due to the time constraints.

The first powerup is given you at The Vents. If you rescue all the dolphins you get Charge Sonar, your ranged weapon:

SING THIS SONG WHEN YOU CHARGE YOUR ENEMIES...

Second (and third!) power ups are what you get at The Lagoon. Shark Song the dolphin you get it from does explain to you, however that's not all that you receive. The reason it's called Perma-Kill in the Password Generator is because the same flag is also used to activate the "steal the soul of your enemy" ability where if you quickly tap B again after dispatching an enemy, you will see Ecco absorb the stars they've disintegrated into. That will prevent this enemy from respawning once you leave the screen it was on.
This ability is only explained in the manual for Tides of Time and you already start the game with it, however it's entirely up to the player to find out in the original!

I will be posting a detailed explanation of how exactly the Ecco 1 password system works, dealing with those flags. I have already covered Tides of Time that you can read about here: secco-ecco-password-system-reverse-engineering-t58

I trust that makes sense!