New cheat codes for Ecco PC (US version only)

[bobblen147]

Reverse engineer / cheat code hunter Bo recently discovered some previously unknown (or perhaps forgotten) cheat menus for Ecco PC and wrote about it on his blog.

I then tested them out and discovered they only work on the original US release of Ecco PC, they've been disabled on all newer versions. Fortunately for me, the old Caverns of Hope release 'Ecco PC Fixed and Enhanced Edition' contains all the known versions so it was easy to test.

https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the ... olphin-98c

Curiously the only known code prior to this discovery, the in game message viewer, works on every version except the first US release. So you lose a cheat and gain a cheat if you play the European version. That code is activated in a similar way to the mega drive debug menu.

https://segaretro.org/Ecco_the_Dolphin/ ... PC_version

[Moduvator]

Oh wow, thank you very much for sharing this! This is definitely a new find and I'm sure people who are only picking up the game are going to be happy this exists!

Ecco PC in general is considered a poor port of the great game that they also rushed so it's not receiving the amount of attention than the rest of the games in the franchise. Not much was done after Korama made the Enhanced Edition, unfortunately.

I also read your article on DoTF secret passwords in related materials on the website and that's also a delight to read! I have to say the way they're hashing the password is not dissimilar to how they do it in the 16-bit series! That does make sense given some members of the original team were involved in making it.

[bobblen147]

My fault for how I wrote that post, but just to be clear. I'm not Bo the reverse engineer responsible for that wonderful find, I'm Bobblen who suggested looking at Ecco and helped him test it. But I certainly agree that Bo has some amazing skills. To be fair, Ecco PC was written for windows 3.1 / 95 before Direct X came along and standardised PC graphical capabilities, so it's not surprising that it had a lot of problems. A lot of games from that era did!

[Moduvator]

Having read the article again I can now see I got confused, sorry about that! Regardless, this is excellent material and something definitely not seen before so thanks again for sharing it! I've linked Bo's article on our Twitter page, hopefully that will help spread the word!