Puggsy (Genesis)

Puggsy is a sidescrolling puzzle game by those silly Brits, where you pick up stuff and use that stuff in order to make other stuff do stuff to get your stuff working in order to get your other stuff out of whatever stuff you've gotten your stuff into.

Anti-Piracy Screen
Although the official retail Puggsy cart does not contain SRAM, the game attempts to write to it anyway, in order to detect third-party copying devices (which always contain SRAM). If the write is successful, the game will appear to function normally; however, after clearing a few levels, the game will stop and present the player with a personal "gotcha" message from the Traveller's Tales devs themselves. Rather infamously, many emulators which blindly create SRAM regions for each game will also trip the check.

The game also tries to prevent these tests from being easily detected and removed — there are six write checks split into three sets, with one of them stored at the end of a subroutine called four times throughout the game, another checked once immediately before one instance of the subroutine call is executed, and the third in a vertical interrupt routine. The SRAM address the game checks also cannot be detected easily, as the game loads an address some random distance away from the actual address and adds the distance immediately afterward through instructions. All checks have different base values and distances.

"A Hidden Place" Passwords

 * All but OTHER have been previously found; OTHER is newly discovered.

If you take five specific letters in A Hidden Place, stack them on top of each other, and push that stack through the exit gate, you can unlock interesting effects. These effects are listed in the order the game checks, and take effect after the score tally: SO YOU HAVE FOUND ANOTHER SECRET BIT. THIS SCROLL TEXT IS JUST TO SAY THAT PUGGSY WAS WRITTEN BY JON BURTON AND ANDY INGRAM. ALL THE GFX WERE DRAWN BY ANDY INGRAM AND THE GAME WAS DESIGNED AND PROGRAMMED BY JON BURTON. THE LEVEL DESIGNS WERE ALSO BY JON BURTON. MUSIC WAS BY MATT FURNISS AND S. HOLLINGWORTH OF KRISALIS SOFTWARE. HOPE YOU ENJOY THE REST OF THE GAME. THERE IS MORE TOO IT THAN MEETS THE EYE. A BIG THANKS TO M.R.CHUDLEY FOR THE USE OF THE FLUFFY WUFFY BUNNY WABBITS GFX. IN TRUE DEMO STYLE IT IS TIME TO WRAP  SEE YA..................................
 * CHEAT: Enables infinite lives, but turns Puggsy (and things that use his colors, such as letters/numbers) green as a consequence.
 * HEROS: Opens a cutscene window with a demoscene-esque credits/greets message from the developers scrolling by.


 * SHOES: Gives Puggsy a pair of shoes.
 * OTHER: Opens a blank screen that shows red/blue and yellow/white streams of particles swirling around each other while the Light House music plays. This animation loops infinitely until you press Start.

Vector Graphics?
Along with numerous other juicy tidbits and secrets, the staff roll reveals the names of several secret levels that the player may not have found, one of which is "VECTOR GRAPHICS". Although one of the secret levels does visually fit this description, there is no actual secret level with that name. A simple mistake, or evidence of a cut level?

Regional Differences
Junior mode, which can be accessed on the title screen, is a demo game for beginners that uses level layouts from the main game. The levels and items used in this mode were changed for the US version, likely because the European version was rather challenging for beginners. Both versions have the Pyramids boss, although it takes only two hits in the US version, as opposed to seven in the European version.

Levels
The chart below illustrates which levels from the main game were used for each Junior level. The Light House 2 was originally a hidden level in the European version; this was moved to level 5 in the US version.

Map
The map in the US version was altered as a result of the aforementioned level changes.

Item Differences
The levels that are shared in both versions have different items.