Ah Eikou no Koushien

Ah Eikou no Koushien
Developer: Taito Publisher: Taito Platform: Arcade (Taito F2 System) Released in JP: April 1991 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused text. This game has debugging material.

Ah Eikou no Koushien is a comedic Japanese baseball game for arcade play.

Debug Functions

Crash Handler

This game has a handler for the standard 68000 exception vectors. It prints data for the program counter, status register, and the sixteen data/address registers at the point of exception.

Floor & Hit Set

Place the following cheat in MAME's koshien.xml cheat file to replace the standard test mode with a debug feature of sorts:

  <cheat desc="Floor Hit Set Test">
    <script state="run">
      <action>maincpu.mw@00781A=E550</action>
    </script>
    <script state="off">
      <action>maincpu.mw@00781A=34A2</action>
    </script>
  </cheat>

Doesn't seem to do much, though. There should probably be a graphic displayed on the bottom-left corner of the screen, but it's always blank.

Controls:

• 1P Left/Right: Changes the "NEW" Floor X offset.
• 1P Up/Down: Changes the "NEW" Floor y offset.
• 2P Up/Down: Adds / subtracts from the style number once every eight frames.
• 2P Button 1 + 2P Up/Down: Adds / subtracts from the style number once per frame.

Placeholder Text

There are a few filler strings for the attract mode sequence. There are subroutines in the game's code to display them, but they're not linked anywhere. Put the following code in koshien.xml to change the Tilt message to one of the filler messages.

  <cheat desc="Change Tilt Message">
    <parameter>
      <item value="0x23BE">GAME</item>
      <item value="0x23DE">MOE </item>
      <item value="0x23FE">SCHOOL A</item>
      <item value="0x2422">SCHOOL B</item>
      <item value="0x2446">TAITO</item>
    </parameter>
    <script state="run">
      <action>maincpu.mw@00178A=param</action>
    </script>
    <script state="off">
      <action>maincpu.mw@00178A=348A</action>
    </script>
  </cheat>

Those strings:

GAME DEMO

MOE DEMO

SCHOOL A DEMO

SCHOOL B DEMO

TAITOOOOO

There's an additional string at 0x006B12 that's not referenced anywhere in the code. It's also the closest thing this game has to an official English title.

AH! HIGH SCHOOL BASEBALL

(Source: Original TCRF research)