[floppy drive sounds]

Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware!

Where we're taking a look at hardware and software

that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete.

And this time around we've got this right here

the PC Action Replay from Datel

for MS-DOS-based PCs from the early 90s.

And yeah, this is a little different

than the one I covered before

that was just like a little parallel board thingy

and some software for Windows 95

this is not that.

This is an actual straight up ISA Card

that plugs into your computer

and manipulates things on a little deeper level

and allows you to cheat at your games

and get some save states and slow motion

and all sorts of other little things

can be manipulated using a combination of the card

and this weird little mouse-looking thing

with buttons and switches and stuff.

Yeah, what in the world.

Let's take a look at it!

So, this is The Ultimate Game Buster

the Datel PC Action Replay from late 1993

one of the original models that sold for 70 pounds

in the UK or $90 in the US.

It's an 8-bit ISA Card paired with a little breakout box

they called the Freezer Controller.

Huge thanks to Brandon for loaning me this one

for Oddware because these things have become

exceptionally hard to find

relative to its later console counterparts

or even compared to the latest PC Action Replay devices

like the one I previously covered on LGR Oddware.

But that was a glorified trainer program

with a copy protection dongle

you plugged into a parallel port

whereas this earlier model

is a fully fledged PC expansion card

for systems running at minimum

a 286 processor in MS-DOS version 3.2.

More Energy, More Levels, More Power, More Lives!

Action Replay gives you the power

to bust your games wide open!

Just imagine the power to freeze

any program and take total control!

Yeah, that certainly would be a nice change of pace

compared to the other PC models I've tried

those didn't exactly grant me

phenomenal game busting powers

so much as they flat-out didn't work.

But anyway, dude!

If this does what it says it does

like generate infinite cheats,

take screenshots, freeze gameplay,

enable slow motion, monitor memory contents

and scan for viruses in real time,

that'd be pretty fantastic.

If anything, the fact that Datel Electronics themselves

advertised it so heavily back in the day,

seems to imply a certain high level of confidence

in the product, more so

than the crappy parallel port models.

This Action Replay received several board revisions,

software updates, box art changes

and price drops over the years

but the core functionality remained the same:

provide infinite cheat codes through software

and freeze games in place using the paddle.

That latter feature is one

that I find highly intriguing

since the way it's described makes it sound

like a kind of save state function

that you normally see on emulators.

Yet this is an ISA card for MS-DOS PCs

so having that kind of functionality

through a hardware add-on is wildly amusing

assuming it actually works.

Inside the box you get the Action Replay software

on a 3 1/2 inch double-density diskette

I don't know the exact version of the software

but the files are dated to December of 1993.

Then there's the freezer controller,

which looks kinda like a tiny serial mouse

minus the ball underneath.

The orange button is for activating

the Action Replay software itself,

allowing you to do things like enter cheats

and freeze whatever's in memory

and this little switch is for activating slow motion.

It connects to the Action Replay card

using what appears to be

a nine pin serial interface

or at least it's the same kind of

D-sub connector on the end.

However Datel repeatedly warned users

not to plug serial devices into the card

or plug the freezer into serial, so, yeah.

As for the card itself,

it's a neat little 8-bit ISA card

with a handful of Programmable Array Logic chips,

some static RAM, PLCC socketed ROM chip,

along with a pin header and set of DIP switches

for the Action Replay's ROM address I/O port

and IRQ settings.

Finally there's an impressive

50-page spiral-bound instruction manual

something that reviewers at the time criticized

for being perhaps a bit too technical

to the point of being confusing

and yeah, I mean, this gets intense.

Even the "quick installation and setup" section

consists of seven pages packed with text

and it only gets more convoluted from there

with detailed appendices and things like

hexadecimal notation and the basics

of 20-bit memory addressing.

Even the Q&A troubleshooting section

is direct and to the point with answers like

You are making a mistake, if you give the trainer

one wrong piece of information you could do

a thousand passes and you would

still not find the right code.

Welp, that's promising.

On that note, let's get the Ultimate Game Buster installed

and for that we'll be using

the venerable LGR Woodgrain 486.

Just gonna drop it into a free ISA slot

and that's about it

as I've already set the I/O port

and IRQ address on the card

so they won't conflict with other devices

then it is just a matter of plugging in the freezer paddle

again keeping in mind to plug it into the 9-pin port

and not the serial port by accident.

And, yeah, that's about it.

Time to freeze and cheat our way

to MS-DOS gaming victory.

All right, now that we've got the thing installed

in the Woodgrain 486 it's just a matter of

getting the software put on the thing

through the floppy disk

and that is incredibly simple,

just a setup program that guides you through things

mostly just making sure that it can see

where the card is, where your mouse is,

and, you know, addresses and things like that.

Yeah, as long as nothing is conflicting,

and it knows where to put stuff

on AUTOEXEC.BAT, you're ready to start cheatin'.

And once the setup was configured

and everything's installed, we restart it

and it loads the action replay COM file here

the control program, it loads it in the memory

as a terminate-and-stay-resident piece of software

so it's always running in the background

you can see there all the settings

that it got from the setup program

and now we can go into the Action Replay folder

and we can look at what's in here.

So it comes with a bunch of different things,

a bunch of pre-configured files

and the COM file itself

and all we have to do now is just load a game

and start messing around with

our little thingy here. [chuckle of silliness]

So it comes with this program here PCMAN

And uh [laughs] this is not the PCMAN I was expecting

it is a Pacman clone, but it's not the older one

it is some other shareware game I'd never heard of

but yeah, anyway, it mentions in the manual

how to figure out this freezing stuff

using PCMAN here as an example.

So yeah, it's this, by Simon Constable.

Intriguing.

Doesn't appear to have any sound,

but yeah, it is just a Pacman game

and so as an example of what we can do

with this little freezer button,

let's just press it in a spot here

press the button, doink!

And it takes us over into the Action Replay menu here.

Really it's just a command line

and you can type in all sorts of things

it's just way more advanced

than the other PC Action Replays already

I mean look at all this stuff.

But yeah, we can go ahead and enter the trainer

and this is pretty awesome actually.

So we can select the trainer type

we can enter some parameters if we already know them

or we can load a parameter table.

It does actually come with some already,

we're not gonna do that though.

I'm just gonna show you how

we can run a trainer, like create our own parameters.

So the trainer type, there's really only one that it can do

through this particular part of the program,

lives or countable value.

So entering a start value.

This is the part of the memory

that we're gonna be looking for

so right now in the game we have three lives

so we're just gonna type in three

and it's gonna scan the current memory

and see if it finds anything in the program

that we froze using the little thingy here.

It found 4,882 possibilities and using this function

we can just look at the first 10

but this is useless, I mean

there's way too many possibilities.

4,882, man.

So we need to narrow that down.

So we can exit back to the frozen program

and since we're looking to mess with lives

let's just lose one really quick

so that takes us down to just two lives

so there's one and then one you don't see

'cause you get yeah like an extra.

So we got two lives left.

Let's go and park our little man over here,

press the button again,

freeze it, and we're back to the trainer

[chuckling of endearment] I love this process.

So the original value is three, now we have two

and it found one location.

That went from three to two since we originally froze it

and there you go, we've got just the one.

This is the Action Replay parameter, very similar

to like where you'd see in a GameShark code.

So this is the code and the address

and now it knows that

so let's go to enter parameters

and then press "insert"

and that inserts the code that we just found

created by looking at the memory

and having the program compare what it knows

that's it.

So we can go back to the frozen program.

And now, we should never be able to lose our lives

so yeah, look, it just goes right back

to the full lives.

Lose another one, goes right back.

[laughs]

So we just created the infinite lives cheat

for this PCMAN game

and I can see why they included it

because it is, as you can see,

very simple to narrow things down.

[laughs]

and that's all, man, I mean this is,

that's what this does.

In theory this is what the other Action Replays

were supposed to be doing,

but it just couldn't find the memory addresses

for whatever reason.