Hi all,
I've noticed over the years there has been a distinct lack of any kind of hacks or game genie codes for Caesars Palace. I don't know if no one ever wanted to do it, or if it was deemed too hard, or unnecessary...but I've spent the last two days in various emulators learning enough 6502 assembly to make some sense out of the debuggers as well as staring at memory locations while doing things. Despite the challenges I was able to come up with some money hacks. I've only come up with what I call a partial hack. I have yet to reverse engineer how the game is storing the actual amount of money you have. But seeing as this game came out in about 1991 and all my Googling turned up nothing...I guess a starting point is better than no point.
RAM Hack:
There's got to be multiple places where your money value is located. So far I've found the locations where it keeps track of how many chips are in each demonination. Maxing these out at hex value FF yields you $35,955:
00A7: Number of $100 chips
00A8: Number of $25 chips
00A9: Number of $10 chips
00AA: Number of $5 chips
00AB: Number of $1 chips
For "unlimited" money you can naturally just apply a ram hack to lock these values at FF. You won't get the money you win, but you'll also never lose any money. Since the game supports more than $35,955 in the bank; I'm clearly missing the memory location that stores the full value...or haven't yet reverse engineered how it stores this information.
Game Genie Codes:
There's also never been any Game Genie codes for the game. I searched and searched before I felt I could make the claim that I've published the very first ones:
NNEKAZTE - Sets $100 chips to "255" at start
NNEKGXZE - Sets $25, $10, and $1 chips to "255" at start
NNOGGXAE - Sets $5 chips to "255" at start
Somewhere between frames 6 and 7 after boot and somewhere around I think scanline 77; the game initializes the values for your chip amounts. IS this the only way the game sets the starting amount of cash? I don't know. I need to see where it's also storing the amount of money and then dig through the debugger to see if that value is touched during the initalization. It's entirely possible these are the limits of what we can do from the ROM side.
I also haven't even begun to figure out anything involving the games. There are so many memory locations updating during those routines...and I really don't know the 6502 at all.