Coach K College Basketball

Coach K College Basketball
Developer: Electronic Arts Publisher: EA Sports Platform: Genesis Released in US: 1995 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has debugging material.

The only EA college basketball game to be released for the Sega Genesis.

Debug Symbols

Like other EA Sports games on the Genesis, several functions have their original names present. They can be found after each corresponding function's last instruction (typically rts). They can be recovered with a Ghidra script.

Version Screen

An unreferenced build version screen contains a compile date, which can be found in the ROM at 1422. This screen can be forced to load instead of the license screen, by following these steps with a debugger:

• Place a breakpoint on address 093F46 (first instruction of function license);
• On breakpoint hit, remove breakpoint, then set the program counter to address 094148 (first instruction of function version).

Animation Debug

To access the dummied out debugging menu, we can restore its entry to the pause menu. It is shown when a memory variable checked at FFE163 is toggled at 0A8FF0. Among other changes, this allows the selected menu index to be stored as FFA465:0006: the animation menu index value. However, some conditional branches need to be patched: the first is changed so that its jump offset is at the start of the toggle setup logic at 0A8FC2, and the rest are replaced with nop instructions, in order to reach the toggle address:

• 0A8F3E:0084
• 0A8FCA:4E71
• 0A8FEE:4E71

If these patches are directly applied to the ROM, then a fail case branch will be taken in a checksum verification function. That branch must also be patched out:

• 1FE020:4E71

Lastly, press C to enter the menu.

Most of these options are fairly self-explanatory, although the directions the sprite is seen at are listed by number and the players are only referred to by number. Note that changing the team will also change the background behind the character.

This menu is also present in NBA Live 96 (Genesis).

(Source: Mezmorize, QUFB)