How To Do Some Downright Mr.Robot Sh*t With NES Game Genie Hacking.

Rani Baker
7 min readJul 29, 2022

A few months back I wrote a kinda snarky beginners guide to Game Genie hacking for Modern Rogue. I’m going to assume you read it, and if you haven’t you should because I’m gonna open this up with the same examples but in more detail as a warm up.

Opened up that article with a relatively simple straightforward Game Genie code, one that provides Unlimited Continues in the NES game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It replaces the hexadecimal opcode ($C6) for the 6502 Assembly command DEC (Decrement By 1) with the hexadecimal opcode ($A5) for the 6502 Assembly command LDA (Load Accumulator). This is a very common trick used in Game Genie codes for Unlimited Hit Points, Unlimited Money, Unlimited Lives, etc by interrupting the operations that decrease them, as long as they are decreasing by one.

IMPORTANT NOTE! You want to always match the format of the command you are replacing or you’re gonna break stuff in unpleasant ways. If you replace a zero page ASM command (that affects RAM addresses from $00-FF) with an absolute one (that affects RAM addresses from $0000-FFFF) it will actually throw off how the processor reads the following commands. You can replace any of the following commands with ones on the same horizontal line:

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Rani Baker
Rani Baker

Written by Rani Baker

I used to work for Macaulay Culkin. Technically still do. https://www.patreon.com/destroyed4com4t. More writing at: https://ranibaker.contently.com/

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