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Sep 30, 2015, 10:47 PM
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Minor spoiler warning: Neobeo's Firetruck easter egg.
Highlight block to show spoiler: That reminds me, Neobeo's Firetruck is known for a number of previously unused tricks, but one of them in particular is very easily overseen. There is an optional location in the level that contains one of the many rhyming messages. If you had played Neobeo's Firetruck, you know that the messages sometimes contain a useful clue, more commonly state your very obvious objective in a complicated way, and occasionally seem to be complete nonsense. This one is easy to discard as a joke: it congratulates you for finding a secret area and tells you to enter what appears to be a completely ordinary icy zone and type "jjackrabbitsaysthatneobeoiscool". However, if this is actually done, the game will react by displaying "neobeoiscool" as a text message on the screen. This is because the icy area is filled with text events with ID 133, but, as you probably know, only IDs up to 15 are meant to be supported. You can define more by modifying a level file using custom tools, but because JJ2 only has space for 16, IDs above 15 will take place of random memory, with potential to cause errors and glitches unless you know precisely what you're doing. The level utilizes that fact too, by using some unused memory for its text strings, but more importantly, Neobeo found out that the same memory address text 133 would start at, happens to match that of the 20th character of the cheat code currently being typed - hence the unusual effect. Keep in mind this only works in vanilla JJ2 1.23 (and maybe 1.22?), as does the rest of the level. TSF is known to crash in that level, versions before 1.22 don't support trigger zones, and JJ2+ uses some of the memory vanilla didn't and as such won't display some of the text strings correctly.

Last edited by Sir Ementaler; Sep 30, 2015 at 10:57 PM.