Crack Mike Tyson’s Punch Out Bang Bang Passwords

[Bisqwit] has feelings about games that use exclamation points in his idiosyncratic walkthrough of all the nuances of the passwords in the famous Punch Out Bang Bang.

As he states in his deeply weird (though in no way wrong) channel intro, when he’s not driving a bus or teaching Israeli dance, he works hard to understand the things around him. Naturally, a mysterious phone number shaped set of digits in a favorite game was a secret worth extracting.

The digits can represent every possible state in the game.  It uses a pretty simple decoding and encoding scheme, which he walks through. As he says, it all becomes clear when you can see the source code.

After working through all the quirks he is able to arbitrarily generate any state in the game and handle the exceptions (such as Nintendo USA’s phone number). You can see all his code here and try it out for yourself. Video after the break.

We’ve grown to respect [Bisqwit] as the explainer of all things console games. You will like his explanation of how to write a code emulator for an NES CPU.

5 thoughts on “Crack Mike Tyson’s Punch Out Bang Bang Passwords

  1. I’ve watched several of his videos on the topic. I’m amazed by the ability to work backward from so little information. This is on my list of hobby projects… I’ve never spent time working through disassembled code and this seems a fun way to build up those skills.

  2. I’d love to see [Bisqwit] do this for “Roger Clemens’ MVP Baseball” for the original Game Boy… My memories are a little fuzzy here, but as I recall, in season mode, the end of each game would give you a massive (24? 32?) hyphenated-character string that would get deciphered in a similar fashion as what’s described here when you went back to play another game (since the cartridge had no memory in which to keep track of player progress). Re-entering it was a pain in the butt. I tried keeping track of the codes in order to try and decipher what was actually going on, but I gave up on the game before I was ever able to find any patterns in the codes. Every now and then something in my brain brings it back up out of deep memory and taunts me a little…

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