Banjo Kazooie Exposed by James S

Introduction

Banjo-Kazooie for the N64 runs fine with the Equalizer cheat code cartridge, allowing me to enter and exit the in-game menu without the game crashing. The Equalizer came pre-loaded with several codes for Banjo-Kazooie such as infinite lives and health, and the very important Must be on code.

A lot of the information you will find here is for the PAL game, however, it should still be useful for other versions of the game.

Introduction

About the Game engine

Stop 'N' Swop

You can email me at james.boshikoopa@gmail.com

About the Game engine

It is said that Banjo-Kazooie uses a modified Super Mario 64 game engine, but like Ocarina of Time the internal workings are very different to SM64. For one thing, the Banjo-Kazooie object is at the same address regardless of the level you're in which helps greatly.

Let's look at a few of the variables in the Banjo-Kazooie object for the PAL game:

0x8037CAB0 800F53E0 034D FF01

First we have what could possibly be a pointer, followed by 0x034D which appears to have something to do with what graphics are used. The last value, 0xFF01, is how transparent Banjo-Kazooie are; lower values make them more transparent, higher values less transparent.

0x8037CAB8 01 000000 3F800000

What we see above: the first value of 0x01 is a graphics enable flag, change to zero and Banjo-Kazooie vanish. The 0x3F800000 is the Banjo-Kazooie size modifier that affects them graphically on all of the three axis.

Stop 'N' Swop

If there's one mystery concerning Banjo-Kazooie more than anything else then it's the Stop 'n' swop feature which, if it had not of been disabled, would of allowed the game to be swapped with another such as the sequel or even Donkey Kong 64 as to unlock new features.

There are remains of the Stop 'n' swop feature even in the PAL game, first of there are three text strings of STOP 'N' SWOP loaded into the RAM at the following addresses in the PAL game:

0x80378E8C

0x80378F70

0x80379060

As to see the text more clearly, I changed the pointer to the RETURN TO GAME text so that the STOP 'N' SWOP string is used instead. So, for the PAL game we have:

0x8036C960 80378C80 Pointer to RETURN TO GAME text

Is changed to:

0x8036C960 80378F70 Pointer to STOP 'N' SWOP text

You will get:

It will still function as Return to game but it makes the Stop 'n' swop a bit more clearer. Note that you may have to pause and then un-pause for the text to change.