The Incident in 15 minutes

Sometime back I posted a set of Game Genie codes for The Incident by KHAN Games. My favorite code forces the game into the pre-recorded solution mode so that game starts solving (auto-playing) the puzzles on its own. The point is to get the game to play itself but that code falls a little short: It’s not continuous end-to-end play because each “floor” (block of ten puzzles) has to be started manually. Also, getting the system to award solution points for “solving” the puzzles requires yet an additional code (since they normally aren’t when auto-play is used). And finally, there’s actually a bug in the code that breaks one of the later puzzles.

Never-the-less, getting The Incident to play itself from start to finish entirely unattended (almost) is something that I’ve been thinking about since. More recently, I created a new version of the auto-play code that attacks the game’s subroutine that checks the state of the auto-play flag rather than the code that resets it (which is how the earlier code worked) and this is much better. It doesn’t break any puzzles, it doesn’t require an extra step to start it, and it awards solution points (as if you solved the puzzle manually) without any additional cheat codes.

PZKVPNOK Auto-play
VXKVYZZA Skip floor-complete screen
NVSTAXXT Skip floor-complete screen

This gets us closer to end-to-end play but the summary screen that appears at the end of each floor requires pressing start to proceed. This prevents the game from just running through the first 100 levels without stopping unless you are standing ready to press that button each time. I managed to find an additional two codes that basically trick the screen into thinking start has been pressed and this allows the game to run uninterrupted from stage 1 to 100.

This just leaves the final 20 stages for the “Kate” and “Claire” robots which need to be manually started and then the final three robot push at the very end of the game. With enough effort it might be possible to come up with a patch that manages to skip all that and truly play 100% automatically but the Kate and Claire sections of the game are pretty short and easy enough to manually kick off so I called this good enough.

The game playing itself for 100 levels uninterrupted is pretty impressive especially at high speed so I’ve uploaded a video of it to YouTube. This was played on Mesen and recorded using OBS Studio. I set the emulator to 10x speed on fast forward but I’m not sure that it’s actually running that fast. It may just be at whatever speed it happened to max out but I think it’s sufficiently fast and the whole game plays in just over 15 minutes. The ROM was just the plain GTROM version that I dumped from an original cartridge back in 2017 (My MMC1 patch wasn’t used because of the visual glitch it has).

While my new auto-play code doesn’t break any of the puzzles directly it does have an issue where it causes the robot to move automatically during the security camera footage scene that appears when each robot is introduced. This has no ill effect for Sam and Kate but it does break the first puzzle for Claire if left on. To avoid all this in the video I just manually switched the code on after the screen camera scene was over. It’s pretty seamless for the video but keep this in mind if you want to use these codes yourself.

That’s about all there is to it but I’d like to mention that me posting this has nothing to do with Kevin’s pre-order for the re-release for this game. I had already been working on putting this together before Kevin announced the re-release and I had no idea it was coming; merely a coincidence. On that note, I do not know if any of my old codes or these new codes will work with the new version of the game. It depends on if any of the existing 6502 code gets moved around by the new changes. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.