Behavior of attract screen with cheats enabled

[RichardAE]

I noticed that Moon Patrol behaves the same in the attract screen with the invulnerability cheat turned on as it does during normal game play. Once it hits gameplay, it will not cycle through the other parts of the attract demo as it probably waits for a death sequence to occur to trigger the next part of the cycle.

This is not shocking, but it made me wonder what other games might have interesting attract screen effects. I am sure these have been noted before, and there is probably an entire website devoted to nothing but "weird attract screen behavior when running MAME with cheats on". However, I did not turn up anything because I am probably using the wrong keywords. Point me in the right direction if you know where I should look. I tried a few other games and found that some cycle based on a timer and others also wait for a death to trigger the next part of the cycle.

Berzerk - player follows the same pattern continuously but since it does not die it will continue to board after board with robots going through the normal color and difficulty cycle.

Centipede - continues to play. Not all that fascinating.

Dig Dug - Does not die but cycles on a timer.

Donkey Kong - with the timer frozen, will continue to move around while things become chaotic. Maybe after an infinite amount of time Mario would randomly climb all of the ladders and move on to the next board.

Pacman - will play endlessly, but after 20 minutes was not able to clear a few dots in one section so may not continue to next board.

[pbj]

You know, this is an interesting one.  I’ve turned on cheats here and there to make it through a game and noticed weird attract mode behavior but never thought to make any notes.

One funny one I’ve noticed recently during game play is that Total Carnage will literally play itself if you turn on infinite lives.  I got bored and walked away for awhile and I was in the middle of a boss fight an hour later when I checked on it.

[pbj]

Nam 1975.  Turn on invincibility and infinite grenades, they completely lay waste to everything during attract mode launching rockets.  It does eventually time out but I found it humorous.