page_title: Game Genie
section_title: Game Genie 2
hierarchical_section_title: Game Genie / Game Genie 2
caption_attribution_description: English: Unreleased prototype for the Game Genie 2 which had many extra features. It was fully developed but never released due to changing market conditions. This board has a number of debugging features including an LCD and parallel port for connection to a PC host. The final product was to use a battery-backed SRAM and feature several buttons for code-finding and on-the-fly cheat activation. On this prototype the original game cartridge is plugged into a connector on the rear of the board. This prototype shows a classic "dead bug" hand-wired modification to fix a timing issue in the prototype FPGA chip.
context_page_description: Game Genie is the name of a line of video game cheat cartridges originally designed by Codemasters and sold by Camerica and Galoob. The first device in the series was released in 1990 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, with subsequent devices released for the Super NES, Game Boy, Genesis, and Game Gear. All the devices temporarily modify game data, allowing the player to cheat, manipulate various aspects of games, and sometimes access unused assets and functions. Five million units of the original Game Genie products were sold worldwide, and most video game console emulators feature Game Genie code support. Emulators that have Game Genie support also allow a near-unlimited number of codes to be entered whereas the actual products have a much smaller limit, between three and six codes.
  In mid-1993 Codemasters began development on a "Game Genie 2", with Galoob again due to market and distribute the device in North America, but ultimately no Game Genie devices were released by Codemasters for the fifth generation of consoles. However, other companies have produced similar hacking devices such as the Code Breaker and GameShark.
context_section_description: A substantially more powerful device was developed by Codemasters for the Super NES, with many improvements including the ability for users to find their own cheat codes, to selectively activate cheats during gameplay using the game controller, to switch games into a slow-motion mode, as well as automatically save and restore the high-scores from games into battery-backed memory on the Game Genie device itself. A fully working prototype of the device was completed, but was not brought to market due to changes in market conditions. One prototype is known to remain in existence, in the possession of Richard Aplin, one of its original creators.
caption: Game Genie 2 Prototype for Super NES (unreleased)
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