With the help of Cheat Engine 7.2 (the one I used back when I made this research), it is possible to play as the boss virtuaroids Jaguarandi (fought as a penalty stage boss if taking too long to clear the first five stages) and Z-Gradt (the final boss) in the Windows version of Cybertroopers Virtual-On.

Note that this also is possible to do with the arcade version through an emulator and Cheat Engine, but obviously the CT table I will share with the values for VON PC won’t work with that version.

The VR values for Jaguarandi and Z-Gradt are 08 and 09 respectively (the numbers before that are standard VRs, and anything beyond 09 crashes the game), and the addresses for your Virtuaroid are separate between the select screen and in-game, so you won’t get anything unusual if you play with the menu values, but you CAN play as Jag and Z-Gradt with the other address.

For example, the screenshots below show Raiden being selected at the screen properly, but as the in-game VR value is forced to load Jaguarandi, that is what you will get in-game (and if you are wondering, there is no Jaguarandi/Z-Gradt unused text or display in the select screen)

Some oddities that have to be mentioned are the following:

If you get to the intermission screen after completing the first five stages and the VR value is *still* set to Jaguarandi or Z-Gradt, the game will lock-up when its supposed to show you your times for each stage before continuing unless you skip the screen before it does that.

If you get sent to the Continue screen, you’ll be met with this. But no crashes happen…as long as you have something already installed for your PC VON installation to not crash anytime it enters the continue screen in a modern PC (like DXWrapper or DxWnd with exception handlers enabled).

It doesn’t look that you shrink if you are defeated or defeat other VRs (including Jaguarandi), but if you lose repeated times as Jaguarandi (though I tested this fighting Jag itself as well), while your size won’t change unlike the AI, your health/resistance to damage will be reduced in the same way AI Jag gets weaker when losing repeatedly.

If you beat the game as Jaguarandi, you’ll be stuck at waiting Jag to do something as normally the playable Virtuaroids charge an attack to destroy the Nirvana and escape (triggering the credits)…but Jag doesn’t have an animation for this.

You can bypass this though by changing the address to a playable VR, which will use that virtuaroid’s animation over Jaguarandi’s model and proceed with the cutscene. Oh, and there isn’t a destroyed Jaguarandi model floating in space at the end of the credits.

On the note of endings, if you play as Z-Gradt and win with a timeout against any VR, you will get the bad ending trigger. Even though this is only supposed to happen as you try to timeout Z-Gradt as another character, it will happen if you play as it here regardless of who you fight.

And speaking about Z-Gradt, since this huge thing was never intended to be playable, the camera is definitely…not very comfortable with the size of it (the only way you can play as this while being able to see is through the PS2 port that had a Z-Gradt mode).

On a final note about Virtual-On and Cheat Engine, there are addresses to load specific colors over you and the AI. It is possible to load more colors than intended for virtuaroids, assuming that these “new” colors are actually colors/textures made for other virtuaroids, though some of those will instead glitch the game and turn most of the textures pitch-black.

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…and that’s all for today! I had recorded footage of this, but I eventually decided to get it done and summarize it into a quick write-up about the notes I got from this. You can get the cheat table with the addresses I discovered here so that you load CE, hook it to the game and then load this table to have everything setup, and get a fully clean, offline-functional installer of Cheat Engine 7.2 here, since trying to get the latest versions/installer will get you instead an adware-loaded download installer that sucks and is likely to be dangerous.

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