Trinea (Super Famicom, 1993) · bug dossier · found 2026-10-31 · struktured labs

Easy Mode Was Harder

Trinea (Yanoman, 1993) hides an English Configuration menu with a Play Level setting. For more than 25 years its Easy mode has been backwards: the difficulty check halves your attack damage on Easy and does nothing to the damage you take, so Easy is effectively harder than Normal. Trinea DX fixes it.

The hidden menu

On the title screen, where CONTINUE/START is shown, press Select. A secret English Configuration menu opens with Play Level Easy / Normal / Hard, a sound test and a music test. Carmelo found it on real hardware on 2026-10-31.

The bug

The difficulty check in the original code is inverted. It doubles the hero's attack damage on every level except Easy. So relative to Normal, Easy halved your damage, and it did nothing to the damage you take. Picking Easy made the game harder.

Hard doubles monster contact and projectile damage at spawn, using an 8-bit shift. For base damage values of 128 or more, that shift would overflow.

The fix in Trinea DX

• Easy now deals Normal damage and takes half damage from monsters (minimum 1).
• Normal is unchanged.
• Hard still doubles monster damage, but it is capped at 255 instead of overflowing.

The play level is saved per save file and survives Continue.

Measured

In an emulator, over the same 1500 frames in Neo Edo:

• The old Easy lost 39 HP. The new Easy loses 21.
• Sara now kills a 6 HP monster in 1 hit on Easy instead of 2.

Availability

The fix ships in the next Trinea DX release. Tracking issue: trinea-dx#13.