Bonus: More Sonic in Gale Racer

A long-lost button code unlocks a Flicky cameo

It’s well known that some Sonic characters appear in Gale Racer, the Saturn port version of the arcade racing game Rad Mobile¹. From Wikipedia:

Rad Mobile was Sega's first 32-bit game, using Sega's System 32 arcade system board. It was also the first appearance of Sonic the Hedgehog, who appears as an ornament hanging from the driver's rearview mirror.

Left: Gale Racer’s opening FMV. Right: Gale Racer’s title screen.

It’s more than just Sonic: in the Saturn version, you earn points that change your ornament:

Left: Sonic is the default ornament. Right: Tails is unlocked with 100 points.

You get a different ornament for every 100 points. My longtime forum friend Rlan extracted the sprites a few years back:

The sprites, courtesy of Rlan

You can see them in motion on Sonic the Hedgeblog or in this YouTube video. The list is: Sonic, Tails, Metal Sonic, Mighty, Eggman, Mecha Sonic from Sonic 2, Ray, Knuckles, Amy, Mecha Sonic from Sonic & Knuckles, and Super Sonic.

…or is it? It turns out there’s an extra one: Flicky! You can unlock him pretty easily - just hold A+B+Start when beginning a race.

Who would have guessed? Below are some technical details about how the ornament system works.

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Technical details

There game has a table of strings that shows the character names, which is handy:

That table is read by a single function, the one at 06041206. It indexes the table based on one of the parameters passed to it, which is in turn based on the 4 byte value stored in 060494c4.

That value is set by the code that starts at 06010f6e. At a high level, it looks like this:

if p1_held == (A_BUTTON | B_BUTTON | START_BUTTON):
    ornament_index = 0x0b  # Flicky
elif saved_score < 1000:
    ornament_index = get_ornament_index(saved_score)
else:
    ornament_index = 0x0a  # Super Sonic

So you either get Flicky or a character determined by your score (see above)

Left: Flicky as the ornament. Right: Super Sonic as the ornament.

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Outro

Feel free to use this information and these screenshots on your favorite sites (Sega Retro, TCRF, etc.) - it will save me the trouble of updating them.

For previous coverage of long-undocumented cheat codes, see:

• Clockwork Knight

• Three Dirty Dwarves

• Shinobi Legions

I’ll have more in my next edition!

1. Rad Mobile was released before Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive, so the arcade version was Sonic’s first game appearance ever.