Expansion hack: Flag to Flag (Dreamcast)

"Detailed pit crew action"

In this edition:

• Flag to Flag for Dreamcast has a hidden debug menu that lets you view car models, alter race track parameters, and more.

• I’ve made a patch to allow access to the menu and unlock the game’s bonus cars and drivers.

Get the patch from SegaXtreme! Details are below.

---

Intro

Although this game’s cover calls it Flag to Flag, the title screen for the North American version just calls it CART. That game’s manual explains the acronym:

CART symbolizes the pinnacle of American motor sport. CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) is the name of the organization that officially sponsors the series, currently called the “FedEx Championship Series”

The FedEx trucks you see on the courses make sense once you’ve read that passage:

What was most interesting about this game to me was these strings in its binary:

8c07928c "DEBUG"
8c079294 "GAME"
8c07929c "PIT WORK"
8c0792a8 "DATA MAKE"
8c0792b4 "DEMO"
8c0792bc "REPLAY MENU"
8c0792c8 "CAR CHECK!"

Following the references to those strings in Ghidra leads to various functions. Tracing those ultimately leads back to the function at 8c01e294, which has a check like this:

FLAG_8c1c421c = 1
if FLAG_8c1c421c == 1:
    # All of the normal stuff here
    ...
else:
    # All of the debug stuff here
    ...

That is, it sets the flag at 8c1c421c to 1, then checks whether it’s 1. No surprise, it is. My patch changes the write to that address from 1 to 0:

8c01e29e mov #0x0,r2  # Put an immediate 0x00 into r2

This causes the game to boot into the special Mode Select debug screen:

The items are:

• Debug: Follow a car around the track, or watch it with a freely movable camera.

• Game: Launches the game normally.

• Pit Work: Doesn’t actually work.

• Data make: View and alter track parameters (see below)

• Demo: View the opening demo.

• Replay menu: Launches the normal replay screen.

• Car check: Vehicle model viewer (see below)

• Arcade 1P, Arcade 2P, Champ Practice, Champ Qualify, Champ Race: Launch the standard game modes.

• Super Speed Mode: Launch the unlockable 60-fps version of the game (it has fewer cars in each race)

• High End mode: Launches the game normally.

• Ending: View the credits.

The Car Check! item lets you see three versions of each vehicle with different levels of detail — here’s a video:

The Data Make option lets you view and change various aspects of the race tracks:

Here’s the Cyber CAM2000 item in action:

I checked to see whether there’s a cheat code to unlock Super Speed Mode and the extra vehicles, but I didn’t find one – alas. You can play everything from the debug menu, but I went ahead and changed everything to be unlocked by default with this patch:

8c032474 mov.b 0xff,r2       # Put an immediate 0xff into r2
8c032484 mov.b r2,@(r0,r13)  # Write it into the 1st set of unlock flags
8c032488 mov.b r2,@(r0,r13)  # Write it into the 2nd set of unlock flags

---

Outro

For more articles in the Expansion hack series, see the archive.

I’ll be back again this week with another article – there’s another PlayStation prototype build that has been hiding out on a demo disc, just waiting to be explored.

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee