Expansion hack: Grandia II (Dreamcast)

Unleash the Geohounds

In this edition I’m examining the hidden debug features in Grandia II for Dreamcast. I’m not the first to discover these — check out this YouTube video from @Knuckles500 for a nice demonstration. You can get my patch that enables them at SegaXtreme.

As the video states, there are some plain text .INI files on the game disc. One of them BIN/FIELD.INI, has sections that look like this:

# デバッグ許可
debug_permition = OFF

# 開始デバッグモード
debug = OFF

# デバック状態表示
debug_disp = OFF

# パフォーマンス表示
disp_perf = OFF

All you have to do is change OFF to ON to get some cool effects. The first thing you’ll see is that the title screen now lets you select a SETTINGS item:

Neither BATTLE GAME nor MOVIE actually work, but FIELD GAME skips the opening video and cut scenes and drops you into Carbo Village.

You’ve got some additional controls:

• Holding B+A lets you run much faster than normal

• Holding X and pressing Up or Down lets you float up into the sky or down into the ground

• Holding Y and using the analog stick and triggers lets you reposition the camera.

• Holding Y and pressing X toggles frame-by-frame mode — press A to advance.

Ryudo floating above Carbo Village

The real fun starts when you hold Y and press Start, however. This brings up the debug menu:

Hold Y to use the menu. The D-pad navigates, R advances screens, L returns to the previous screen, B makes selections, and Start dismisses the menu.

On the top level menu, Debug Scnr and Test Mode are somewhat inscrutable. Nindows seems like it should toggle the desktop-style debug environment, but doesn’t seem to actually work. Motion Test doesn’t do anything. Light Test lets you mess around with a light that moves around Ryudo:

There’s lots of cool stuff in the Debug Menu1 and Debug Menu2 sub-menus:

I’ll highlight a few of those things here. My favorite feature is Map Jump, which lets you warp basically anywhere. I’m sure there are some unused areas to catalog:

Under Display Mode you can alter the frame rate, resolution, and such. The results aren’t always great; you often get corrupt textures and distorted text:

There are a few collision display options that show the geometry of objects and things you can interact with:

Some other interesting things:

• Under Performance, you can remove the 30 frames per second speed limit.

• Under Party you can disable collision and walk through walls. You can also disable encounters with enemies.

• Under Object you can turn on and off the display of anything on screen.

• Under Texture you can view sprites and textures.

Overall it’s very cool. If you like this game, definitely check it out.

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Outro

For more Grandia, see my RPG hacking roundup article. It’s got a patch for Grandia: Digital Museum that enables debug features.

For more game patches, see the Expansion hack archive.

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee