Expansion hack: High Velocity

4 player split screen in High Velocity / Touge King the Spirits

High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge, a.k.a. Touge King the Spirits, is one of several Saturn games produced by Cave and published by Atlus, but it’s the only one that was released outside of Japan. It’s a driving game that has you race through mountainous courses, and features several cars that are legally distinct from real ones.

Why am I writing about it? Well, I found something: an unused four player split screen mode! Here’s a video:

I made a patch to enable it - get it from SegaXtreme.

This article will describe this enhanced multiplayer mode and explain the details of the patch.

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Multiplayer modes

High Velocity advertises support for two players. You can choose between vertical and horizontal split screen:

If the two players are near each other, they share a single viewport. But if one pulls away, the screen splits smoothly. It’s a nice effect, especially for 1995:

The hidden four player mode is different - you’re always in split screen mode:

It seems like this mode is incomplete: there’s no speedometer, no lap information, and it seems like you can just race until you get tired. The replay feature, which lets you change camera angles, is cool for four cars, though:

If you’ve got a multi-tap and four controllers to play with, check it out! Let me know if you play it.

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Technical details

I stumbled upon this mode because I was looking at how the Mode Select screen works:

If you pick King Battle, the address at 06046f30 gets written with a value of 00. If you pick VS Battle, it gets 01. Time Trial is 02. Ranking is 04. So what’s 03? I set it manually and the 4 player car select screen popped right up. Score one for curiosity!

For the patch, I changed the Option item such that it launches 4 player mode. This was more or less forced on me - there’s not any room to stick an immediate value of 03 in anywhere else.

The code for Option looks like this:

The instruction at 06032e80 writes 05 into the race mode address (I’m not sure why the options screen gets a race mode) and 03 into 0605e2f8. This latter address determines which menu screen we go to - we want it to be 02 for the course selection screen.

Left: the changes re-route the Option menu item. Right: the 4 player car select screen.

The patches are thus:

06032e7c e202  # Put 02 into r2
06032e80 2931  # Write the 03 in r3 to the race mode address
06032e82 2531  # Write the o2 in r2 to the menu screen address

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Outro, and a mystery

Many thanks to Malenko, a previous collaborator, for pointing me toward High Velocity. He asked me what this weird Halloween-themed video was doing on the disc:

The answer is: I don’t know! There’s no way to activate it from the game. It appears on other Atlus titles, such as Touge King the Spirits 2, but you can’t access it there either. If you know a game that actually uses it, enlighten me!

Send me your suggestions for games to analyze. I’ve got some articles based on reader requests in various stages of completion!