Extending the demo: Touge King the Spirits 2
A prototype demo with some cool extra features
Intro
After I stumbled upon the fact that High Velocity, a.k.a. Touge the King Spirits, has a secret 4 player mode, I of course checked whether its sequel has the same thing. Alas, it doesn’t seem to.
However, I found something else: a prototype version of it hiding out on the Flash Sega Saturn Vol. 15 demo disc. Its build of TKTS2 is from 1997-02-20, a few weeks before the final one (1997-03-11). Normally it lets you choose from a handful of cars and do a single race, but these restrictions are superficial - it’s a more-or-less complete build of the game.
I made a patch to lift the demo’s limits so you can explore the prototype build. Get it from SegaXtreme!
Here’s a video that shows off the debug menu that’s present in this version of the game:
The debug menu
The standout thing in this prototype is the pause menu. It’s got lots of options for tweaking visual effects, game parameters, and car physics:
The Shading Type lets you change how the car model looks. The Millor (mirror?) option is available via cheat code in the final game:
But the Gourad and Flat options are unique to this menu:
The the Distruction (destruction?) mode is in the final game as a cheat code, as is the Car Size option, but you can toggle them on and off during gameplay with the menu.
The physics parameters are fun to play with. Kasoku Ritsu is “Speed limit,” and increasing it lets you go real fast. Dmper Effect changes how you bounce, sort of.
I checked the final game, and the code for this menu seems to have been removed. So it’s good that we have this build.
Other prototype differences
The demo takes you straight into gameplay from the title screen. The code for mode select is present, though. It matches the final version visually, but it’s incomplete: you can’t actually navigate it.
The Magazine and Photo Contest modes don’t work - you can see the magazine entries, but you can’t view them, and the photo screens are just blank.
It’s not clear whether these are “incomplete prototype things” or “removed from the demo” things. Navigation works for the Training sub-menu, so I suspect the original intention was to have you see the mode screen, but only give you the King Battle option.
The available cars and courses match the final game, but Course D doesn’t actually work. I can’t tell whether this is because it wasn’t finished yet, or whether it was removed from the demo to save space:
Technical details
My patch does two things: unlock all the cars and put you into Free Driving mode.
The game has a set of flags for each of the 20 cars starting at 06002098 (it’s at the same place in the final). There’s not a good place to write a 01 in each slot, so I changed all of the relevant reads:
06027510 e001 # Read a constant instead of the actual unlock value
0602746a e001 # Ditto
0602767e e001 # Ditto
060275c6 e001 # Ditto
06027baa e301 # Ditto
I chose Free Driving mode because it has the debug pause menu from above hooked up (weirdly, the other modes have it pretty thoroughly removed). The race type is stored at 06002090, and all we have to do is store a value of 3 there:
0602aca6 2100 # There's already an 03 in r0; write it to the race type addressThe other modes do work, so an alternate patch could give you Free Battle or VS Battle instead:
Outro
For what it’s worth, Touge King the Spirits 2 has the same Halloween-themed Atlus video that I mentioned in the article about High Velocity. It’s not accessible here either! Thanks to the people who explained (e.g.) that the character comes from the Shin Megami Tensei games.
For previous coverage of demo discs with prototype builds, see:
Many thanks to vbt for testing out the patch. Send me your suggestions for things to look at next!