Independence for Psyth
Play the shmup sub-game from *Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You*
Today we’re talking about Psyth, the Konami shoot-em-up for Saturn. What, you’ve never heard of Psyth?
That’s probably because you haven’t religiously attended the “Computer Club” in Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You, the Konami dating sim. Doing that eventually unlocks two surprisingly full-featured “sub-games” - TwinBee Time Attack and Psyth.
Actually playing these has historically been difficult: it takes several hours of playing the main game to get to them1, and that main game is entirely in Japanese.
But now it should be much easier to play Psyth: with this patch from SegaXtreme, it will boot right up! Here’s a video:
This article will be about Psyth and the process of liberating in from the surrounding game. The next one will be about TwinBee Time Attack.
Playing Psyth
Psyth has a tutorial mode called Instruction on the main menu that explains controls. I recommend practicing with it for a moment to get a feel things.
Press A to do a normal shot.
Press B to do an orb shot. Your orbs will seek out a target and return to you if you keep holding B.
Press L or R to change your normal shot pattern.
The game has two levels, and takes a few minutes to get through (if you’re good). If you’re not good (like me), you can use patch this address for unlimited lives:
06016f84 0009At the end is the Steel Mantis boss, which has three phases.
After you finish the game, your name will be added to the list of Planet Savers. Presumably these are the programmers2?
Doing this unlocks extra Options, including a sub-game within the sub-game! You get points for shooting targets that bounce around the screen.
There’s a fantastic video walkthrough from Randomised Gaming that you can watch for lots more detail.
Technical details
If you’ve unlocked the sub-games normally, they’ll be available from the title screen (Pseudo Saturn Kai has save files that you can use for this). Tracing the execution of these title screen menus led me to the function at 060147f, which conspicuously references a string with the value
That function gets called by another one at 0600d3e4, which looks like a big switch statement:
I call this function the “mode switcher.” The Psyth launcher function is mode 8A, and there are lots of other ones.
The “mode switcher” function gets called with mode 00 when the game first boots. Can we tell it to load mode 8A instead? Yes indeed - the patch is:
0600d408 01d4This causes the game to load PSY_PRG.BIN, which is what gives us Psyth.
Wrapping up
Psyth is an impressive little game - why did they put so much effort into something that’s hidden away on a dating sim that most players won’t ever see?
There’s very little information about it on the Internet, so now that it’s easier to play, I hope it can be better documented. Feel free to use the information and screenshots in this article on your favorite reference site.
The trick above doesn’t work for TwinBee Time Attack - freeing it from Tokimeki Memorial is more involved. We’ll cover it in the next article!
Many thanks to Wesker for suggesting Tokimeki Memorial and testing my Psyth patch, Fallen92 for contributing a save to Pseudo Saturn Kai, and privateye for helping me out as always.
See this great article from Hardcore Gaming 101 for details on how to access the sub-games the conventional way.